With so much agony built up since George Floyd’s death (as well as the killings of Breoanna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery in the months prior, plus all black lives gone due to police brutality ) I can’t get myself to be centered enough and compose my thoughts on why it is important for me, a South Asian immigrant American, to make a stand against systemic racism. So I take and share poignant statements here said by the smart and witty comedian Hasan Minhaj:
“Asians: We love black excellence. Barack, Michelle, Jay-Z, Beyoncé. We love seeing how high a black person can ascend in America. But we’ve done nothing to raise the floor.
Our Bollywood stars do skin whitening commercials so we don’t look black. It is bad to be black in Desi culture. Even though we all wish we were black. You don’t think that affects how we view black people?
We are in this country because of protest. Because of the civil rights movement. The only reason so many of us are here is because the Immigration Act of 1965. That law rode the wave of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Think of the chess moves...MLK gets LBJ to sign that sheet of paper, and little do we know MLK CC’d us on that email of progress.
America’s story didn’t start when we got here. When you became and American citizen, you don’t just get to own the country’s excellence. You have to own it’s failures. That is the deal.
We can’t just knock out racism. We have to help win this thing on the cards. We have to donate our money and time to black organizations. All this applies to everyone.” - @hasanminhaj
>> Excerpt from full video on YouTube
Illustration by Sacrée Frangine
Resource links
George Floyd - GoFundMe
Breonna Taylor - GoFundMe
Fund the BLM movement
Stop saying “all lives matter”