Silent Minority No More

By: Jessica Chang

We still have decades to live, but we have inherited your baggage for the rest of our lives. With the first steps my parents took on American soil, I became another owner of your ugliness and hatred. America, you hide behind words like "equality" and "opportunity," but these words only mean something if you already have them. We all see your real face. Make no mistake, America, I love you like a daughter loves a parent because I was an orphan drifting before finding harbor with you. But I have always been acutely aware that you do not love me, and you hate who I love, and you hate my black brothers and sisters. We, your children - birthed and adopted - do not know how to forgive you.

I am tired of living in a vicious world where the color of our skin divides us into groups: wanted, tolerated, and persecuted. I am tired of the senseless, inhuman violence you commit against your other children. I am tired of being a citizen of a country where a black person is killed by police violence every single day of the year. I am tired of being invisible and silent in this country, and tired of not being able to do more to help those whose skin is not invisible but a flashing light that invites danger and death. I am more than tired. I am sick, disgusted, grieving, and angry. You do not want my anger, because it is the wrong color. And you do not want the anger of those whose righteous fury and fear goes fathoms deeper than I can imagine, but you cannot just take what is palatable for you. This medicine is bitter. Drink it, and fix this sickness.

"Give me your huddled masses." Well, here we are: huddled, masked masses crowding in the streets, and you meet us with gas and weapons and rocks. America, take a look in the mirror. You are diseased. You are a hypocrite. You protect murderers. This is the legacy that you leave us. This should never have been our weight to carry, but we will carry it. All of us will. We will carry it not for the day, the week, or even the year. We carry it with us until we die, together. It does not end with an Instagram post, a difficult conversation, or a protest. If we get it right, future generations will inherit a lighter burden. That is the best we can hope for.

I speak to the Asian community directly: being Asian in the US is an isolating experience. We've struggled to find our place in this country's racial narrative. There is a historical disconnect and division between Asian Americans and the black community and other communities of color. But we have a duty to support and defend black lives. Despite the struggles of being Asian-American, we do not live in daily fear for our lives in the same way as the African-American community. If anything, the decades of erasure, hate, and violence that we have endured should be a reason to stop the heinous and fatal oppression of black people in America, not one to drive a wedge between us. Martin Luther King said that "a time comes when silence is betrayal." That time is now. Being silent is a betrayal, because we owe this to the black protesters who refused to be silent during the Civil Rights Movement, which led to the 1965 Voting Rights Act ending language discrimination, the Immigration and Nationality Act ending quotas on Asian immigration, and the end of bans on interracial marriages. Silence is leaving one group of people to be crushed by the weight of shouldering this burden alone. We must do better. Injustice grows in the absence of opposition. Raise your voice and show America that the silent minority is silent no more.