By Cortlynn Stark and Katie Moore
Kayla Reed stood in a line of dozens of people along the sidewalk near West 119th Terrace and Grant Street as she held up her South Korea flag. They were all gathered to support Asian Americans. They gathered in defiance as hate against those communities hit a fatal crescendo.
Reed turned to a Black woman standing next to her and thanked her for coming. “We got you,” the woman said.
Reed, 23, showed up to the rally organized by Allies Against Asian Hate in Overland Park in March because she was tired of staying quiet. For much of her life, she was afraid of her identity and heritage. But on that day, she wore a shirt with pride that she wouldn’t have worn a year ago: a Black T-shirt with a quote from actress Sandra Oh that read, “It’s an honor just to be Asian.”
Over the last year, largely the result of escalating racist anti-Asian attacks during the COVID-19 pandemic, Asian activism has grown. The Stop Asian Hate movement led to rallies across the country, spurred by the killings of eight people, including six women of Asian descent, in Atlanta. In Kansas City, a number of groups and individuals have attained broader visibility, speaking up for the nascent movement.
Activists have said people need to stand together across various movements, bringing Stop Asian Hate and Black Lives Matter together. Ultimately, they have the same goal: to dismantle white supremacy.
“Until we get justice for everybody, an injustice to anybody is a threat to justice for all,” said George Williams, who founded Stand Up for Black Lives Prairie Village.
What’s in a movement?
Last year, hundreds of people filled Mill Creek Park by the County Club Plaza to protest police brutality. Crowds chanted “I can’t breathe,” “Black Lives Matter,” and the names of local victims of police shootings: Cameron Lamb, Donnie Sanders, Terrance Bridges and Ryan Stokes. Police used pepper spray and tear gas against protesters.
Protests on the Plaza continued for days. Even after protests quieted down along what was once J.C. Nichols Parkway, they sprung up elsewhere: outside Kansas City Police Department’s East Patrol Station, near the police department’s downtown headquarters and outside the home of Jackson County prosecutor Jean Peters Baker.
New social justice and advocacy organizations emerged, including Black Rainbow, White Rose KC and Stand Up for Black Lives Prairie Village. People who were not in the public eye rose to the top, becoming prominent Kansas City figures, as they called for change.
“We’ve always seen social movements happen we just didn’t have a term for it, and movements for justice and equality and shared space, and shared resources,” said Toya Like, associate professor of criminal justice and criminology at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. “I think so many of the things that I see are that these are the parallel of what we’ve done historically.”
The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, which originated in 2013 around the death of Trayvon Martin, is sometimes referred to as the “modern Civil Rights Movement,” Like said. And while this movement is more decentralized than the days of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, she added, the same push to bring issues to the public’s attention is happening.
“It used marches, public demonstrations to sort of bring awareness to this issue of social injustice and racial inequality, but it also had the advent of social media right away,” Like said.
The same thing is happening again as organizations blossom on social media and people rally to Stop Asian Hate.
More than 6,600 hate incidents were reported to the Stop AAPI Hate nonprofit since March of last year, including verbal and online harassment, physical assault and civil rights violations.
The number of incidents surged by more than 2,800 in March this year alone.
This year, as the community rallied in Overland Park, where a large portion of the metro’s Asian population lives, a 9-year-old girl whose grandparents live in China carried a sign that read, “Don’t hurt our grandparents.” She’s afraid of them visiting her here.
The day after that rally, about 500 people turned out in Kansas City’s West Bottoms to stand in solidarity against anti-Asian hate and to pray for the Atlanta shooting victims. It was sponsored by Cafe Cà Phê, a Vietnamese coffee shop near West 11th and Mulberry streets. The shop, owned by Jackie Nguyen, has become a focal point in the movement locally.
After attending the rally in Overland Park, Reed joined a group to help launch Asians Do Matter, a website dedicated to amplifying the voices of the AAPI community and sharing their stories. The group organized primarily through social media. Another woman, Marina Le, who lives in California, reached out to Reed on LinkedIn. She wanted to start a movement and had an idea of how to start one.
“I can’t just sit back because it’s happening to our people,” Le said. “If we don’t galvanize as a people, we would lose this opportunity to amplify our voices.”
Movements are no longer isolated, Like said.
“But now we have imagery through print media and photos and now through video and then now social media, which is taking a life of its own too,” Like said, “I think this is what brings together these groups where you can have alliances in ways that we probably didn’t have before.”
In April, community activist PaKou Her co-founded API Underground, the mission being to build kinship among the Asian American community in Kansas City and provide opportunities to get involved in grassroots initiatives.
“We deserve to have space in the racial narrative as Midwesterners,” Her said.
The organization is still assessing the community’s needs, but is considering ways to expand bias reporting as well as education about the Asian American culture that goes beyond food, delving deeper into issues around race and identity.
Last weekend, Her joined more than 100 people spread out around Ilus W. Davis Park, across from City Hall in downtown Kansas City as the city declared May as Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month.
“I think when we look at here locally, we’ve seen the rise of people coming out and supporting Asian American activists,” community activist Justice Horn said, “because they’ve been doing this work and they’re finally getting appreciation and being seen and finally given the mic.”
While speaking to the crowd Horn said: “I think it’s important, no matter if it’s Black Lives Matter, AAPI lives matter, trans lives matter, as well as women’s rights, that we show up and show out and fight against racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and all the nasty things that call themselves home in our community.”
Everyone has to show up, he said.
“It’s not co-opting and taking up space, it’s standing together in solidarity,” Horn told The Star.
Lessons in history
In other cities, Asian communities have carved out entire city blocks to create spaces such as Koreatown or Chinatown — enclaves of culture, language and identity. Kansas City does not have the same place. In the metro, about 80,200 people, or 3.7% of the population, identifies as Asian.
Those enclaves helped build socioeconomic capital to enter the middle class, said Like, who has studied social movements across the country. She pointed out that in the inner city communities of color are not called ethnic enclaves, but rather “ghettos,” an example of how systemic racism is used to continually separate groups of color.
It’s hard for her, she said, as someone who is African American and who studies race and ethnicity, to “hear African Americans speak anti-other minority group rhetoric.”
Like said the levels of oppression and racism other groups face is different, but that all have had difficult pasts in the U.S. when it comes to the “centering of whiteness … and the de-centering of other people of color.”
Sharon Quinsaat, a sociology professor at Grinnell College in Iowa, said the violence that different minority groups face varies — from police brutality to attacks on individuals by individuals. But both can be traced back to ideas of hatred and discrimination perpetuated by the state, which has used the idea of the “model minority” to pit marginalized groups against each other. The effect, as Asian Americans Advancing Justice of Los Angeles said, is the minimizing of systemic racism and its impact on Black people.
“We need to get rid of all those barriers that we see as preventing us from sitting down and talking about our common struggles,” Quinsaat said.
Recognizing that many of the goals are the same, namely dismantling white supremacy, can be especially important for Asian American activists in parts of the Midwest where numbers are small, Quinsaat said.
“Within the Asian American community, there’s a lot of conversations about multi-racial organizing, so connecting with the Black Lives Matter movement, connecting with movements focusing on the undocumented, so immigrants rights, to identify those common struggles,” Quinsaat said.
For Asian and Black activists in the Bay Area fighting racism, coalition building is not new
The Black Lives Matter movement in particular has been successful in confronting racist state structures and using a diversity of tactics to sustain momentum, she said.
That persistence paid off last month, she said, when former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of murdering George Floyd.
There are historical examples of connections across groups being successful, said Scott Kurashige, a professor of comparative race and ethnic studies at Texas Christian University.
“In the late 60s and into the 70s, the idea of Asian American identity was very much tied to the Asian American movement which was in large measure inspired by the Black Power movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement,” Kurashige said.
Both groups tended to reject assimilation and white standards of success and beauty.
Today, Black Lives Matter “is very much establishing a model and a movement to be in solidarity with,” he said.
For those in the Asian American community, that has meant conversations about how to address anti-Asian violence that recognize solutions like increased policing that may hurt other people of color.
“The whole idea of doing this work has to begin with the notion of justice for all,” Kurashige said. “And how we formulate our organizations and our identities has to begin with this intersectional concept of how oppression works and how social justice can be achieved.”
It also means recognizing the diversity within the Asian American community, which includes many ethnic groups and a spectrum of religious and political beliefs. Asian Americans are represented at the top levels of the economic bracket as well as the bottom, Kurashige said.
In Kansas City, Her said it was important “to see ourselves in the full landscape.”
“We’re not here to have some kind of liberatory experience just for Asian Americans,” Her said. “We know that if we’re going to have a radical, revolutionary anti-racist experience, then we need to be fighting for that for everybody else as well, and that is a core value for us.”
Reed said she hopes they can unite with the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement and that with the movements supporting each other, people will truly listen.
Solidarity between movements
George Williams, who founded Stand Up for Black Lives Prairie Village, attended the rally outside Cafe Cà Phê with his wife Trudy, carrying signs that read: Black Lives 4 Asian Lives.
He learned about the event through one of their group members. He and his wife wanted to be there, he said, to show support. His group tries to be “deliberate about inclusion,” as they invite other organizations to participate in their actions.
Williams is just one generation removed from slavery. His grandfather was born on a plantation in West Virginia. He grew up in Fort Riley, where he said mixed race couples were sent before the practice was outlawed in 1967. His father is Black and his mother is Korean. For much of his life, he strongly identified with his father’s heritage.
The massive turnout last year at a rally for Black lives in Prairie Village was incredible, he said. It came at a time when they felt depressed, Williams said, watching the trauma happening to Black people across the country.
He’s experiencing the same emotions now. Williams said he feels a sense of loss and sadness as he sees news about the attacks on Asians in America. Then, it turns to anger at the perpetrators and their inability to recognize humanity.
“The cultural climate in America and that was kind of set by the last administration, I think, the former president almost gave people permission for things that might be a little more suppressed, even though it still existed,” Williams said.
At the vigil outside Cafe Cà Phê, he said he felt encouraged by the Japanese drummers from Three Trails Taiko. The same drummers performed last weekend as the city recognized May as AAPI Heritage Month.
Horn, who attended both events, said he has faith the community will show up for social justice issues. He added that everyone has to band together to dismantle white supremacy.
As for the future of the movement, Like said in order for people to not forget that it is important for people to not treat the hate crimes as if they happen outside of your community. It didn’t just happen in Ferguson, she said, and it didn’t just happen in California. Social media helps keep the movement at the front of people’s minds.
“They’re all social justice movements, and they’re aimed at saying we need to do something to bring about equality,” Like said.
Reed said she has to tell herself that this movement will sustain — it’s how she keeps hope alive.
“I have to be confident that my children won’t have to experience the same things I did growing up,” Reed said. “This will work out. Why do anything if there’s just going to be hate?”