A Letter From Young Asian-Americans To Their Families About Black Lives MatterPosted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Audio, Media Archive, Social Justice, United States, Videos on 2016-07-28 02:12Z by Steven |
A Letter From Young Asian-Americans To Their Families About Black Lives Matter
Code Switch: Race and Identity, Remixed
National Public Radio
2016-07-27
Shereen Marisol Meraji, Reporter
Kat Chow, Digital Journalist
In the Facebook Live video streamed earlier this month by Diamond Reynolds after her fiance, Philando Castile, was fatally shot by a police officer during a traffic stop in a Minnesota suburb, Reynolds identified the man who shot Castile as “Chinese” as she narrated the scene.
It was later understood that Castile was shot by Jeronimo Yanez, who is Latino. In the meantime, Reynolds’ testimony gave Christina Xu, a 28-year-old Chinese-American ethnographer who lives in New York City, flashbacks to earlier this year, when many Asian-Americans around the country protested the prosecution and conviction of Peter Liang, the Chinese-American cop who shot and killed Akai Gurley in a dark stairwell of a Brooklyn housing project in 2014…
The protesters said Liang was being treated as a scapegoat at a time of heightened focus on police shootings of unarmed black people, pointing out that white law enforcement officials involved in several high-profile cases in recent years have not faced similar consequences.
For Xu, and other younger Asian-Americans who have shown support for the Black Lives Matter movement and anti-police brutality causes, this was disturbing. “To me, clearly justice is about getting justice for these black families,” Xu says. “Not about making sure that Asian people have the same privilege as white people.”…
Listen to the podcast here. Read the article here. Read the transcript here.