Response to Anti-Asian Hate Crimes
- Resolution to Condemn the Surge in Hate Crimes Targeting Asian Americans and to Reaffirm Santa Monica Community College District’s Commitment to Provide a Safe Environment for All Students and Personnel Agenda Page 34-35- April 6, 2021
- Resolution to Reaffirm SMCCD’s Commitment to Provide a Safe Environment For All Students and Personnel - Minutes Pages 34-35 - May 5, 2020
- It’s Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month: Solidarity Now & Beyond - May 27, 2021
- Support + Resources for Colleagues & Students of Asian Descent - March 23, 2021
- SMC Stands Against Anti-Asian/American Racism - March 3, 2021
- SMC COVID-19 Webpage & An Urgent Reminder - March 6, 2020
March 1, 2021
Dear Asian, Asian-American, and Pacific Islander faculty, staff, and students and SMC Community:
The COVID-19 pandemic ignited far-reaching anti-Asian sentiment, discrimination, and racial violence. National leaders incited misinformation and stereotypes about COVID-19 that scapegoated and made the Asian American and Asian Pacific Islander community vulnerable targets of racialized violence. In Southern California, we have a large and diverse APIDAA community who contribute to the benefit of us all. We acknowledge that many of our APIDAA community members have been working on the frontlines of healthcare and as other essential workers even as they have been scapegoated and vilified by racially incendiary leaders and media. The recent surge in anti-Asian and particularly, anti-Chinese racism, discrimination, and violence is disturbing and unacceptable, yet not new. Anti-Asian racism is rooted in a long-standing global history of Yellow Peril rhetoric, Orientalism, and xenophobia. The ability of national leadership to spread anti-Chinese hate with impunity has provided tacit approval for this racial violence to continue. We must stand together against racism and racial violence in all of its forms.
The Pan African Faculty and Staff Alliance condemns anti-Asian hate and stand in solidarity with the SMC Asian Pacific Islander Desi American Alliance (APIDAA), our Asian American and Pacific Islander students, faculty and staff, and the larger AAPI and APIDA community. We recognize that our respective communities have a historical relationship that is complex. Black and APIDA communities share in experiences of mass oppression and marginalization, forced displacement and migration, and stolen property and rights. Yet, at times our communities have not stood together and in fact, White supremacy resulted in us actively working against one another. Locally, many of us remember this being illustrated during the uprisings in south Los Angeles following the Rodney King verdict. Today, we are intentionally reclaiming and standing upon the long history of Black and Asian solidarity and coalition-building. We view your struggle and liberation as being intertwined with our own. We stand in opposition to anti-Asian racism and urge the Santa Monica College community to wrap its collective arms around you in support.
The continued and increased presence of anti-Blackness, anti-Asian racism, and other nuanced forms of racism and discrimination against Latinx and Indigenous communities only further illustrate the urgent need to fight against White supremacy. The Pan African Faculty and Staff Alliance vows to do our part in that fight. In the spirit of the activists and freedom fighters who came before us, we are committed to building and strengthening our allyship and being better accomplices to the APIDAA community. Further, we pledge the following:
- We will educate ourselves and others about the long-standing history of anti-Asian racism and discrimination, including locally within southern California.
- We will further educate ourselves about the ways in which anti-Asian racism manifests specifically at Santa Monica College.
- We will work collaboratively with our APIDAA colleagues and unlearn harmful anti-Asian, ‘model minority’ rhetoric and other harmful biases that pervade educational systems - including at SMC - that works to erase the needs of APIDAA students, faculty, and staff.
- We will disrupt and stand against anti-Asian racism virtually, in-person, or wherever we encounter it. We will use and make available to students national reporting resources such as STOP AAPI HATE and Asian Americans Advancing Justice.
While the urgency of the current moment is distressing, we also understand that we must be committed to the long-term fight for our mutual liberation. The Pan African Faculty and Staff Alliance remains committed to co-creating an environment of safety and liberation for our respective communities for the benefit of all. We ask that other campus constituencies join us in this stand against anti-Asian racism as we all seek to emerge from the shadow of this pandemic together.
In love and solidarity,
The SMC Pan African Faculty and Staff Alliance
Our Response to Violence Against Asian American Communities
March 18, 2021
Dear SMC Colleagues,
On March 16, a white, 21-year old man shot and murdered 8 people in Atlanta, Georgia in a racially motivated attack — seven of whom were women. Six of the women were Asian or Asian American.
This despicable act of violence and the recent rise in anti-Asian hate crimes are a reminder that as Asian and Asian American people living in this country, we are not safe, and we are vulnerable to racist violence.
Your Asian Pacific Islander Desi American (APIDA) students and colleagues are experiencing distress, fear, pain, and anger.
What should you know about the recent rise in anti-Asian attacks?
The increase in violence and hate against Asian Americans was fueled by the anti-Asian rhetoric spewed by the country’s former President Trump and the xenophobic discourse around the COVID-19 pandemic. Stop AAPI Hate, the national organization that documents and addresses anti-Asian hate and discrimination, has documented nearly 4,000 incidences between March 9, 2020 and February 28, 2021 — with disproportionately more of the violence, discrimination, and hate targeted at women at 68%.
The Atlanta shooting was intersectional in nature and discussions of the attack should consider the intersectional relationships of race, gender, immigration status, and social class. This country has a long history of misogyny against Asian and Asian American women, and the stereotypes of Asian and Asian American women as submissive, docile, exotic, and hypersexual make them more susceptible to being sexualized, fetishized, and marginalized.
How long has anti-Asian hate crimes been happening?
Violence and hate directed towards Asians in America has existed as long as Asians have been in the United States. However, the racialization of Asians has a much longer history rooted in Western ideas about gender and foreignness, what scholar Edward Said dubbed Orientalism.
In the United States, this has resulted in racialization that assumes Asians as perpetual foreigners coupled with misogynistic white supremacist notions of Asian hyperfemininity. Asians and Asian Americans have been cast as subservient and docile, or cold calculating dangerous people without morality and emotion.
From Fu Manchu, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Madam Butterfly, Full Metal Jacket to Nicki Minaj’s music video “Chun Li”, American popular culture is littered with images of Asian nerds, violent Yakuza or Chinese mafia thugs, submissive Asian wives, dragon ladies, and prostitutes.
The result has been a long history of hate and violence against Asian Pacific Islander Desi Americans. Here are some:
- Chinese Massacre of 1871: A mob of 500 white people went to Old Chinatown in in Los Angeles and attacked, bullied, robbed, and murdered Chinese residents. This was one of the largest mass lynchings in U.S. history.
- Page Act of 1875 that stopped Chinese women from immigrating based on the assumption all Chinese women were prostitutes.
- Rock Springs Massacre of 1885: White miners murdered Chinese miners.
- Watsonville Riots in 1920: Violent assaults on Filipino American farmworkers.
- Murder of Vincent Chin in 1982: A Chinese American who was beaten to death by two white men.
- Koreatown rapist in 2005: A serial rapist in L.A. who targeted only “Asian-looking” women to rape, assault, and rob.
- Abduction and rape of two college students in 2000 when two white men and one white woman targeted, kidnapped, and tortured Japanese women because they “thought they were submissive and would be too afraid and ashamed to report the assaults” in Spokane, Washington.
There have been many more. However, law enforcement does not label attacks and targeted sexual assaults on APIDA women as hate crimes because the criminal justice system does not recognize the ways in which race is gendered. Just like the horrid justification for the white supremacist who murdered seven women in the Atlanta shooting. Nor do hate crimes against APIDA communities often get categorized as such.
What can you do for your APIDA students and colleagues?
- Reach out, extend grace, and offer specific forms of support. For example, being flexible with deadlines or volunteering to take on a task or meeting.
- Demonstrate that you care for them, validate their feelings, and create space in your departments and classrooms for them to process and grieve the trauma.
- Communicate that you’re aware of the news and acknowledge that anti-Asian hate and violence exists.
- Don't pit groups against each other. We can both be against anti-Asian hate and against anti-Blackness.
- Learn about the history, cultures, and stories of your APIDA students and colleagues.
Your APIDA students and colleagues may process their trauma and respond in ways that may not be obvious because of cultural norms and factors. For example, some Asian communities value silence and suffering in silence, and this expectation may lead to some students and colleagues smiling through pain, fear, and anxiety, never acknowledging these feelings, and powering through their day as if their trauma does not exist.
Your APIDA students and colleagues are concerned about their safety. They may be stressed,
anxious, and afraid to be in public spaces. We encourage you support them by taking
a bystander intervention training.
How can you educate yourself and support APIDAA efforts?
Here are some resources that we have compiled for those in our campus community who want to know more and support:
- Anti-Asian Violence Resources
- Classroom Resources and Tips To Address Anti-Asian Discrimination
- Sign Up for Bystander Intervention Training to Stop Anti-Asian/American and Xenophobic Harassment
- There's been a rise in anti-Asian attacks. Here's how to be an ally to the community.
- Here are AAPI-led organizations where you can donate today.
- Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center Care Package
- This Is What No One Tells You About Being Asian In America In 2021
- The Atlanta Shootings Fit Into a Long Legacy of Anti-Asian Violence in America
The Asian Pacific Islander Desi American Alliance (APIDAA) affinity group is currently
planning virtual spaces for APIDA colleagues and students to process the recent anti-Asian
hate and violence, grieve, and heal. We are planning to have some of the spaces facilitated
by an expert.
Resources are being gathered for the community: API Resources to Support Students
As we grieve and respond to this tragedy, we call on our allies to stand with us in solidarity against systemic racism and gender-based violence for APIDA communities as well as all communities of color, including Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities.
The APIDAA Steering Committee
- Sang Chi
- Cyrus Fernandez
- Tiffany Inabu
- Regina Ip
- Hannah Lawler
- Jean Paik-Schoenberg
- Michael V. Tuitasi
March 23, 2021
Sent on behalf of the Latinx Staff & Faculty Collective
Dear SMC Comunidad,
This letter is written with a heavy heart as we have been mourning the victims of a domestic terrorist attack in three spas across Atlanta on March 16th - six of whom were women of Korean and Chinese descent, and several of them immigrants. Unfortunately, this horrific event is part of a pattern of thousands of reported incidents involving targeted harassment and assaults on the Asian Pacific Islander Desi American (APIDA) community in the past year, who are already living under great duress through a global pandemic.
The Latinx Staff & Faculty Collective stands in solidarity with our APIDA sisters and brothers, denouncing all anti-Asian rhetoric, propaganda and xenophobia that hurt the most vulnerable and marginalized, while serving to undermine multiracial, intersectional efforts to fight against White supremacy.
Being Latinx and Asian are not mutually exclusive, as APIDA populations have long-standing roots throughout Latin America. In the U.S., APIDA and Latinx people have lived side-by-side in immigrant communities and have created lives together as co-workers, neighbors, friends and families. From the 1903 Oxnard agricultural strike when Mexican and Japanese sugar beet farmworkers formed an independent union to reject employers’ attempts to divide and conquer, to the early twentieth century intermarriages of Punjabi and Mexicans in the Imperial Valley, to the partnership of Filipino and Mexican California farmworkers who founded the United Farm Workers Union in 1965, to the student alliance of the Third World Liberation Movement who fought together in 1968 to create Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University and UC Berkeley, to our 1990s collaboration to defeat racist nativist laws such as Proposition 187, and our shared battle since the 2000s to legalize the status of DREAMers and our undocumented families.
As much as Latinx and APIDA populations have shared histories of immigration restriction, segregation in housing, school and the labor market, and generational struggles straddling immigrant and American worlds, Latinx people still have work to do if we hope to disrupt injurious anti-Asian sentiments that flow freely within our families and communities. In a similar vein, the crisis that APIDA communities are facing at this moment demand for allies (like our Collective) to better educate ourselves in the history of racism and sexism afflicting APIDA populations, and be more intentional in holding safe and protective spaces for our APIDA colleagues, friends, and partners who are currently grappling with anxiety, pain, and grief.
We especially want to tell our APIDA students, staff, and faculty at SMC that we are here to support you and uplift you like our ancestors have done with one another in the past. Your struggles are OUR struggles. Tu lucha es nuestra lucha.
We look forward to taking actionable steps with you to rebuke and dismantle White supremacy.
In Solidarity!
The Latinx Staff & Faculty Collective
March 30, 2021
The Santa Monica College Honor Council stands with our Asian, Pacific Islander, and Desi American Communities as we fight against the anti-Asian attacks that have occurred over the last year. The Honor Council principles of honesty, integrity, social responsibility, respect and civility lead us to support our friends in this time of need. Feel free to call upon us if there is anything that our organization can do to combat this cycle of hate and ease the pain.
With Respect and Humility,
The SMC Honor Council