Episode 014: Conversations About Conversations

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Transcript

CONTENT WARNING

CATHY VO: Hey everyone! Just a heads up: There’s going to be some swearing on today’s episode.

COLD OPEN

CATHY VO: On June 4th, 2020, our team saw this video from the Netflix show, "Patriot Act":

CATHY VO: When protests over the murder of George Floyd were first spreading across the country, our team saw this video from the Netflix show, "Patriot Act":

Hasan: A black man was murdered in cold blood. And we were on the fucking sidelines, watching.

CATHY VO: That's Hasan Minhaj, the host of “Patriot Act,” giving this really passionate speech, about the responsibility of immigrant Americans to stand with protesters in defense of Black lives.

Hasan: I'm not saying we were the ones who killed George Floyd. But we have to be the ones who pull that cop off his neck. We think we're not a part of the story, but we're at the scene of the crime.

Hasan: (lowers voice) "Fine Hasan, what do you want us to do? How do you want us to support black America? I did the little black Instagram square. I had... I had the tough conversation with my family."

Hasan: Fuck that. This fake woke shit we do on IG dies in a week. We can't just knock out racism. We have to help win this thing on the cards. 

MUSIC begins

Hasan: We have to donate our money and time…

Hasan: (fading under Cathy) ...to black organizations, to all the doctors. Offer free healthcare to protesters...

CATHY VO: This 12-minute video is called "We Cannot Stay Silent About George Floyd." but as you can hear, Hasan draws a line, basically saying: Talk is cheap. Having conversations with our family members isn't enough.

CATHY VO: And he gets specific about what he thinks we need to do next:

Hasan: Number one, end qualified immunity.

Hasan: Next demilitarize, the police 

Hasan: Three: Vote out corrupt local officials.

Hasan: You have to Google when the election is... vote locally and get new officials into the system. That's on all of us.

CATHY VO: It's been six months since this summer of protest began.

CATHY VO: That Congressional bill to end qualified immunity is stuck in the Senate.

CATHY VO: Policing in America is nowhere close to being demilitarized.

CATHY VO: And the verdict is still out on whether we'll see changes in state and local governments, where these kinds of policies are decided.

CATHY VO: One thing that HAS gotten a lot of attention, especially on social media, IS a callout to have conversations with our loved ones about anti-Blackness in America.

CATHY VO: As basic as it might seem, that "tough conversation" that Hasan referred to is still incredibly difficult for a lot of people, including our own listeners.

Kaitlyn: That conversation is just like, fraught with landmines, right?

Jenny: Like I actually pause and I think to myself, " Am I really going to do this? Like, am I going to end up in a pile of shit or am I going to be able to make it on through?”

Jenny: My dad totally believes in the American dream because it worked for him. Then again, he's a doctor.

Jenny: And he doesn't understand that when you have an entire people enter the United States as slaves. I mean, that's, that's going to impact them, you know, 400 years later. I'm like, 

Jenny: That's what I need guidance in, is, like how trying to explain that the catch-all of like, "If you just work hard enough, you're going to be fine, is not true for many people."

Kaitlyn: As immigrants who came here from the Philippines in like the seventies and eighties, like they struggled. I can only imagine all the things that they had to suppress, repress, just stuff down deep within their bodies and souls to just make white people comfortable.

Kaitlyn: And that's just like the challenge of assimilation, right? Like, losing yourself, losing your identity in order to make white people comfortable.

Annie: I think when we think of bringing our families into our lives and our communities, we often hide ourselves. but in hiding yourself, you never get to be the full person that you are. 

Annie: And if we come at it from a point where we make someone else wrong, Uh, we can never make someone right, you know?

MUSIC ends

OPEN

THEME MUSIC begins

CATHY VO: This is Self Evident, where we challenge the narratives about where we're from, where we belong, and where we're going... by telling Asian America's stories.

CATHY VO: I'm your host, Cathy Erway. And as we reach out to our loved ones during what might be the least celebratory holiday season we’ve experienced, I'm finding out what it feels like to have that first conversation about racism with family members, who've never really talked about it...

Patricia: I could not walk for a week after. I had to take my dad's, like, 800 milligram ibuprofen just to, like, take care of the pain, so I was like, "Was it the weight of the racism conversation, that just bearing down on me?!"

CATHY VO: ...what kind of choices are beyond the limits of conversation...

Maya: You know, if it's feasible for you to live in a working class area and invest in the community there, do so. And don't just correlate whiteness with desirability.

CATHY VO: ...and how keeping these conversations going can give us the strength to make those choices, for a more just society.

Talisa: A huge part of our group is asking ourselves, what professional goals am I okay with just completely dismissing, because achieving said professional goal is less important to me than having the time to show up for people in my life and to show up for these movements.

SEGMENT 1: FAMILY MEETING!

CATHY VO: The first conversation I'm sharing with you today started when we saw a photo on Twitter, from Doctor Anthony Ocampo.

Anthony: Hi, I'm Anthony Ocampo. I am a writer. I'm a sociologist and a professor at Cal Poly Pomona.

THEME MUSIC fades out

CATHY VO:  The photo showed a slide presentation on his computer, titled, "How to Talk about Race: The Filipino Family Edition."

CATHY VO: It was a conversational toolkit that he put together with his cousins when they started noticing family members sharing news stories that criticized the protests for Black Lives.

CATHY VO: I called up three of the cousins from this group — Anthony, Paul, and Patricia — to hear more.

Paul: I'm Paul Ocampo and I'm the director of development at Asian Americans Advancing Justice, Asian law caucus, which is the nation's first Asian American civil rights organization, and I've been there for about eight years.

Patricia: I'm Patricia Ocampo.

THEME MUSIC ends

Patricia: I'm the baby. (laughs)

Patricia: I'm actually just a, like a clients relations manager for this,  media monitoring company…

CATHY VO: Anthony, Paul, and Patricia have a group text with their cousin Ivy, who suggested bringing the topic of racism to a video chat that their entire extended family was having to keep in touch during the pandemic.

Cathy: It sounds like you have a lot of cousins. Like how big is your extended family?

Paul: Have we counted?

Patricia: I think, maybe, I think there's like 18 cousins on my dad's side...

CATHY VO: So just the logistics of this family conversation were a lot to handle.

Anthony: we had about 30, 40 people on it. if I'm recalling correctly. And then a different generations, like seven to over 77 years old, so folks that were born here slash their parents were born here or born in the Philippines.

CATHY VO: Some family members had lived under martial law in the Philippines and spoken out against President Marcos during the People Power Movement in 1986, and they understood how police brutality had affected their lives back then.

CATHY VO: But those same family members almost never talked about these issues as Americans.

Anthony: I think it's important to note that in the Philippines, that was a place where what you say and what you write and what you believe, or what meetings you attend on a college campus, had the potential to get you killed or disappeared.

Anthony: And so, when thinking about, like, my father's and Tricia's father's generation of Filipinos, I don't necessarily fault them for being reticent to, to be so open and vocal about certain issues, because they grew up in a country where that could cost you your life.

Cathy: Tell me a little bit about how you decided to put together this presentation for your family.

Anthony: I had to remember the fact that unlike my students, my family is not required to listen to me.

Cathy: Patricia, you're giggling a little bit. What do you think of that?

Patricia: They're surrounded by people who are interested in this and our family is, they do it if they have to, but it's not, you know, their every day, "What's the weather like?" Talk. So, um,  we had to kind of tailor it more to  a general audience, you know?

Patricia: Something that would kind of inform them, but also keep them engaged.

CATHY VO: The cousins still took a teach-in approach. They led a family prayer, and set up goals for the talk.

CATHY VO: Then they presented a sort of 101 seminar on different forms of racism, the history of Black Lives Matter, and misconceptions about protesters.

CATHY VO: There were also moments encouraging family members to think about their own experiences with racism.

CATHY VO: While everyone was muted during the presentation, they were encouraged to ask questions and share their thoughts in the chat box, which was moderated by Patricia and her cousin Ivy.

MUSIC fades out

Patricia: One of the things that we want to, to establish what the presentation is, we're not trying to shame you. We're just trying to...

Cathy: Right.

Patricia: ...provide you with this information so you can come to your own conclusions about things.

Patricia: So we did decide a little bit later on like when we're completing this whole thing that we should kind of open it up to discussion if anything, to the zoom chat, which I think was very  helpful. Cause you know, especially with Asian families, you're like talking all over each other all the time. So the chat was actually very helpful because people could, you know, if they weren't comfortable using their own voices, they could use the chat to kind of describe their own experiences.

Patricia: Cause we did delve into like, "How have you experienced racism in this country?"

Cathy: Mmm.

Patricia: And people, you know, they were actually willing to share. , some of them did say it out loud and then a lot of people,  were actually very open to the chat about it.

Anthony: And that was enlightening because I feel like some of them even noted that this was the very first time that they ever spoke openly about a racial experience or racist experience that happened to them 14 years ago, so… as they were saying that it made me see like , perhaps for Filipinos, the strategy for racism has been to sweep it under the rug and pretend it didn't happen and move on.

Anthony: But what that kind of comment showed is that even if it did happen 14 years ago, that memory still is imbued with the whole lot of trauma and pain.

Paul: We had to engage them on their own sort of experiences.

Paul: "When were you passed over for promotion because of your accent?" or "When were you made fun of that accent?"

Paul: So those were the things I think that made  family members really engaged on, on the conversation.

Cathy: What happened during it that, you know, was not what you hoped?

Paul: So when we were doing this presentation , we were wondering if our cousin who's in the police force in Jersey. Was going to be joining.

Paul: He had missed a few of our Zoom calls. And so we were like, okay, he might be, there might not be there, but in the case that he's there, how do we, um, make sure that, you know, we are , talking about this issue in a way that also doesn't attack him personally.

Paul: There were moments when we showed some of the recent images of police brutality, especially towards protesters , and during the discussion, he had reasons for the brutality.

Paul: I thought we, we shouldn't be engaging, on the questions or be very defensive on the matter. But thankfully some of our own, some of our family members were able to just question him about, about his reasonings.

Patricia: They were bringing basically, like, counterarguments to his justifications of why the police acted in the way that they did , like when the elderly man was being pushed to the ground, he was trying to say like, “Oh, that policemen was scared. Like he was acting out of fear.” And we're like, "He's like this frail old man, and you have an entire army of police surrounding him. Like, how can you justify that with fear?"

Patricia: And, like, the chat was kind of going off while he was saying it. 

Anthony: And I wanted to acknowledge that my cousin's thought process about these issues , is not as one dimensional as, like, one may think. 

Anthony: We've had, for example, a really in-depth conversation about a recent case involving Peter Liang in, in New York. The cop who shot into the stairwell and ended up killing an innocent Black man.

Anthony: And so, um, he had a very complicated view on that. And in the end, you know, he, he couldn't throw support for Peter Liang even though, you know, the Asian Americ — well, Chinese American community was trying to say like, "Hey, like how come he's not getting away with the same stuff that the white cops get away with?"

Anthony: Um, but because you know, it just, I wanted to acknowledge that, like I know that he can think about these issues in a complicated fashion

Anthony: And, you know, to his credit he's, he's actually like invited me to, to ask him questions and, and talk about, like, the job.

MUSIC begins

CATHY VO: That cousin didn’t change his views during the family call. But the goal of this conversation wasn't to persuade. It was to keep a door open when Facebook walls and group chats seemed to be closed for genuine conversations about race.

CATHY VO: And often, the biggest hurdle people are overcoming when they open up that door is just feeling confident enough to try. That's true even for an educator like Anthony.

Anthony: I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the fact that going into this convo, I was very nervous.

Anthony: You know, I teach for a living and I, speak around the country, everywhere from like, predominantly white, super red States, to diverse places like San Francisco.

Anthony: And I don't get that nervous, but with my family, I was super, super nervous, and after the convo, I totally passed out.

Cathy: Patricia, How did you feel?

Patricia: I don't know if it was because of this talk, but I was having back spasms throughout the morning. in the middle of our presentation, my back just... it felt like I threw it out.

Patricia: I had to turn off my camera, ‘cause I was kind of, like, writhing in pain. (laughs) I'm still, like, trying to stay engaged with our more conservative cousins.

MUSIC ends

Patricia: I was like, "No, that's not right," but like, chatting...

Cathy: So Anthony passed out right, after you're writhing in pain during this is like really physical stuff.

Patricia: It was so weird. I could not walk for a week after I had to take my dad's like. 800 milligram ibuprofen just to like take care of the pain, so I was like, "Was it the weight of this racism conversation, just bearing down on me?!"

Patricia: I think it actually helped though to calm me down. Cause I think I might've been a lot more aggressive and angrier, had I not been distracted with physical pain.

Cathy: Wow.

Paul: I think like Anthony, I was. Extremely exhausted. after that, I just , I needed a drink.

Paul: Like, I drank before the presentation. And then I needed five drinks afterwards just to calm my nerves. I've never felt so exhausted physically, but actually really charged  emotionally and in some positive ways too, I was just, like, “We did it. We actually were brave enough to hold the space.”

CATHY VO: Holding that space, stopping a conversation from breaking down into a bitter fight, IS challenging.

CATHY VO: Asian Americans across the country told us they weren't sure if these conversations would make a difference, if they would tear the family apart... or if they even had the nerve to try.

CATHY VO: When the Ocampo cousins presented their toolkit at the Filipino American National Historical Society, they saw these same feelings of apprehension.

Anthony: we essentially gave a narration of how we thought about the talk and what we did and how it went.

Anthony: And then at the end, we were like, raise your hand. If you're going to have this convo with your family and Trisha, do you remember how many hands went up?

Patricia: I just remember it wasn't that many.

Patricia: I think we had pretty good, realistic expectations that nothing would be changed overnight.

Patricia: And, you know, my dad's, he watches Fox news a lot, so I understand where the person or the people who are like, we can't change them with conversation. 

Patricia: I think if anything that we've learned from this is that you should at least make an effort and trying, and if it doesn't, you know, post successfully or the way you want to, don't be so hard on yourself. Like don't carry their weight with you.

Anthony: And I also understand just from being a queer person, having grown up in this same family, that progress is possible, right? And I also know that it's not always the facts that are going to be the things that change people's minds.

Anthony: Like I just imagined if I were to rewind back in time to moments where I wasn't out or, or even thinking about coming out.

Anthony: If I were to imagine myself, like bombarding my family with a bunch of factoids, I don't think that would have necessarily changed folks in the same way of just living openly with my queerness, you know. And so I imagine that in the future, we've already established that race and racism and racial inequality is an issue that's important to the four of us. And at least people like know now.

Anthony: My mom, she's an avid Facebooker, and I was actually kind of surprised to see that she was posting about police brutality on her page, which is something that I wouldn't anticipate her doing.

Anthony: My partner's, sister, for example , she actually went to a protest in LA after that; something about the presentation really ignited her to, to initiate conversations with her girlfriends about black lives matter, about police brutality, and so, whereas before that could have been a topic that would, fall to the wayside because you don't want to quote unquote, "make people feel uncomfortable," now she was the one who was bringing it up and actually having a language to talk about it. That's... that's a success.

Anthony: 'Cause the general default is that people don't talk about race and see it as a taboo topic and avoid it at all costs.

Cathy: So, everybody's stressing the importance of uncomfortable conversations; why is that discomfort an important goal to have?

Patricia: Well, I like, read a lot of spiritual stuff on Instagram. So a lot of the things that are, like, reiterated, are, “Wherever you find discomfort, that's where you need to find growth.”

Patricia: Like when I talked to my dad, I am very uncomfortable about it, but I think it's also a reflection of where your values lie.

Anthony: This moment has enlightened me to the idea that I am pretty used to making my life as comfortable as possible when it comes to who I decide to follow on Facebook or unfollow, who I decided to engage with, with Twitter.

Anthony: And it almost makes me miss a time when we didn't have all of these. Social media apps, or the internet wasn't what it was today, because I felt like I was in where more conversations, where I had to practice proving my point, as opposed to just curating an audience that would be inclined to agree with me.

Anthony: I feel like we have a model to talk about complicated things, and it's a start.

MUSIC begins

Anthony: And it makes me less afraid to address these topics that are causing harm, not just in our society, but also in, in our own family, in ways that perhaps folks are just not as open about.

Anthony: Being able to understand what makes people in my family or in my community tick... that doesn't go away just because the issues that are on the news change.

Anthony: At the end of the day, like my family is always going to be my family.

SEGMENT 2: THE CONVERSATION GAP

CATHY VO: When people say "uncomfortable conversations about racism," I think what often comes to mind is a dinnertime chat with that uncle who voted for Trump.

CATHY VO: It’s easy to think of ourselves as educated people who live in diverse places and need to show other, less informed people what they're missing.

CATHY VO: But some of the worst violence, discrimination, and denial of opportunity against Black people takes place in diverse cities like New York, Los Angeles, and of course, Minneapolis.

CATHY VO: And the racist boundaries that descended from slavery, like redlining, housing discrimination, and school segregation, shaped how generations of Black and brown Americans have grown up across the country.

CATHY VO: It's also shaped how the rest of us pursue our dreams within those boundaries.

Maya: I think that one thing that is true across many groups is that many of us have built our existence in the U.S. off of anti-blackness, and as, like, Toni Morrison says, you know, like off of the backs of Black people.

CATHY VO: That's Maya Bhardwaj, who just finished her master's dissertation on queer modes of solidarity between South Asian and Black Activists in the U.S. and the U.K.

Maya: I work as a community organizer, facilitator and trainer. I'm also an artist and musician. My work spans across racial economic, gender and, and queer justice.

CATHY VO: I hopped on the phone with Maya and her friend, Ragen Wingate. They both grew up in the metro Detroit area, in Michigan.

Ragen: My name is Ragen Wingate.

Ragen: I have a master's in public administration from Wayne State University. Uh, the last five years I've worked in the mental health sphere, working with people with autism, providing access to services and treatment for individuals on the spectrum.

CATHY VO: Ragen was actually a little surprised to hear about the various guides and toolkits that Asian Americans were creating to have conversations about racism with their families.

MUSIC ends

Ragen: I've heard of them mentioned, but like what really is it? Like, is it just like a conversation piece to their families to say like, “This is what black folks in this country are, like, going through?” Or, like, what really is a toolkit, you know, a South Asian toolkit for families?

MUSIC ends

Maya: Yeah. And I think, like, that question is really important, right? Because there are guides for how to have conversations with our families about anti-Blackness.

Maya: But if we're not like organizing in our own spaces and if we're not actually building relationships, with Black folks or, or even, you know, moving money towards Black communities or, or other marginalized communities, those conversations are ultimately hollow.

CATHY VO: Maya recently wrote an article for Overachiever Magazine, challenging Indian Americans to go beyond showing solidarity with Black Americans on social media.

CATHY VO: She was writing from experiences going back to her teenage years, when she and Ragen met at Groves — which is a majority white public high school in a wealthy suburb of Detroit.

Maya: We bonded because actually we used to sometimes sit together in the library, like over lunch to study and I would make these mixed tapes with like all of the, yeah. All these top 40…

Ragen: Limewire?

Maya: Yes, absolutely, Limewire, because, uh, I was all about it.

Maya: And so I had this mixtape with like a lot of, I think, like Aliyah and Ashanti and —

Ragen: Murder Inc.

Maya: Um, yeah, a lot of Murder Inc. (laughs)

Ragen: We owe Ja Rule and Ashanti, like our friendship, honestly, Maya.

Ragen: Oh man.

Maya: They didn't fare as well, but we figured, well, our bond transcended theirs,

Ragen: Yes.

CATHY VO: They also bonded because they were among the few South Asian and Black students in honors and AP classes at the time.

Maya: I mean, I remember really vividly how segregated it was. There was definitely a huge intertwining between class and race. Um,

Maya: I would say the majority of the black students at our, at our high school were, came from working class families and the vast majority of white students came from quite wealthy families.

Maya: And that made a big difference in terms of people's ability to interact in, in class or in after school activities or things like that. And even like the social spaces were really segregated too.

CATHY VO: This segregation at Maya and Ragen's high school was part of the deeper history of segregation in the Detroit area.

Ragen: I know my family migrated to from the South to the North because of the opportunities. And so black people were actually able to own houses and have like a, a well-deserved like, functional life, you know, so I think that was an, another notion, like... 

Ragen: Detroit was a city of people who, who had money, who were working class and, um, with more people like working in the plants, they started moving into like areas that were mostly white areas, and that's kind of like what incited, like the race wars in the sixties.

Maya: Yeah. It's about white people establishing dominance and trying to decimate any space where Black people can live good lives. And that's like the story of red lining in Detroit.

Maya: People refer to it as the race riots in Detroit, in the sixties, but they were not race riots. They were racial terror by white folks against black communities for the purpose of destroying black communities, and they were done also by the police. And were facilitated by the police, which was a white police force and still is.

MUSIC begins

CATHY VO: There is a lot of reading you can do about this. The legacies of anti-Black policies and violence in Detroit stretch back to the New Deal, and long before.

CATHY VO: And these legacies showed up in Maya and Ragen's lives throughout their choices for school.

CATHY VO: Decades of white flight from the City of Detroit had left its people underserved — and its public schools poorly equipped to educate a majority Black population.

CATHY VO: Ragen's parents moved to the suburbs specifically to get her into a better school.

Ragen: So that was a decision that my parents and my family made because there was not enough resources in Detroit to, you know, to, to, to function.

It's, it's terrible.

CATHY VO: Families in Detroit who couldn’t make that kind of move would have to take other steps to get the education they couldn’t have in their own neighborhoods.

CATHY VO: They could pay tuition to enroll from outside the district, or some might have moved in with a relative who lived inside the district.

CATHY VO: We had a hard time digging up precise data about Maya and Ragen’s time at Groves, but these kinds of choices have been made plenty of times by families trying to do better for their kids.

CATHY VO: And the result of this inequality was that Black students, whether from in the district or not, faced social pressure and scrutiny.

CATHY VO: From 2004 to 2008, Black student enrollment in Groves fell twice as much as white student enrollment.

Maya: That number was, was hugely diminished. And that wasn't because of, like, dropout rates or anything, it was because students were removed, or for some reason, were not able to continue in school with us.

MUSIC ends

Maya: It felt like there was sort of witch hunting, so to speak of, of black students under the allegations of not living within the district, which is something that absolutely did not happen to white students and also didn't happen to me.

Cathy: Wow. Ragen, can you tell me a little bit more about this?

Ragen: Absolutely, so...

Ragen: I really do believe that the, the kids that were obviously black, that who were targeted were kids on, like, athletic teams. I think a lot of families were unhappy that, you know, these black kids from Detroit are coming in and they're the star athletes and they're getting all this credibility and no, you know, notoriety, for winning for our teams. 

Ragen: And they felt like these people aren't even supposed to be here and complained.

Ragen: So I think that's really where it stemmed from.  I, I know it was a lot of like, just hearsay, hearsay and kind of talking of like --

Cathy: Yeah. What was the hearsay though? Like what were the rumors you guys were hearing?

Maya: I definitely remember hearing that white parents were following black kids home and like recording them. And this was back when, like, people didn't have phones that had cameras on them. So I remember somebody telling me a story of like a white parent following a black student home with, like, a video camera to try and prove that they didn't live in-district. But like, I couldn't confirm who that happened to, you know, I just remember like hearing that.

Ragen: And I, I would hear that like, so we had this like security officer,  who would come in and I don't even know what he really did. From what my understanding, he was really racist and he would just go around and follow all the black kids home who are like on these teams to see if they actually lived in the district or, you know, if they were like using their family's address who lived in the district to get an education and to come to the school.

Ragen: I remember hearing that people had to like come into their  leasing office and, like, actually prove that, you know, they're supposed to be in that apartment or they had to show it to the district or something happened, where they made it more difficult to get into our public schools.

Cathy: So what kind of actions will be really needed to change the system, which led to what you guys experienced at Groves?

Maya: It's not just about interpersonal acts of racism, right? Like, of course it is disgusting that, um, white administrators or white parents chose to accuse black students of not living in district, but that is a product of the systemic racism that's built into the way that education, housing jobs, like everything in Detroit and in America as a whole is, is set up. Like the system is set up for Black folks to, to fail.

Maya: The educational system in the U.S. is oriented around taxpayer dollars. And that's based on, on districts, which are extremely segregated by race and class.

Ragen: Yep. Absolutely.

Maya: One act that folks who have some level of disposable income and have the ability to make choices about where they live and where they enroll in school is: don't just live in rich white areas and enroll your kids in the public school system. You know, if it's feasible for you to live in a working class area and invest in the community there, do so. And don't just correlate whiteness with desirability.

Maya: I think that's really complicated, right? Like it's not my place to tell anybody where they should live or what system they should put their kids into. And I wonder what choices I will make when I, when I have children?

Ragen: I definitely agree with Maya. 

Ragen: I think when you make friends and you, and you befriend people who are different than you, that's when your perspectives change.

Ragen: I know I have friends who willingly decided to buy a house in Detroit, just to be a part of that community. They're teachers, and so they work in the school district and they live in that school district.

Ragen: In high school we felt powerless.  I don't think that we felt like we had a voice and you know, especially with our community, in the black community, we don't want to put ourselves as like, "Oh, they're the angry black family," or they always, you know, it's like, "You're the problem, family, if you say something."

Ragen: So I think a lot of times we just felt like this is how it is, and there was no way to change that.

Ragen: Now, with, like, social media, and just being more aware of racism and anti-blackness, I love to see that we're having these conversations… It's just, I want to see the fruit of it. And I think that's kinda what I'm excited to see in the future.

Maya: I want to echo that and add that if these conversations aren't  happening with strategy, then like Ragen said, the fruit is, is not going to be borne, so to speak. 

Maya: Like it might make us feel good, but it doesn't recognize the different things that exist in each of our different communities and those structures of power and privilege and oppression there

Maya: And so we have to figure out a way that emphasizes like our shared stake in, in racial justice and liberation in the U.S.

MUSIC begins

Maya: And I think like Grace Lee Boggs, with, with her husband, Jimmy Boggs, did that really, really well, and I think that's why we see it in Detroit. Because there are those models of like, what does Asian American solidarity look like? And not just, Oh, I am an ally in your struggle, but like, we are in struggle together against a shared target.

SEGMENT 3: A CLUB THAT WOULD HAVE ME AS A MEMBER

CATHY VO:  In Brooklyn, where most of our team lives, one of those shared targets — police brutality — revealed itself as soon as protesters began marching for Black Lives.

CATHY VO: On May 29, less than an hour into the first big Brooklyn protest, New York police officers began handcuffing peaceful protesters with zip ties and beating people with night sticks. They pepper sprayed two Black elected officials. They followed protesters on their march for hours, and shoved a 20-year-old woman onto the pavement, so hard that she had to go to the emergency room for a concussion.

CATHY VO: It was a moment when non-Black protesters experienced some of what Black communities have known since slave patrols were created as some of the earliest forms of police in the U.S.

Talisa: I just felt so viscerally, enraged and appalled at how our city was handling it, how our mayor was handling it, the way that protesters were being treated.

CATHY VO: That's Talisa Chang, one of the founders of our show.

CATHY VO: Around the time that the Ocampos were trying to start new conversations about racism and police brutality with their extended family, she was also having a weekly family call with her parents, who are South African Chinese American.

CATHY VO: This wasn't a situation where she had to convince people that Black Lives Matter. But she was looking for support for the kinds of action that she wanted to take, and for the kind of society she wanted to help create.

Talisa: I remember trying to tell them about it and trying to talk about what it felt like every day, and I was just breaking down like crying .

Talisa: Like, “Defund the police,” that felt so obvious, I think, living here.

Talisa: You know, I have to support people in the streets. I have to support bail funds. I have to do, you know, support jail support, but I also have to know what I'm doing and know why I'm doing it.

CATHY VO: Talisa saw an Instagram account that spelled out some steps on how to start a discussion around the book, "Are Prisons Obsolete?" by Angela Davis — and she decided to bring this idea for a weekly reading and discussion to the family.

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Talisa: There's a lot of talk about meeting people where they're at, like starting with, you know, how they think about things and going from there, and I think at, at this point in my life, I, I also really want people to meet me where I'm at, especially the people that are close to me in my life.

Talisa: And I was like, “Well, I could do this book club thing on my own, cause I'm interested in it and participate and then turn around and try to talk to my friends and family about what I'm learning, and try to bring them along on my own journey” — towards, you know, thinking of myself as, as an abolitionist.

Talisa: Or we could all do it together! And I can cut out that step. Um, and I can just kind of create the conditions in my life where the people closest to me, like my friends and my family, um, are learning along with me and that we can actually dig into this stuff together.

Cathy: Was it hard to get everyone's buy-in?

Talisa: I had already, at that point, convinced them to start funding the local bail funds in their, in their areas, and, you know, they were already sort of getting on board with what I was asking them to do, um, from, like, an acting perspective, but…

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Talisa: ...but I think everyone was like, yeah, let's, let's do it. It's six weeks. Let's do it.

Talisa: And so we actually got, um, my parents, Thomas's mom and his two sisters, her sister's fiance, and then a group of five or six of our other friends to join.

CATHY VO: The group met every week, reading a chapter or two at a time... and when they had finished "Are Prisons Obsolete?" everybody wanted to keep going.

CATHY VO: They started reading "How We Show Up," by Mia Birdsong. It's a book that challenges readers to let go of American ideals of individualism and personal achievement, in favor of interdependence and being deeply in touch with your community.

CATHY VO: Our producer James and I hopped on the phone with Talisa, to unpack what she was learning from months of reading and discussing ideas of abolition.

Talisa: The North star of the discussion group is, “How do we be better actors? How do we connect the dots between what our life's work is and what we know about the world?”

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James: Well... the dynamic of people being activated and brought into these conversations through social media, also taps into something else that I think has been happening within Asian American conversations, particularly online, which is there just seems to be this really specific focus on how guilty we should feel...

James: I think a lot of people focus on the Tou Thao photo and the George Floyd video because it has this kind of viral, iconic, essentializing, like "Here's the Asian role in this."

James: Anyone can say, "That is a bad person. Asians should not be like that." But that's kind of easy. And it's just more of a way of making yourself feel better,

instead of really zeroing in on, "Why do we kill so many Black people in this country?"

Cathy: Right.

Talisa: Yeah.

James: There's a big focus on speaking up, and I think this is actually particular to Asian Americans, because the racialized experience of Asian Americans is that you're silenced and, and made invisible, so one of the phrases that I see and here a lot is just this language around, "You can't be silent. You have to say something, you have to say something. If you're being silent, you're being complicit."

James: And I just wanted to get your thoughts on that before I insert my own opinion. (laughs)

Cathy: I feel like speaking up, I mean, it either could be like a really baseline sort of baby step for people who aren't politically active at all to kind of, sort of dip their feet into the water and could be an entry point to explore more things, if they're willing to say that black lives matter, you know, and if that's where you're, you know, meeting us then cool.

Cathy: Or I, I think that oftentimes, um, there was a lot of fatigue over the overuse of, you know, brands using these signifiers. It's really a PR and marketing move and I think that a lot of people latched onto that, and saw themselves as a brand basically, and kind of just signaling and posturing. And of course we saw a lot of people and brands get into trouble for being in businesses, small businesses that, you know, signaled support for black lives matters, protesters, defunding the police, all these things that they were then sort of accused of not really being behind in their entirety.

Cathy: So I think that, I think that it led to a lot of good discussions for better, for worse. I think that it unpacked. I mean, the fact that we're talking about this, I think  the pressure for people to speak up did more, more good than bad.

Talisa: I think for me, it, like, remains to be see. Like, I think speaking up in some ways, when we talk about performance, like it's kind of the equivalent of those like safety pins. Do you remember safety pins? Do you remember that?

Cathy: Safety pins? What safety pins?

James: I remember the safety pins.

Talisa: Aiiieeeeeeee!

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CATHY VO: OK, so I actually had to look this up. Apparently, right after Trump won the presidential election in 2016, there was a social media trend where people put safety pins on their clothes to show that they were an ally to minorities.

CATHY VO: Just like the viral "Black Squares" on social media that Hasan Minhaj criticized on his show, it came under fire as an example of virtue signaling that doesn't improve the lives of people who are suffering.

CATHY VO: Anyway, I don't think we got into this to tell anyone that they're doing the wrong thing. It's more that we wanted to answer this question, about what our role — not just our opinion — is going to be, as time goes on.

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Talisa: It's not that silence is complicity, it's like stasis is complicity, and like these big systems, capitalism, you know, the carceral state, they're not going to get solved in this year or in the next four years, right?

Talisa: So what's our place right now in this world? In this timeline? How are we going to contribute to that thinking and to that, to that forward momentum?

Talisa: That's not just going to be about speaking out. That's going to be about actually considering and having specific and thoughtful ideas about what actually is wrong, what actually is the problem, what actually needs to get done... 

Talisa: And you have to have lots of conversations to do that. With yourself and with others. And we can at least start with our friends and family, because hopefully they're going to be around with us for the long haul too.

James:  I think there's something which not a lot of people say out loud, which is: A lot of what would be required for us to make a big impact on the systems — and by systems I'm specifically thinking of racist housing, education, and police systems — it cuts right to the core of what a lot of second generation Asian American immigrants in the US today came up on.

James: When I grew up, my parents were real estate agents. So it was very, like, explicit in the conversations that we had early on, uh, that success meant, “Stay away from where black people live. And when Mexicans start moving in, then you better get out of there, because your property value is going to go down and then your school's gonna get bad.”

James: And then all this stuff, it was just like, nothing was masked, because it was just their job to take advantage of this very intentional racist system to benefit me.

James: And. I — I get frustrated when people aren't willing to talk as much about, “What are we actually willing to do,” right?

James: I have friends now who we all moved to New York. We're gentrifiers, and then we were here in our twenties and early thirties. And a lot of them said, "Cool, that was fun. Now I'm just going to move back closer to where I grew up with my family, and then find a good place to raise my kids and put them in a good school."

James: Like we've just doomed an entire generation. I don't want to be too extreme, but it's like that one decision and that centering of, "Can the next generation have a better life?" It costs other people things in America.

James: You know, the things we always hear, "You risked everything, sacrificed everything for us, so we could have a better life"... you want to carry on that part of the story, right? But I think it's often hard to reconcile that with what we have to do to other people in this country, to, to keep that vision of ourselves alive...

James: …’cause, like, that's how our system works. It takes away from black communities.

James: Am I making sense?

Cathy: Yeah.

Talisa: This is something we talk about in our discussion group!

Talisa: Going back to the topic of “How We Show Up” — this is going to be like a plug for Mia Birdsong's book — what I love about this book and what I love about what it's doing for our discussion group is it's talking about personally, what are the drawbacks of pursuing an American dream?

Talisa: You know, I think what this book does is illuminate how the desire to hoard, the desire to have success, you know, the desire to prioritize a certain goal of, of wealth, of ownership, of nuclear family status…

Talisa: ...isn't just bad for Black people or for society. It's, it's bad for us personally, that when we focus on these things, these pursuits, that we are actually like hollowing out our lives and  not creating the space for like connection and love and joy and healing and community and shared experience and like, like abundance.

James: It's like, you can't even care about other people and work for other people's well being and our own collective growth... until you're done working and you've made enough money.

Talisa: YES!

James: And you, like, pay an absurd amount of rent, and then also you don't sleep. And recognizing this doesn't solve any of those problems, but —

Talisa: Oh, this is a constant theme in our, in our discussion group.

Talisa: A huge part of our group is asking ourselves, what are we taking off of our plates? What professional goals am I okay with just completely dismissing, because achieving said professional goal is less important to me than having the time to show up for people in my life and to show up for these movements.

Talisa: Because I can't have it all and I don't have unlimited time and energy  and it sucks that we all have to work so much because that is what is also preventing us from organizing and doing all these things, and so that's something that we talk about a lot, and in our group we talk a lot about like, “Why is my goal to like hoard money and time? Why is my goal to be successful at this XYZ thing?” Is that actually more important than being able to be there, when someone in my family is having a mental health crisis and we don't want to call the cops and we need to figure out what to do? Which is, like, something that we had to deal with this summer. 

Talisa: So... these things can be found in conversation, I hope! I don't know...

James: I think you're pointing out something, which is the point of having conversations isn't that like, some people know what's up and then can tell other people, and then we can all get on board, but it's like, we actually, in many cases may not even know how to talk about it. And so it sounds like having a one time a week discussion where you can fuck up and you can be ignorant, and just know that it's going to take a lot of time, sounds really powerful.

James: Because then it's not even about the book, right?

Talisa: Absolutely.

James: Like you finished the book, but then you have this connection with other people.

James: The doing, the things you actually could do, have always been there. 

James: But I think the reality is, it is actually really hard to just do things. And so maybe a way around that is just, don't take it all on, on yourself.

James: Try to make it more of a community based activity or a group activity. Then the doing, when it comes up, can be a lot easier. And it sounds like you've already experienced some of that.

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Talisa: Yeah. And I think for me, it's recognizing that sometimes there's a distinction between places in my life, you know, my work life, my freelance jobs and my organizing life, but that maybe there doesn't have to be as many distinctions, and that may be this kind of thinking can bleed throughout the rest of my life and bleed into my relationships in a really good way.

Talisa: And that all the people in this discussion group are going to take a little piece of that space and thinking with them, as they move through their circles.

Talisa: Building, like a new way of moving through the world, together.

CATHY VO: This episode was produced by James Boo, Harsha Nahata, and Julia Shu.

CATHY VO: We were edited by Julia Shu and mixed by Timothy Lou Ly. Our theme music is by Dorian Love.

CATHY VO: Thanks to the Ocampos, Maya, Ragen, and Talisa for joining the show.

CATHY VO: And I want to give a special shoutout to Jack Shu, one of our biggest supporters on Patreon.

CATHY VO: If you want to join Jack in supporting our mission and making our work sustainable, please become a member at patreon.com/selfevidentshow.

CATHY VO: You can also make a one-time donation to support the show at our web site, selfevidentshow.com.

CATHY VO: Self Evident is a Studiotobe production, made with support from our listeners.

CATHY VO: I’m Cathy Erway. Let’s talk soon.

CATHY VO: Until then, keep sharing Asian America’s stories.

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