Can one understand another person's fear? Today I realized I've been failing even where I thought I was doing okay. After a long zoom conversation with a colleague who hails from China, touching on anti-Asian violence and the insufficiency of the responses of various bodies, where I proudly recounted switching my classes online a week earlier than everyone else last year because Chinese students told me they didn't feel safe coming to school, I cheerfully said "once things settle down, let's try to get together, over food!" It fell to her to say she wasn't sure when she'd feel safe taking the subway again. How could I be so thoughtless? We'd just been talking about how folks didn't take seriously the fear Asians feel even going out these days. Indeed we'd both reported we couldn't unsee the video of an Asian person being beaten to unconsciousness in the New York subway a few weeks ago, while other passengers did nothing. Didn't I post that New Yorker cover which shows how the subway has become a place of unease and even menace everywhere I could? And yet I blithely assumed the subway is generally safe, the subway where Asians are assaulted and other passengers may do nothing to help.
I think I've learned to sense a little of the fear women feel walking on dark, empty streets at night - or that this is a frightening situation. But while I know it I don't feel that particular threat there. (There are places where, as a gay person, I feel unsafe, though not as many as if I presented differently.) Likewise, although particular cops may seem unsavory to me, I don't feel unsafe around the police in this country, as African Americans must. Indeed, I feel safe because I assume the police would come to my aid were someone to accost me. I remember well an episode Ta-Nehisi Coates described in Between the World and Me where a white woman says to him, in an Upper West Side movie theater, "I could have you arrested." I know I could, too.
I guess the fear Asians and Asian Americans have been feeling on the streets, in the subways, in shops and restaurants isn't one I really feel either. I can't picture their assailants - they seem to come from a world I can barely conceive, both in their prejudices and in their acting them out against vulnerable people - but I haven't had to live with constant micro aggressions, coming from all sorts of people, including people like me. I've not been told, verbally and nonverbally, that I don't belong in my own country, or the supposed "land of immigrants" to which I've come for study or work or family - that I never can. While I've read about it - most only in the last weeks, especially on the intersectionality of Asian women's experience in America - and idly wondered about the experiences of Asian Americans of various generations as the US becomes more visibly diverse, I've never felt racially invisible in that way, and, now, racially unsafe. White folks get to not feel racially anything, even as everyone else does.
My colleague had spoken about the great and unacknowledged mental suffering of AAPI students she speaks to. The context of people coming from China, like a significant number of the students at my university, is more complicated still. To thoughtless stereotypes of model minority and perpetual foreigner add geopolitical rival and disease vector (things I'm probably naive to imagine less common at a university like our own), and - unashamedly present at universities including our own - cash cow. You know: like so many schools, we depend on the full fee tuition of presumably well-off foreign students to get by. How does the way we talk about that feel to these students (or those the racist gaze equates with them)? For our university, as for our land, it must sound like they're not part of the narrative at all, at best tolerated if noticed at all, their indignities unmourned. I need to do better.
