AAPI Heritage Month 2021 — An Open Letter
May is AAPI Heritage Month. Leading up to it, I reflected on all the hate crimes that we have seen through the past year against the community. I wanted to leverage my perspective on this moment to create something good. I ended up writing an open letter to the employees of my company, in hopes that they will join the fight for racial equality one day. Here is a version of it, here is my story…
Dear Reader,
My name is Sandy Chan and I am an Underwriter. Maybe you know me because I have emailed you, or perhaps you know me because you’ve come to the New York office and we’ve gone downstairs to the beer garden for a drink after work. In this message, I am taking off my Underwriter hat and I am reaching out to you only as someone that you may have crossed paths with during our time together here at this company.
As a member of the Diversity & Inclusion Task Force, I have been thinking about what Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month means this year. It has traditionally been a time to celebrate AAPI influence on the history and culture of the United States. I have to admit that I have not paid much attention to the observance in the past, even as a first generation Chinese American myself. This year however, things feel very different.
At the onset of the pandemic, I saw a trickling of acts of hate towards people of Asian descent. First, I heard of the vandalism outside a Korean noodle bar that I had last visited with colleagues for dinner. Later there were more reports of physical and verbal attacks. I started to really pay attention when I saw videos of crimes happening in the Chinatown in Oakland, CA. I watched the one of a 91- year old man shoved to the ground there, in the same Chinatown that I had grown up visiting every weekend with my aunts. It was hard to know that this was happening in my home. I was outraged. In the weeks that followed, I watched from afar the volunteers that organized to patrol the streets. My outrage subsided as I saw the humanity in those community members who sacrificed their time and resources to keep each other safe.
Then, there were the Atlanta shootings. In the wake of such violence, I found myself on the phone more often, talking to my friends and family. That week I learned of a new attack from my inner circle almost daily. One day a Korean friend revealed that he was punched in the back of the head, and that his attacker had leaned in close enough to whisper a slur in his ear. On another day, my mom called to tell me to be careful while I’m out. Earlier, she saw a Filipino woman struggle with her cane as tried to fight off the thief who stole her purse. My mother had witnessed this only after being a victim of the same kind of crime herself not so long ago.
During that time, my friends and I shared our stores. While it was good to process them together, we questioned what we would achieve in reporting them to the authorities. In feeding into the stereotype of “keeping my head down”, I justified that silence with the thought of all the people that have called me a slur while I walked down the street, and how after all, each one of them had already gotten away with it.
As the many cases of explicit, racially charged hate crimes came up on the news, there are many more incidents of which we will never know the motive. It is in that ambiguity that I realized the power of our conversations. Having them helped me see and understand the patterns in those crimes. There will never be concrete evidence of my mother being targeted for theft because she is a Chinese woman. I understand that one or two attacks of the same nature in an area can be a coincidence, but I eventually learned of more. While talking through it with a friend, I asked the question of how many more cases it would take to make the call that the common denominator is race. We concluded that there is no magic number.
With these conversations in mind, for AAPI Heritage Month this year, for the first time, I want to participate. I want to participate not solely to bring awareness to the AAPI community but to the role of race as a whole in our society. These days I live in Chicago. It remains one of the most segregated cities in the US, having not yet overcome its pre-civil rights era practices of institutionalized housing discrimination. While sitting in my living room one evening I heard chants of justice for Adam Toledo. I looked out my window and I saw a familiar procession of protesters. I flashed back to last summer when weekend after weekend I heard similar chants for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Elijah McClain, Rayshard Brooks, and Jacob Blake. I want to put in the work so I can look back during future Heritage months to see more equality and less violence in 2022. The best way I can contribute to that effort is to have more grassroots conversations on this topic.
Earlier this year, I read So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo with members of the D&I Task Force. The book helped me identify gaps in my knowledge and afforded me with language to do this work both inside and outside of the company. The material seems to be more fitting now as I embark on this journey. As a refresher, I am going to reread it.
My understanding of racism is not that it is only individual acts of race-based prejudice but it is also the systems of power in place that allow those acts to perpetuate. Those systems range from the tropes we see on TV that contribute to our unconscious bias, to the rules and laws that disproportionately have an adverse effect on people of color. Fighting racism in this sense is a big job and the truth is grassroots conversations take time. I know some of you may feel that this is not your fight but a less violent, more equal 2022 is ambitious, so I need your help. If you have made it this far into my story, I hope you join me in reading the book. If you would like to start a community to read and discuss it together, please email me. After we are done, I hope you find your own way in contributing to a more equal 2022.
As I leave you, I think of Amanda Gorman’s closing lines in her poem “The Hill We Climb”:
For there is always light,
if only we’re brave enough to see it.
If only we’re brave enough to be it.
Sincerely,
Sandy Chan
