Today I want to give my time and care to honor the dead, and the living. I have an offering for each. Whether you read this for learning, or for the affirmation of feeling seen, here’s my offering:

For the dead: Say their names

I join in mourning with the families and communities of the people murdered in the Atlanta spa shootings on March 16, 2021:

Soon Chung Park
Hyun Jung Grant
Sun Cha Kim
Yong Ae Yue
Delaina Ashley Yaun
Paul Andre Michels
Xiaojie Tan
Daoyou Feng

As I name our murdered kin, of whom six were women of Asian descent, I also name what killed them: Anti-Asian racism. White terrorism. White supremacy. Misogyny. Toxic masculinity. The legacy of American colonialism, imperialism, and war. All of these things and more, intersecting in their bodies and ultimately tearing them apart.

As I name them, I offer my own learning to folks like me who are not from the same communities as our lost siblings: Initially, I saw lists of their names which were intended to memorialize them, but which erased their identities by treating their two-part first names as a first name and middle initial. That’s exactly the kind of thing that happens when the cultures and traditions of a marginalized group are not even part of what the dominant group “knows they don’t know” — and that dominant group fails to intentionally listen to the affected communities. Where were the police officials, journalists, and editors of Korean descent who could have protected the dead and their loved ones from being unseen even in the glare of our 24/7 mainstream media for days?

And lastly, as I name them, a saying rises to my lips from my own kinfolks’ long tradition: May their memories be for a blessing.

For the living: Honor their truth

Whenever I think about what sparked me to begin my personal racial justice journey a few years ago, I have deeply embodied memories of exactly where I was when two crucial moments broke me open. Until this week, I never connected the fact that both are memories of Asian-American people. These two colleagues each courageously chose to risk my White anger by giving me a truthful glimpse of how my own behavior fit a pattern of racism that they had experienced too many times before.

I’ve thanked them before for their gifts, many times. Now seems like a good time to thank them again, this time by sharing their gifts with you:

…

It was the first morning of the first day of our all-staff training on “Race, Racism and Whiteness.” I was excited but didn’t know what to expect. The session hadn’t begun yet; we were slowly gathering in the big conference room, choosing seats one by one at the groups of conference tables. There was no assigned seating, no grouping by departments or affinities, just first-come first-served. I was already parked at a six-person table with two other earlybirds, when my Asian-American colleague A bounced in, put their hand on the back of the chair next to me, and said, “May I?”

And I, looking around the mostly empty room and suddenly feeling a responsibility to be In Charge somehow (although I wasn’t at all involved in organizing the training) responded, “Maybe it would be good to start another table?”

A beat of silence. “Sure – if you want to keep this table all White!” said Colleague A cheerily, bouncing off again.

I literally LOL’d. The idea that I wouldn’t want Colleague A at my table? The truth was, A was so awesome that I frequently found myself consciously trying to not play favorites by showing how much I liked them!

I figured A knew this. So, when I found myself in line next to them for mid-morning brownies, I teased them about their funny joke. And again there was that beat of silence.

“Oh. You weren’t joking,” I said blankly.

“No. I wasn’t. It was all White people at your table and a person of color asked to sit there and you said no.”

Eyes wide, standing there in the hallway outside the conference room – this is the first moment that my body remembers so clearly. I felt two choices tugging at me. Obviously the first option was to defend why that was completely silly and they’d totally misunderstood me, I hadn’t even thought to notice that the people I was sitting with were White!

The second option was to realize that I had worked with this person for YEARS now, in which I had never had reason to feel anything but the highest respect for what came out of their mouth. Was I really going to start now? Was I going to choose this particular moment to completely dismiss their point of view, tell them I wasn’t even going to consider what they were saying?

Nope. I was not. That was not going to be me, because why would I disbelieve them only on this one thing ever? And as we got our brownies, I chose to be curious instead. I said how shocked I was at that interpretation, and asked them if that was really a thing they’d experienced.

Turned out, it was. It definitely was a thing, many many times over. So, whatever point I might have wanted to make about my particular intention that morning became, well, beside the point.

The point was that someone I cared about had been hurt by the impact that my words had on them, no matter that I hadn’t meant it “that way.” My behavior — what I actually DID, regardless of what I thought — fit a pattern of racism that they had experienced throughout their life.

And that was just not OK with me, not something I could shrug off. I wanted to be more careful in future, and that meant I needed to believe in A’s description of the pattern so I could avoid repeating it.

…

A month or two later, as part of the same ongoing all-staff training, I was paired with another Asian-American colleague, B, for a “homework discussion” about our racial experiences.

Sitting there on the yellow IKEA couch in my office, B told me how bad it had felt to attend a philanthropy-sector gathering at the swanky home of someone we both knew. B was very acutely aware that everybody else at that entire event was White… except for the one person who was there to serve the White host family.

“Oof,” I said. “That sounds so uncomfortable. It reminds me of…” and I shared a story of how awkward and out-of-place I’d felt walking into a similar work-party at a similar home and how I reassured myself that I belonged anywhere.

“Sometimes,” said B gently, looking thoughtfully out the window, “White people share stories about class when they’re trying to connect with stories from people of color about race.”

See what B did there? Not even holding up a mirror to me. Just kind of putting a mirror on the coffee table in front of the sofa where we were sitting, and nodding quietly in its direction in case I might want to pick it up and look in it.

Which I did. And what it showed me was less about seeing myself from a different angle, and so much more about seeing that my angle on the world was not the only one. My perspective missed what was different about B’s perspective. Yes, there was commonality in our house-party experiences. But there was also difference, and IT MATTERED.

“I think…” I sat there on the couch and saw twenty years of my nonprofit career flash before my eyes, and that was the second moment of clarity. “I think maybe I’ve done that before.”

It mattered to me because I’d spent so long trying so hard to help communities of mostly Black, Asian-American, Pacific Islander, and Latinx people thrive economically. But I’d always sought solutions to what I saw as their problems from the vantage point of my own experience, not theirs. And in B’s mirror, I suddenly started to see that my solutions were often not nearly as good as they could have been — as I desperately wanted them to be — because my limited perspective wasn’t letting me seeing the actual problem clearly. (I wrote more about this revelation here: East Palo Alto Revisited.)

Again, I’m not here for any kind of argument about whether B was “right” to feel a racially-based sense of being othered, not belonging, at that party. I am talking about the undeniable fact that I missed how B’s experience was different to them, and therefore when I tried to apply solutions from my experience, it didn’t work. I missed the target, because I hadn’t been able to see where B really needed me to aim.

For me, as someone who wants so much to help, that was… not good news. And again, not something I could ignore or shrug off. I could abandon my life’s aspiration and keep doing same old same old. Or I could keep my goal and try to learn more.

I mean. When you think about it that way, it’s not really a tough choice, is it?

…

Which brings me back to today. To this week, and its terrible but predictable and predicted losses.

Bias, hatred, and systemic injustice against Asian-Americans were very real three years ago when my brave and brilliant colleagues A and B helped me to see through their eyes for a moment.

They are even more real now, following a year in which The Most Powerful Man In The World deliberately brought our country’s long-simmering anti-Asian racism to a boiling point, and our misogyny too.

To my friends who identify as Asian and Pacific Islander and to your communities, I see you. I believe you. I will do what I can to stand with you, and I’ll try to do it in the ways you want me to, because you see this more clearly than I do.

And in particular to A and B, I will spend the rest of my life trying not to waste the trust that you placed in me.

This is my offering today to the dead and the living.