This essay is featured in Issue 1 Of Muntjac
NOTE: In this piece I use the terms “(British) East & South East Asian” (BESEA) and “Asian American” in a loose, critical way. It names a particular tendency and group of people who engage in such politics, the sort that might self-characterise as being “anti-covid hate” or “Stop Asian / AAPI / ESEA Hate”. My comrades and I remain sceptical that a “(B)ESEA” political identity as recoverable even as we sometimes organise under it to do certain things.
I am writing to sketch out the current reactionary basis for community self-defence in Asian American and BESEA politics. Instead of continuing to beg for crumbs of state validation and protection from cops, we need to continue the proliferation of resistance against state violence.
We’ll begin with a brief description of the situation in the so-called U.S., as BESEA groups appear to view Asian American activity as somehow more advanced and it’s important to show this is not the case.
From 2021 onwards, various news articles in the so-called US reported a rise in Asian Americans taking self-defense classes [1] and purchasing guns. [2] This was in response to an escalation in racist street violence against Asians; the attacks which gained the most media attention created a narrative of white male vigilantes or Black homeless men specifically targeting Asian American women and elders. Anti-Black racism is inherent to these politics. While some Asian American organisations might post instagram slides that celebrate Juneteenth or offer condolences for Black victims of police violence, it’s clear from the rest of their social media messaging, co-operation with similar organisations, state bodies and public figures that their primary goal is assimilating Asian Americans into the colonial violence inherent to the US state through the protection of private property. A previous realisation of such politics includes the so-called Rooftop Koreans, petit bourgeois Asian settlers who sought to defend their businesses during the L.A. uprising in the 90s by attacking Black people.[3] It is therefore no surprise that when community self-defence is grounded in Asian American “Stop Asian Hate” (SAH) politics, its participants fill the role of self-deputised police rather than opposing state violence and neglect.
And yet there is a contradiction: for all their messaging that Asians need to be responsible for protecting “our own”, SAH social media content is largely aimed at applying pressure on police to investigate violent attacks and indeed all racial animus as “hate crimes”, celebrating weighty sentencing that apparently shows the state considers such animus as injurious to its own social body. [4] Journalist Esther Wang reported on such ‘desperate, confused, righteous’ politics of SAH in 2022, focusing on the aftermath of Christina Yuna Lee’s murder by a street homeless man from a nearby encampment. She writes, ‘A bitterness was beginning to take hold — a sense of grievance that was hardening into a politics of self-protection.'[5] Her article describes in detail the reactionary bent of SAH politics: Christina Yuna Lee’s former landlord carrying a taser and pepper spray in order to attack homeless people, community objections to any housing support for their neighbours on the street, and Asian self-defense training clubs that espouse theories of racial self-interest. Wang makes clear that while such paranoid responses have an understandable root cause, they’re not solutions to deep societal problems or everyday trauma.
In all this, it’s made clear the condition of being made vulnerable to homelessness, of gentrification, displacement, criminalisation and incarceration, is not understood as violent within the rubric of SAH politics. The reality of the U.S. as a settler-colonial project and how it constructs and orders race to situate certain populations close to death in literal spatial terms is seen as merely aberrant, rather than consistent with its death-making project. A slightly more canny tendency of SAH politics pays lip service to non-carceral advocacy, which can be seen in recent Stop AAPI Hate statements condemning the killings of Easter Leafa, Victoria Lee, and Sonya Massey[6] by police which consistently call for ‘in-language’ and ‘culturally sensitive’ responses to mental health crises, demanding ‘accountability’ for this ‘misconduct.’ Again, the idea that such violence is entirely consistent with the state is not permitted; it would interrupt their redemptive fantasy of the state as an all-giving caregiver who simply needs to draw its lesser favoured child closer to its breast.
This is what abolitionist Dylan Rodríguez describes as the ‘”Asian Exception”‘; “Black on Asian” violence is but one folkdevil used to kick dirt over the tracks of what Rodríguez calls ‘white nationalist, domestic warfare totality’ for which state-enforced punishment of individualised perpetrators is an insufficient response as said totality is ‘a) cold-blooded as fuck, and b) doesn’t give a shit about individuals in-and-of-themselves.’ [7] Citing critical Asian American organising by sex workers, abolitionist feminists, and prisoner support campaigns, Rodríguez encourages us to join the call for ‘collective practices of revolt, solidarity, creativity, and mutual aid that de-prioritize condemnation of individual perpetrators (Black, Brown, and otherwise) and cultivate infrastructures of accountability to other communities, organizations, and movements struggling for liberation from antiblackness, colonial domination, and asymmetrical domestic war.’ Rodríguez consistently draws attention to his own contradictory position within his own academic dayjob, observing that this position is filled with people whose embrace of liberal pacifism means they have a ‘knee-jerk aversion to guns and firearms.'[8] Because they prioritise individual knowledge extraction rather than being open to collective militancy, these people can be a real security risk to movements who see the necessity of self-defense.
You will never find me condemning armed resistance anywhere in the world. However, as I was researching community self-defense in an Asian American context, various critiques came to mind – mostly that armed struggle in the so-called U.S. has become synonymous with U.S. gun culture.
For example, Yellow Peril Tactical is an Asian American armed leftist pro-gun rights group with the aim of educating and training people in firearm handling, tactical training, and community defense. They also build connections with other armed leftists groups and medics, sharing this knowledge through their podcasts. They situate their project as an intervention in reactionary self-defense. All of this is valuable. However, as I listened to their discussions, I started thinking that perhaps some armed leftist groups position themselves as a subset within US gun culture who wish to explore their militarised hobby, rather than politicised organisations who have strategised the necessity of taking up arms through their own analysis of the state monopoly on violence.
I also noted that while there appears to be a willingness to wield coercive force, this sits alongside rather limited ways of looking at representation. For example, YPT’s inaugural podcast episode in 2021 began from the point of diversifying gun culture, with one speaker complaining about how hard it was to be a queer Asian woman in the gun world, and another speaker chiming in that there were now more diverse gun influencers. But I kept listening, and though I personally felt mildly irritated to hear this couched in terms of “misconceptions”, “representation” and “diversity”, YPT essentially described a serious situation where self-deputised white supremacist forces dominate the distribution of and training in firearms. YPT is also clearly interested in building meaningful solidarity across borders: they collaborate with various groups, raise funds for the village of Jinwar in Rojava as well as insurgents in Myanmar, which further clarifies their politics radically differ from the average liberal.
While YPT still proceed from an embedded position in U.S. gun culture, they are clear that firearms are to be used in specific situations and share information about different interventions, such as de-escalation, and complement tactical knowledge with field medicine. ‘Guns are not a talisman,’ YPT write in a recent infographic. [9] This ironically echoes a line in An Anarchist Anti-Gun Manifesto: ‘I think people acquire guns because of the fantasy of possessing hyper concentrated power.’ [10] This manifesto de-naturalises the role of guns in armed resistance, encouraging the expropriation then destruction of such weapons while keeping in mind there are other ways of wielding force in domestic warfare.
Asian American organising is of course much more varied than the liberal NPIC or armed leftists, but I focused on these aspects as I feel it is currently under-theorised.
We now turn to the situation in the UK, which is similarly captured by counterinsurgency. The same calls for Stop Asian Hate rang out with predictable politics: a so-called Demonstration of Unity rally in spring 2021 collapsed due to brave groups[11] and individuals that refused to work with a speaker who was the subject of the Solidarity not Silence campaign about misogyny and abuse in music.[12] Liberal and conservative BESEAs do not have working analyses of how power structures function – they think capitalism and its concomitant violences are fine, their horizon of radical change being improved access for BESEAs. Add to this bizarre, self-fulfilling, British-poisoned Asian exceptionalism with its foundational anti-Blackness – animated through a frankly deranged focus on joy, food, and hate crime by NPIC careerists for whom small business ownership is their family background and political subjectivity – and you have the current BESEA movement in a nutshell. (Notable exceptions include the abolitionist tendency in some groups within ESEA Sisters; Remember & Resist;[13] and sex worker organising such as Sparrow’s Wings, not to mention individual Asians active across various solidarity movements, including antiraids networks.)
The situation in the UK can still be neatly described in The Monitoring Group’s statement about another rally later in 2021: ‘We asked the police to be present at the rally to ensure there would be no breach of peace. They requested further information and intelligence supporting our concerns. This was provided to them within minutes of their request.’ [14] The current BESEA political landscape is characterised by nonprofits and high-profile charitable individuals in full, unquestioning, eager co-operation with the state. Everybody circulates around the axis of “hate crime prevention”, for which a more comprehensive state surveillance is the solution. This is their goal and they refuse to see any other approach as valid, such as the abolitionist strategy of within and against realistically assesses what happens when the state intervenes in marginalised communities and situations with vulnerablised people.[15] BESEAs do not really have values that derive from the abolitionist tendency–for them, it’s radical to collaborate with hate crime charities to deliver bystander intervention workshops. You won’t find them at copwatch meetings learning about police interventions because that would mean caring about people other than themselves.
BESEAs are self-righteous about this self-interest because their political identity is based on being uniquely downtrodden and ignored. They don’t historicise Asian identity within the larger context of both colonial labour and colonial middlemen; they refuse any critical engagement with these contradictions. Rather, they propagandise narratives of the hardworking migrant rejected by both whites and other racialised groups; they write exhausting books and articles, appear on morning TV segments, curate whole exhibitions, circulate around the Having Conversations Industrial Complex, attend big dos at Buckingham Palace. What is their demand? Visibility–tolerance–and increased hate crime data collection. And afterwards, they’ll grab their newest LinkedIn profile picture.
When the pogroms of 2024 burst forth and communities rallied in the streets against fascists and their pig protectors, these BESEAs sat in their newbuild apartments and cried. They didn’t say, ‘We’re not good in crowds, we can be more useful co-ordinating from home or doing arrestee support afterwards’– no, their relation to these streets is not tactical. They exclusively communicate in a language of fear and unsafety. This was to be expected of the glossy fintech and media types, but a similar response was given by established community services that support migrants on the ground: report all “hate crime” to the police or a reporting service. Community services were in a position to create and share multi-lingual safety plans, to check in with their members and affirm solidarity with targeted groups. Instead, the “hate crime prevention” narrative was in easy reach for everyone, and it will continue that way until a viable alternative program for filling these social needs is created.
Meanwhile, the state’s border securitisation regime continues apace. Undocumented migrants, asylum seekers and refugees experience the sharpest edge of this vulnerablisation. They have also been discarded from the majority of BESEA discourses on public safety. Contextualising the deaths of the Essex 39 and the Morecambe Bay cockle pickers within the Hostile Environment would mean understanding the state as something other than saviour–how these social murders are consistent with its regime.[16] Similarly, focusing on street attacks rather than how fascist organising works in tandem with state violence means that both material conditions and community needs are obscured. While there is a clear need for multilingual culturally-informed support services, tying it to the success of state-funded hate crime data collection practises diverts attention and resources from actually effective solutions.
Indeed, it is not straightforward for the public to understand how hate crime data is actually used by either police forces or reporting services; thus far there’s been no accountability from the “changemakers” who apparently use this data to make policy changes (for and by whom?). There are ways in which community groups could collect and analyse data using an actively caring methodology and robust ethical framework which targets the root causes of social problems, as shown by the Dying Homeless project by Museum of Homelessness.[17] Otherwise, it appears that a whole panoply of ESEA community centres and migrant support services are being funded, wholly or in part, by the state desire to monitor a narrow category of racial animus by non-state actors. As one possible use of state hate crime data reporting is assigning patrols in certain areas, liberal BESEAs have made it clear they are willing to treat increased police interactions and criminalisation of other communities as collateral.
There would be some utility in abolitionist ESEAs encouraging internal conversations within migrant support services, asking them how they benefit from involvement in this hate crime scheme. If it pays an already overloaded caseworker for a few more hours a week, then it’s important to name that this is not a sustainable solution for making our communities safer. Our responsibility, then, is to propose things that do work and build capacity towards realising this. One example is the community mediator program carried out by Asian American organisers in Oakland.[18] This robust, holistic approach fills many gaps, from intergenerational political education, Black-Asian solidarity, de-escalation, prisoner support, and housing.
Learning from their organising, perhaps our foundation in babylon would be clear, simple messaging that combats a narrative of distrust and fear, all while balancing an acknowledgement of people’s feelings of unsafety. Then, we ask people to really consider what safety means. We have to actually listen–even if we anticipate their answers won’t please us–because it builds trust and can sometimes be surprising. Then, we begin linking the specifics of the ESEA experience to shared material conditions and create accountability to other communities. For these ESEA migrant services and community centres, it might look like making meaningful connections with groups outside of the current hate crime consortium, including but not limited to Black-led abolitionist movements, Palestine solidarity groups, community-led homelessness advocacy, trade and renters unions, queer migrant solidarity and prisoner support.
I sketch out the above even though it seems almost reformist as these services are actually trusted by a sizeable proportion of migrant communities, especially elders who aren’t confident using English. Since it’s impracticable to argue against the existence of such services, we can instead challenge their funding, messaging, and coalitional potential. Our situation differs from that of the so-called US, where the liberal hate crime nonprofits provide no social good whatsoever: they purely exist to propagandise for the police. We have to discern the roles that various groups serve in our communities and drive home how their continued participation in “hate crime prevention” fails to fulfil that need. This happens alongside developing our own abolitionist theory and organising, understanding it must be contextualised as building towards a globalised insurrectionary movement.
The representasian narrative remains so popular exactly because the messaging is simple and self-serving, but it isn’t insurmountable. Indeed, their narrative of racial self-interest, bourgeois aspiration, and failed-assimilation-as-abject-victimhood has has stabilised over the past few years. We know their tricks. We know they’re wrong, and we know they’re scared. They don’t have any new ideas. We want the whole world free, and we have to make that knowledge completely irresistible.
[1] Yasmin Tayag, ‘What I Gained From Self-Defense Class in the Wake of Anti-Asian Attacks’. New York Times, 9 June 2021. [https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/09/well/Asian-women-self-defense-training.html]
[2] Wufei Yu, ‘The West’s Asian Americans arm up for self-defense’. High Country News, 20 May 2021. [https://www.hcn.org/issues/53-6/south-guns-the-wests-asian-americans-arm-up-for-self-defense/]
[3] Natasha Ishak, ‘The True Stories Behind The ‘Rooftop Koreans’ Who Took Up Arms During The L.A. Uprising’. All That’s Interesting, 5 November 2020.
[https://allthatsinteresting.com/roof-koreans]
[4]theyellowwhistle, ‘So glad to see justice served […]’, Instagram, 30 November 2022. [https://www.instagram.com/p/ClmDicTps2b/]
[5] Esther Wang. ‘How to Hit Back: the desperate, confused, righteous campaign to stop Asian hate.’ NY Mag, 26 September 2022.
[https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/stop-asian-hate-crimes-politics.html]
[6] https://stopaapihate.org/2024/07/25/statement-stop-aapi-hate-responds-to-the-murder-of-sonya-massey/
[7] Dylan Rodríguez, ‘The “Asian exception” and the Scramble for Legibility: Toward an Abolitionist Approach to Anti-Asian Violence’. Society and Space, 8 April 2021. [https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/the-asian-exception-and-the-scramble-for-legibility-toward-an-abolitionist-approach-to-anti-asian-violence]
[8] ibid., Robert Sirvent, ‘Cops, Colleges, and Counterinsurgency: An Interview with Dylan Rodriguez.’ Black Agenda Report, 13 Sep 2023. [https://www.blackagendareport.com/cops-colleges-and-counterinsurgency-interview-dylan-rodriguez]
[9] yellow_peril_tactical, ‘Today it’s confirmed that the November […]’, Instagram, 13 March 2024 [https://www.instagram.com/p/C4eBWkvO-kG/]
[10] Ignatius, ‘An Anarchist Anti-Gun Manifesto’, Anarchist Library, May 2023. [https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-an-anarchist-anti-gun-manifesto]
[11] Remember & Resist, ‘Content warnings for posts and caption: sexual violence, harassment/bullying, abuse …’, Instagram, 23 June 2021. [https://www.instagram.com/remember.resist/p/CQd43yPFMxq/?img_index=2]
[12] Solidarity Not Silence, CrowdJustice update, 3 August 2021. [https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/solidaritynotsilence/]
[13] Remember & Resist, ‘Hate crime legislation can’t—and won’t—save us’, Shado Mag, 3 April 2021.
[https://shado-mag.com/opinion/hate-crime-legislation-cant-and-wont-save-us/]
[14] The Monitoring Group, ‘A statement from The Monitoring Group (30/11/21)’, 30 November 2021
[15] Abolitionist Futures, ‘Addressing Gender-Based Violence’. [https://abolitionistfutures.com/gender-based-violence]
[16] Jun Pang, ‘Don’t call the Essex 39 a ‘tragedy’’, New Internationalist, 25 October 2019. [https://newint.org/features/2019/10/25/dont-call-essex-39-tragedy]
[17] Museum of Homelessness, ‘New research shows 1474 homeless people died in 2023 – a mounting national crisis revealed.’
[https://museumofhomelessness.org/news/new-research-shows-1474-homeless-people-died-in-2023-a-mounting-national-crisis-revealed]
[18] Rosalyn Romero and Momo Chang, ‘Since Stop AAPI Hate, some Oakland Chinatown residents are rethinking crime prevention’, The Oaklandside, 12 September 2024. [https://oaklandside.org/2024/09/12/oakland-chinatown-stop-aapi-hate-crime-public-safety/]