I do not want your sad reacts and your heart emojis. I do not want your pity or your thoughts and prayers. I want to change the concrete conditions that leads to violence in the first place.

I started college completely enamored with Asian American identity politics. I spent my days thinking about media representation, about the stereotypes flung at me constantly, about feeling extremely out of place in lots of public spaces. My entire day was filled with the complicated sorrow of diaspora and loss—loss of my mother tongue, loss of a community I once knew when growing up in China, loss of what could have been had I been more “Chinese” with my parents. I was sad almost all the time. And every time someone threw a racial slur at me or joked about my culture, I grew more and more defeated; I spiraled into a state of utter confusion and anger. “How could people be so mean?,” I would ask myself constantly. My goal in life was to prove that I was not the flattened down Asian they pieced together based on racist depictions in movies. Suddenly, my loudness, my bad-at-math-ness, my I-actually-say-y'all-ness became weapons I would wield just to prove a point. A defense, as I flung my metaphorical sword into the void. It was so fucking exhausting, not because it was part of this grand, admirable fight against white supremacy but because identity politics is not a productive way to fight against racism to begin with.

I originally greeted this idea with a lot of resistance. I felt hurt, invalidated, and completely betrayed. My entire life, I have lived with the weight of being an Asian American, and now I am faced with the confrontation that centering my identity as such can be a hindrance to solving the very problems I was trying to defeat? My trauma, the violences that I had lived through, the hours I had spent sobbing to myself because of racism, they screamed back so loudly until I finally pieced together (with the help of numerous people, numerous books, numerous reflections) that liberalism is a wasteland for revolutionary politics. If I was truly interested in changing my material conditions—those factors and circumstances in life that immediately and viscerally impact my (and other's) lives—I started to understand that I could not rely on subtle asian traits and trauma porn to make a direct impact.

This realization came slowly, but there were many parts that actively contributed to it:

1) I reevaluated my goals. I think that spending time thinking about identity, culture, and heritage is important; in the world we live in now, people are massively alienated, lonely, and lost. Capitalism does not provide a framework where we feel confident in who we are (re: our strong attraction to personality tests, to the emotional attachments we form with fictional television characters, to coming-of-age stories that romanticize and Disney-ify our experiences). So to spend dedicated time and to be intentional about reflecting can be life-changing and life-giving. For a very long time, I conflated my goals to simply learn more about my life and myself with goals to dismantle racism. There are definitely parts that overlap but they are not at all the same.

2) I was introduced to the idea that race is not real, but racism is. This doesn't mean that I completely ignore race and everything that comes with it; it doesn't mean that my “Asianness” is suddenly inconsequential. Rather, it shifts the framework with how I perceive the world to one that is built on racialization. Race is a social construct: we see this in the way that race has changed definitions multiple times legally, the ways in which race was used to brutalize populations of people, how race science was done in order to justify the continued promotion of white supremacy, and so on. People don't call me a chink because I am Asian—there is nothing natural about my skin color or my genes or my biology that attracts and forces people to yell out slurs at me. People call me a chink because of the way they racialize me, because of the racism that has been deeply embedded in so many systems our society operates under.

3) I had patient, kind friends who would help me throughout this process. It's so fucking confusing. They would consistently support me, answer my questions, share resources with me, and bully me (tough love!). None of us are free until all of us are free.

4) I realized that all I was doing was complaining. I had no solutions in mind, no alternative future, no foundation to even begin brainstorming what that would look like. I feel moved by Kwame Ture's words, which I learned through Mariame Kaba's newest book, We Do This 'Til We Free Us—”When you see people call themselves revolutionary, always talking about destroying, destroying, destroying, but never talking about building or creating, they're not revolutionary. They do not understand the first thing about revolution. It's creating.” Racism is so fucking horrific: to complain is oftentimes to heal, to grow, to process. But in order to make true change and minimize (and eventually eliminate) the harms it causes, to be revolutionary, I started thinking about what world I wanted to create and orchestrating the beginnings of actually executing that in my life.

5) The cracks of identity politics started getting bigger and bigger as I questioned what even is the Asian community. At first, I found so much power in calling myself an Asian American. But it soon started to wear off, as I wanted to acknowledge unique experiences in my life . . . so I started to find power in calling myself a Chinese American. But alas! I grew up in the South, and my material conditions lended me a different life than other Chinese Americans from California, or Kansas, or Texas, or even three hours away also in Georgia. So, Chinese American became Chinese American from the South. And slowly, but surely, Chinese American from the South became Chinese American woman from the South because it was (and is) impossible to separate my gender from my race (or, in other words, the ways in which I'm racialized from the ways in which I'm gendered). But the more specific I got with my identity, the more I started to feel detached from the “Asian experience” and the “Asian community” that was so widely touted online, through media, through essentializing stories. If I don't know how to play mahjong, does that somehow mean I'm any less Asian? If my parents actually don't care that much about wearing shoes inside the house, does that invalidate my entire cultural upbringing? The more Asian was defined, the more not-Asian was defined. This was not my liberation.

6) I learned about communism! This is an ongoing process. But learning about the intricate relationship between capitalism and racism helped dramatically. In Fred Hampton's speech, Power Anywhere Where There's People, he states, “We've got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don't fight racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say you don't fight capitalism with no Black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism. We ain't gonna fight no reactionary pigs who run up and down the street being reactionary; we're gonna organize and dedicate ourselves to revolutionary political power and teach ourselves the specific needs of resisting the power structure, arm ourselves, and we're gonna fight reactionary pigs with international proletarian revolution. That's what it has to be.” I started to understand how capitalism UPHOLDS racism—because the boot-licking mentality of just-work-really-hard-and-accept-failure-as-a-reflection-of-the-self-rather-than-literally-everything-else is a direct cause of poverty, of homelessness, of incarceration, of exploitation. So to dismantle racism also means to dismantle capitalism, to fight for communism. The western empire does not want that; in fact, it has a vested interest in shutting down communist movements (for a very thorough review of how this happens and where, read Killing Hope by William Blum).

7) I started practicing patience with myself (and then, with others). It was very easy for me to feel guilty, or even angry, for not having had these “radical” ideas earlier, or for not recognizing the violence that the United States promotes more clearly. But, this is expected! The American education system did absolutely nothing to teach us history in a way that doesn't promote a very specific vision of the world. Virtually almost everything I've consumed growing up subscribes to maintaining a status quo that promotes the United States rather than critically challenging what this country has done and continues to do.

8) I started reading so much. (Let me know if you'd ever like to read something together!)

All of this is to say, yesterday really pushed me to my fucking limits. I spent the majority of the day chatting with friends and having not-super-close-but-well-intentioned friends reach out to me to check in on me. In between those conversations, I doom-scrolled through all my apps and felt so much anger. I see articles from the NYT questioning why there is so much anti-Asian hate right next to their endless stream of articles that paint China to be evil and scary. I see Instagram infographics being shared all throughout social media calling to #StopAsianHate, completely divorcing the “hate” from ongoing destruction of Asian people organized by the US military and its appendages. I see people talking about the increase in Asian hate crimes without acknowledging that the outcome of hate crimes typically involves a criminalization, incarceration, and the maintenance of the “justice” system that has caused the very problems people are trying to flee. Rest in power Yang Song.

These incidents do not exist in a vacuum. This did not happen only because the shooter was having a “bad day,” but ALSO because the shooter was socialized into a society that is committed to the destruction of communism, a society that has decades and decades of racism woven into its history (re: literally all of Asian American history), a society that hypersexualizes Asian women. There are so many moving parts to the power that the western empire holds.

No part of the shooting is a coincidence. It's not just a random occurrence that the majority of the victims were Asian women. It's not just a random occurrence that the shooter was a white male who vocally and proudly shared his beliefs that Chinese people were to blame for COVID. It's not whatsoever a random occurrence that the shooter made an automatic assumption that the massage parlor was representative of a “temptation he wanted to eliminate”. Esther K of Red Canary Song shared yesterday, “The women are de facto being seen as sex workers and being scapegoated as such. Removing the anti-sex-work component really removes the crux of what this specific kind of racism is about: the fetishization of Asian women’s bodies, the objectification of their bodies and the assumption that Asian women are obviously going to be providing sexual services at massage parlors. The conflation of massage parlors and sex workers without any nuance is very specific to anti-Asian racism against Asian women.”

Talk to raging-liberal-identity-politics-believing-past-me, and she would have been so utterly broken, in a way that revolved around questions of, “How could this have happened?” and “I can't believe this is something that did happen in my lifetime.” Talk to me now, and I will tell you that I am devastated, so heartbroken. But I feel extremely empowered by my ability to say, “I know exactly why this happened” & “This has happened long before my lifetime and will continue past my lifetime if we do not address its concrete origins.” Mark Tseng-Putterman tweeted yesterday about this in words better than I can string together. He wrote, “It is US imperialism which frames Asian women as open to militarized sexual conquest. The US military remains a central purveyor of sexual violence in Asia.” Given the large history of sexual assault, military violence, and power dynamics enacted by the West onto the countries they were actively fighting, this incident is no longer lost in the abstraction that liberalism offers. It is clear as day to why it happened, but that means that once we see that, we are one step closer to being able to destroy it. The society we live in was not created inherently with racism, with white supremacy, with capitalism, with misogyny; all of those things were constructed, so all of those things can be torn to shreds.

I understand the pain that comes with living in this current world. I am so fucking sad. I am so fucking angry. But I refuse to reduce violence to something I will mourn without action. I refuse to hear about Delaina Ashley Yaun, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Julie Park, Hyeon Jeong Park, and Paul Andre Michels and repost on my social media just to shake my head in disbelief and move on. Noname recently tweeted, “folks ask me why i post 'sad shit' 24/7 and i always wonder why they're not more curious about why so much sad shit exists? or how we can change it? i know it can be triggering but how can we address/eliminate it if folks refuse to see it? not trying to antagonize, just curious”.

I know that there is so much pain and suffering in this world; I hope we can all take whatever actions we need to process, heal, and comfort ourselves. Sometimes it is best to decompress, to unplug and reflect in the way that brings the most peace. Sometimes, that means not engaging. That's okay, but I hope whenever we're ready to take that next step (which does happen at different times for everyone!), it means the looking at the sad shit and doing whatever is necessary to to make sure it doesn't exist anymore. To me, this week, the sad shit is the baggage and weight that comes with being racialized as an Asian woman (and more so, as an Asian SWer). And to me, this week, the way to START making sure that baggage and weight doesn't exist anymore is to remember that identity politics cannot save us. People power and the continuous commitment to changing material conditions can.