Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
March 21, 2021
Hello All – Yesterday many CFOW activists attend a rally in Ardsley that spoke out against anti-Asian violence, both the murders last week in Atlanta and the rising trend of anti-Asian violence nationwide. The rally, organized by the high school Asian Student Union, was a great success. About 400-500 attended, and the speaking portion was followed by a march of hundreds, led by the students, to Ardsley Village Hall. The speakers, both students and politicians, were excellent. I was particularly engaged by a poem written and read by high school student Priscilla Ha, and with her permission it is printed here.
You're the Most White-washed Asian I Know
By Priscilla Ha
And for the millionth time, I heard:
"You're the most white-washed Asian I know"
Am I?
Or do you feel awkward, talking about the things that your country did to mine?
Do you feel awkward, when I tell you that Asian hate crimes are rising at a drastic incline?
And if I told you, would you care?
The environment I grew up in told me that white people are superior;
They are the standard,
Most beautiful, most fit for the biggest opportunities that I could only dream of
I grew up trying to fix myself;
Why can't my eyes be bigger,
Skin be paler,
Be an appealer to the other white kids at school?
Why can't I be white?
Eventually, I lost grip of myself and became one
I was a girl engulfed, choked, overwhelmed
By the status quo of this so-called no-stigma zone
I was lost in my own head, trying to identify my individuality
I was trapped in someone else's ethnicity
But in my exploited mindset of white superiority,
I didn't want that to change
March 13th, 2020:
The day the whole world went into lockdown.
The day that marked the beginning of a spike in Asian racism.
Asians, all around the world were targeted for the start of Covid-19.
It didn't matter how you acted,
But how you looked.
Our beautiful small eyes,
Our straight black hair
Our unique last names,
Became our worst nightmares
Finally realizing my foolishness for assimilating into white culture,
I began to accept,
Began to love the things about myself that I once resented.
I was proud to be Korean,
I was proud of our people,
Of our Asian brothers and sisters
I had to stand with them.
But if I did,
Here in Ardsley,
I would lose my friends
I would have to endure the apparent stares of judgment
Fighting the walls of Asian vehement
Why should I have to live in the obscurement of my culture?
Why should I have to hide the country that defines who I am?
This is why:
Because if I did, you would have to change
You would feel as if you have to take the responsibility of fighting racism with me
You don't want to take the stand with me because there are so many other people who would.
You just don't want it to be you.
You're lost in your own head
You are trapped in this mindset of normalized racism
But in your exploited mindset of white superiority,
You don't want that to change
So even if I am the most whitewashed Asian you know,
I am still a target
So if we fought for you
Please fight for us
[FB] Among the many commentaries about the ubiquity of anti-Asian violence and its roots deep in American history, I think these two are on point:
(Video) Stop Asian Hate: Connie Wun on Atlanta Spa Killings, Gender Violence & Spike in Anti-Asian Attacks
From Democracy Now! [March 18, 2021]
---- Deadly shootings at three Atlanta-area massage parlors that left eight people dead have stoked outrage and renewed fears about rising anti-Asian racism in the United States, which has already seen a rise in violence directed at Asian Americans during the pandemic. …. Connie Wun, co-founder of AAPI Women Lead and a researcher on violence against girls of color, says it's impossible to "disconnect race from sexism" in the Atlanta killings. "There's a long-standing history around the hypersexualization, the ongoing sexual violence against Asian women. This has happened across the globe," Wun says. [See the Program]
Anti-Asian Violence in America Is Rooted in US Empire
By Christine Ahn, et al., The Nation [March 19, 2021]
---- Shortly after the mass killing in Georgia—including six Asian women—earlier this week, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken denounced the violence, saying it "has no place in America or anywhere." Blinken made the comments during his first major overseas trip to Asia with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, where Blinken warned China that the United States will push back against its "coercion and aggression," and Austin cautioned North Korea that the United States was ready to "fight tonight." Yet such hawkish rhetoric against China—which was initially spread by Donald Trump and other Republicans around the coronavirus—has directly contributed to rising anti-Asian violence across the country. In fact, it's reflective of a long history of US foreign policy in Asia centered on domination and violence, fueled by racism. [Read More]
News Notes
The campaign to end solitary confinement in NY prisons has achieved a great victory. This week the NYS Senate passed the Humane Alternatives to Long-Term (HALT) Solitary Confinement Act. Previously passed by the Assembly, the bill now goes to Governor Cuomo for his signature. While the Act is not perfect – it kicks in only next year, and restricts (not abolishes) solitary confinement to 15 days – it is a major step towards ending what the UN describes as prison "torture." The legislation, incidentally, will save $132 million each year. Many organizations, including CFOW, enlisted in the fight directed by the New York Campaign for Alternatives to Isolated Confinement. From Hastings, special thanks for his leadership to Steven Siebert!
CFOW Nuts & Bolts
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. Taking the Covid Crisis into account, we meet (with safe distancing) for a protest/rally on Saturday in Hastings, at 12 noon at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) Another vigil takes place on the first Monday of the month (April 5th), from 5:30 to 6 pm, in Yonkers at the intersection of Warburton Ave. and Odell. In this time of coronavirus, we are meeting by Zoom conference; if you would like to join one of our Zoom meetings, Tuesday and Thursday at noon and/or Saturday at 5 pm, please send a return email. Our weekly newsletter is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com/; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook page. If you would like to support our work by making a contribution, please send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks!
Rewards!
This week's "Rewards!" for Newsletter readers begin with a short documentary film called "A Song for Ourselves." It was made by Tadashi Nakamura and portrays the life and times of Asian-American singer Chris Lijima, a leading spirit in the emergence of the Asian-American protest movement of the early 1970s. Many of Chris's songs are included in the album "A Grain of Sand: Music for the Struggle by Asians in America" [Link].
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
FEATURED ESSAYS
"We all struggle with despair": Naomi Klein on overcoming doomism with climate action
By India Bourke, The New Statesman [UK] [March 2021]
---- Seven years ago the author and activist Naomi Klein dedicated her new book, This Changes Everything, to her son, Toma. [Since Toma's birth], her writing has since galvanised an ever louder and more authoritative climate movement; partnering on a film with US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and forging an alliance with the Pope. Yet for much of that same time, Klein has also wrestled with the question of when and how to share her climate knowledge with her son. … Unable to shield her five-year-old son from the pervasive smog and raging skin rashes, the question concerning Klein now shifted: given that the world has failed to safeguard young people, how can it "empower" them instead? Part of her answer to this dilemma is a new book aimed directly at young readers, How to Change Everything. [Read More]
---- Seven years ago the author and activist Naomi Klein dedicated her new book, This Changes Everything, to her son, Toma. [Since Toma's birth], her writing has since galvanised an ever louder and more authoritative climate movement; partnering on a film with US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and forging an alliance with the Pope. Yet for much of that same time, Klein has also wrestled with the question of when and how to share her climate knowledge with her son. … Unable to shield her five-year-old son from the pervasive smog and raging skin rashes, the question concerning Klein now shifted: given that the world has failed to safeguard young people, how can it "empower" them instead? Part of her answer to this dilemma is a new book aimed directly at young readers, How to Change Everything. [Read More]
Women are harmed every day by invisible men
By Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian [UK] [March 19, 2021]
---- The alleged murderer of eight people, six of whom were Asian American women, reportedly said that he was trying to "eliminate temptation". It's as if he thought others were responsible for his inner life, as though the horrific act of taking others' lives rather than learning some form of self-control was appropriate. This aspect of a crime that was also horrifically racist reflects a culture in which men and the society at large blame women for men's behavior and the things men do to women. … Thus have we treated a lot of things that men do to women or men and women do together as women's problems that women need to solve, either by being amazing and heroic and enduring beyond all reason, or by fixing men, or by magically choosing impossible lives beyond the reach of harm and inequality. Not only the housework and the childcare, but what men do becomes women's works. [Read More]
(Video) "Jim Crow in New Clothes": In First Senate Speech, Raphael Warnock Slams GOP Assault on Voting Rights
From Democracy Now! [[March 19, 2021]
---- Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock, whose election in January helped bring the chamber under Democratic control, used his first speech on the floor of the Senate this week to assail Republican efforts to restrict voting rights. He called the raft of voter suppression bills being introduced in states across the country "Jim Crow in new clothes," denounced false claims of voter fraud spread by Donald Trump and others, and called on Congress to pass the For the People Act, also known as H.R. 1, a sweeping voting reform bill that would greatly expand access to the ballot. "Make no mistake: This is democracy in reverse," said Warnock, who is the first Black senator elected in Georgia. "Rather than voters being able to pick the politicians, the politicians are trying to cherry-pick their voters." [See the Program]
WAR & PEACE
(Video) "Immoral & Illegal": U.S. & U.K. Move to Expand Nuclear Arsenals, Defying Global Disarmament Treaties
From Democracy Now! [March 18, 2021]
---- The United States and the United Kingdom are facing international criticism for moving to expand their nuclear arsenals, defying a growing global movement in support of nuclear disarmament. The U.S. is planning to spend $100 billion to develop a new nuclear missile which could travel 6,000 miles carrying a warhead 20 times stronger than the one dropped on Hiroshima, while British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has just announced plans to lift the cap on its nuclear stockpile, ending three decades of gradual nuclear disarmament in the U.K. "We're seeing this united, uniform response of nuclear-armed states to what the rest of the world is calling for, which is the total elimination of nuclear weapons," says Alicia Sanders-Zakre, a policy and research coordinator at the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. [Read More] Also useful/interesting is "What's Behind the Biden Administration's New $100 Billion Nuclear Missile System?" by Jeremy Kuzmarov, Covert Action Magazine [March 19, 2021] [Link].
(Video) A Guide to US Empire in Africa: Neocolonial Order & AFRICOM
With Abby Martin, Empire Files [March 13, 2021] [53 minutes]
---- Abby Martin speaks to Eugene Puryear to discuss the big picture of US imperialism in Africa: From the Berlin Conference to the subversion of liberation movements to neocolonial puppets and the current sprawl of AFRICOM "counterterrorism." [See the Program]
10 Years after the Outbreak of the Syrian Revolution, the US is Still Prolonging the Agony
---- On March 15, 2011, ten years ago this week, the first tiny demonstrations took place in Damascus in Syria. A larger protest, however, was staged in the town of Deraa south of the capital on March 18, from which most observers start the Syrian revolution. The first wave of protests, in 2011, mainly consisted of youth and students on the one hand, and of slum dwellers and recent migrants from the countryside on the other. Some middle class people from small cities joined in, and the Syrian National Council was all business suits and constitutionalism. People wanted more services from the Baath government. Youth wanted more personal freedoms. Some middle class people wanted more democracy. In small towns, some people wanted more influence for fundamentalist Islam along the lines of the Muslim Brotherhood. Bashar al-Assad, however, deliberately radicalized the would-be revolutionaries by attacking them militarily and driving them to take up arms. … But with most of these economically powerful metropolises in government hands, and with the country's major port under control, the would-be revolutionaries were ultimately unable to overthrow the government. [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
Biden's Early Agenda Gives Hope, But Activist Pressure Must Not Cease: An Interview with Noam Chomsky
From Truthout [March 20, 2021]
Q: What's your assessment of Biden's actions so far to deal with the coronavirus pandemic and the pain caused to millions of Americans on account of the pandemic?
Chomsky: Better than I'd anticipated. Considerably so. … It's easy to find serious omissions and deficiencies in Biden's programs on the domestic front, but there are signs of hope for emerging from the Trump nightmare and moving on to what really should, what really must be done. The hopes are, however, conditional. The temporary measures of the stimulus on child poverty and many other issues must be made permanent, and improved. Crucially, activist pressure must not cease. The masters of the universe pursue their class war relentlessly, and can only be countered by an aroused public opposition that is no less dedicated to the common good. [Read More]
The Movement for Black Lives Has Been Waiting for This Moment
By Eli Day, In These Times [March 16, 2021]
---- As it continues to fight local battles, the racial justice movement is also using the power it has built to demand change on a national scale. Movement organizers say they plan to intensify their advocacy — through street protests and other forms of direct pressure on lawmakers — to make sure their demands for transformative change are met under the Biden administration. … Then there's the issue of criminal justice reform. Designed by the Movement for Black Lives' Electoral Justice Project, the BREATHE Act calls for sweeping changes, from abolishing mandatory minimums, ending life sentences and repealing the 1994 crime bill to "decriminalizing and retroactively expunging drug offenses," and rerouting large chunks of the country's massive criminal justice and defense budgets towards addressing the preventable misery that drives so many to desperate acts in the first place. While the bill was introduced last year by Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D‑Mich.) and Ayanna Pressley (D‑Mass.), Biden's team has so far declined to say whether the administration backs such dramatic reforms. [Read More]
ISRAEL/PALESTINE
(Podcast) What You Need to Know About Israel's Unprecedented Election: Special Briefing
From Haaretz, Israel's leading liberal newspaper [March 21, 2021]
---- Israelis are heading to the polls again on Tuesday, for the country's fourth election in two years. This election will determine the future of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is trying to amass a majority that will allow him to evade prosecution over corruption charges. It will also determine the future of Israel as a country – and the strength of its democracy, economy and relations with key allies like the United States. … On Sunday, less than 36 hours before polling places open, Haaretz hosted a special pre-election briefing for readers and subscribers, focusing on the issues at the heart of this election, the potential governments that could be formed once it is over, and the chances of another election taking place this summer. [Listen to the Program]
Palestine Horizons: Winning the Long Game
By Richard Falk, ZNet [March 21, 2021]
[FB – Having reached the age of 90, Richard Falk has now written his autobiography, Public Intellectual: The Life of a Citizen Pilgrim." Over the decades, and in many parts of the world, he has brought his expertise in International Law to bear on core issues of war and peace.]
----In recent weeks the Palestinian people have scored major victories that would have dire consequences for Israel if law and morality governed political destiny. Instead, these successes are offset by adverse geopolitical developments as a result of the Biden presidency embracing some of the worst features of Trump's hyper-partisanship with respect to Israel/Palestine. … As with other anti-colonial struggles, the fate of the Palestinians will eventually turn on whether the struggles of the victimized people can outlast the combined power of the repressive state when, as here, it is linked to the regional and global strategic interests of geopolitical actors. Can the Palestinian people secure their basic rights through their own struggles wages against a combination of internal/external forces, relying on Palestinian resistance from within, global solidarity campaigns from without? This is the nature of the Palestinian Long Game, and at present its trajectory is hidden among the mystifications and contradictions of unfolding national, regional, and global history. [Read More]
OUR HISTORY
A Collective Experience [The Black Panthers in Memory]
By Stephen Kearse, The Nation [March 18, 2021]
[FB – The film Judas and the Black Messiah, which is about the FBI murder of Illinois Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in 1969, has elicited a lot of comment and controversy. I think this is a useful/interesting introduction to the film and how/why it fails to represent the true history of those times.]
---- In the summer of 1967, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover issued the first in a series of memos outlining how the bureau would deal with what it deemed "black nationalist hate groups." The memos, sent to the FBI offices participating in Cointelpro, the bureau's covert (and illegal) counterintelligence program, are as infuriating and terrifying as they are outlandish. … They declared that the FBI must prevent "a true black revolution" and likened a potential coalition of domestic Black political groups to Kenya's Mau Mau rebellion. They even posited that Martin Luther King Jr. and Elijah Muhammad were peers, as if there were no substantial differences in their outlooks and tactics. The memos were more a racist projection than a work of intelligence. Judas and the Black Messiah takes its title from these memos, in which Hoover warns of a "messiah who could unify, and electrify the militant black nationalist movement." [Read More]
