By Soya Jung, Race Files
For weeks I have been in awe of the organizers and writers – Rev. Osagyefo Sekou, Jamala Rogers, Malkia Cyril, Ta-Nehesi Coates, john a. powell, Falguni A. Sheth, and so many others – who have placed the situation in Ferguson into critical historical and political context. This despite persistent attempts by police, elected officials, and mainstream media to erase that context with vilifications of black political protest and black life. I write this post to express my solidarity and rage, and to offer a response to the disturbing question that I’ve heard asked, and that demands an answer: Does Ferguson matter to Asian Americans?
Tear gas reigns down on a woman kneeling in the street with her hands in the air after a demonstration over the killing of teenager Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer on August 17, 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri. Despite the Brown family’s continued call for peaceful demonstrations, violent protests have erupted nearly every night in Ferguson since his August 9, death. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
First and foremost, the murder of Mike Brown by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson is causing profound grief at the violent loss of yet another black mother’s child. The expression of that grief by the Brown family, and the pained words of solidarity from Sybrina Fulton, the mother of Trayvon Martin, are necessary bedrocks for understanding the human toll that anti-black racism takes. What makes this a national political crisis is that Mike Brown’s death was not an isolated incident. It was excruciatingly unexceptional – one more deadly outcome of white supremacy in a human rights crisis that spans cities, nations, centuries.
The predictable and familiar response – mainstream media pondering whether Mike Brown deserved to die, the City of Ferguson sending in a militarized police force to occupy an already disenfranchised neighborhood, whites denying that this is about race, and the indictment of black rage rather than the indictment of the murdering police officer – these are the mechanics of how America normalizes black death.
That Wilson gunned down Mike Brown so close to the buried body of Dred Scott is a gut-wrenching reminder that the fight for the recognition of black humanity is centuries long, still raging, and yet unfinished. The only way to make sense of this is through the logic of anti-black racism, a logic that asks us to set aside our humanity.
In the words of black feminist writer Brittney Cooper:
“The idea that we would show no rage as we accrete body upon body – Eric Garner, John Crawford, Mike Brown (and those are just our summer season casualties) — is the height of delusion. It betrays a stunning lack of empathy, a stunning refusal of people to grant the fact of black humanity, and in granting our humanity, granting us the right to the full range of emotions that come with being human…
Nothing makes white people more uncomfortable than black anger. But nothing is more threatening to black people on a systemic level than white anger… We should sit up and pay attention to where this trail of black bodies leads us. They are a compass pointing us to a raging fire just beneath the surface of our national consciousness.”
I do not move through the world in the crosshairs of a policing system that has its roots in slave patrols, or in a nation that has used me as an “object of fear” to justify state repression and public disinvestment from the infrastructure on which my community relies. I am not public enemy number one in the ongoing U.S. domestic war over power and resources that has systematically denied black humanity. Yet as an Asian American, black rage occupies an important and intimate place in my heart and mind for at least two reasons.
First, I have said before that I come from war. My rage is not the same rage that Cooper describes. But I can relate to her when she says:
“Rage must be expressed. If not it will tear you up from the inside out or make you tear other people up. Usually the targets are those in closest proximity. The disproportionate amount of heart disease, cancers, hypertension, obesity, violence and other maladies that plague black people is as much a product of internalized, unrecognized, unaddressed rage as it is anything else.”
There is a word in Korean culture, han. It is hard to define, yet it deeply shapes Korean consciousness. To quote Elaine H. Kim, it loosely means “the sorrow and anger that grow from the accumulated experiences of oppression… When people die of han, it is called dying of hwabyong, a disease of frustration and rage.”
Coming from a people who were controlled, occupied, and threatened with erasure by outside forces over centuries, and brutalized as silage in a war between the United States and the Soviet Union, han was not something that I consciously embraced. It is in my blood. Han is Korean rage. It was expressed in protests against Japanese colonial rule in 1919, in the struggle for self-determination as the Korean war broke out in 1950, during student protests against the oppressive U.S.-backed South Korean government in 1960, and again during the democratic uprising in Kwangju in 1980.
Read the full article HERE.
