As a second generation Chinese American, my nascent understanding of this country was an amalgamation of utopic American ideologies: the American Dream, the wonderful melting pot of America, a healed society post-civil rights movement.
And growing up, I didn’t feel like I had the agency to question that. Rather, I was socialized to lay low, respect law and order, and not cause any trouble. Basically, to be a “good minority.” I was raised to see American society not as something to change or improve, but rather as something to succeed within.
Yet, even after generations of peaceful protests and incendiary rebellions, this country’s troubling history still has not led us to the post-racial society that is so readily peddled and so fatally wrong. There still is no justice.
So when I think about the impact of these protests, I think about the power they have in disrupting and dispelling those utopic American ideologies. They challenge the fallacious narratives many of us were raised with. They force us to confront the unpleasant inequalities built into the bones of this country. They force us to recognize how our society and our institutions continue to fail and murder our Black and Brown communities. And they force us to have hard conversations about race—with ourselves, and with our communities.
The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Manuel Ellis, Rayshard Brooks, and countless others were never just isolated incidents divorced from race. They are the intended outcomes of this country. America was built and continues to run on white supremacy and anti-blackness. And we are socialized to be complicit with—or worse, become arbiters of—that institutionalized inequality.
There is so much to say, and so much that has already been said over several generations, to the point where it feels beyond frustrating that there is still no justice. But silence is deadly, and inaction is irresponsible. There is a lot to be angry about, and until there is revolutionary change and justice, we must continue to speak out, and fight back.
