Sundas Ejaz | DB 13

• What is Phi’s point about Asian Americans’ relationship to police and police violence? What is the goal of his piece?

Phi discusses how conservative Asian Americans are when it came to societal issues such as police brutality. He talks about how Asian Americans support the police and how they supported a petition for the NYPD, but then won’t show the same support when one of their own community members was murdered by the same police. It shows how conservative  Asian Americans are worried about their own lives, which is why they try to stay on the good side of the police, even if it means that they are supporting their oppressors. The police are the oppressors as law enforcement tends to go against Asian Americans quite often, especially white policemen. For that reason they would rather show support for them, and not when their own people are victims of police brutality. Overall it shows how no matter how hard we try to assimilate into American culture and take sides with the oppressors, the system will never be in our favor. We can only hope that they would protect us the same way they protect their white Americans. Phi also encourages that Asian Americans should acknowledge that it’s wrong to take sides with the oppressors, as regardless, the system is against us, so instead we should rather stick together as a community and fight oppression.

• What do you learn about “Chinese conservatism” from the article by Zen and what are the responses from other Chinese community members? How does this piece relate to Phi’s writing?

Chinese conservatives often take the side of the oppressors. This is because they are conditioned to believe that other minorities such as the Black community are “lazy criminals” and are responsible for “all the hate crimes towards Asians.” Unfortunately yes hate crimes do occur, but it is very wrong to put an entire racial community at blame due to the faults of a few. Since Chinese conservatives have a wrongful view on black people, they often tend to side with law enforcement when it comes to issues dealing with black people. They always support the police, and are in favor of times when the police is unjust to the black community. For example, anytime a material possession or property such as store is destroyed by a black person, they are quick to blame the entire community, or even when it wasn’t a black person, they somehow try to put the blame on them. And when law enforcement responds to these issues, there are times when black people lose their lives due to how anti black our law system is. And unfortunately many Chinese Americans don’t care about the lives of black peoples due to this hatred that they have towards them. Why is it that people care more about material possessions that can be replaced than the lives of a person? My opinion is that the anti blackness that is rooted in the Chinese community is a result of conditioning and propaganda that is spread to make the black community look like the enemies of the Chinese Americans, which only divides the communities more and more.

• What is the goal of the letter? Do you think this letter meets the goal? Why or why not?

The goal of this letter is to make the authors family understand that black people aren’t our enemies, and that it is wrong for us Asian Americans to be siding with the law enforcement aka our oppressors, because regardless, our support of them doesn’t guarantee our protection. Instead we should be more accepting towards the black community, understand that they too are minorities who also struggle in a society where the system wasn’t made to favor them, and to stop believing propaganda that is spread about them. At the end of the day, black people are humans too, and they too deserve the upmost support and respect that we give to others. Thus, I do think this letter achieved its goal because not only did the author call out his family for their anti black beliefs,  it it also addresses how Asian conservatism doesn’t guarantee our protection by the law, and at the end of the day, we all are minorities living in a system that is against us. We should be supporting each other rather than hating on each other due to blatant propaganda.