75 – Rooftop Koreans (Patreon)

Sam recently received a message from Brittany Wong, a senior reporter at Huffpost asking him to give his thoughts on the “roof Korean” memes showing armed Koreans on rooftops. The message of the meme was to say every race has the right to arm themselves and use force against supposed “Black” invaders. Essentially becoming avatars for white supremacy. This is Sam's response in its entirety: 

As the protests began, I received a number of messages and texts from white people I know expressing faux concern about whether or not I was “okay.” They were worried because to them, the Black "Other" was out there roaming the streets again. 

At the same time, others sent me "rooftop Korean" memes in some perverse form of white solidarity. 

Whether it's the internalized suburban racism of white people we know, or the Alt-Right, the energy is the same: to say they are justified in fearing Black people because other minorities—specifically the so-called “model minority”—fear them; to say they hurt other minorities. 

Both groups weaponize Asian Americans to say Black people's legitimate claims of racism are unjustified and that the police have to use force because Black people are dangerous. By sending us pictures of “rooftop Koreans” or even in conjuring up those images in faux solidarity with us, as if to say "don't mess with the Koreans, they can protect themselves," they are also saying we are justified and given permission to take Black lives over insured property—a sentiment we’ve seen expressed in all forms of media since the protests began. 

Growing up in this country, I always found it disconcerting that it was a given that property was more important than people—especially Black people. So white people are reinforcing these claims to Koreans, not recognizing or willfully disregarding the problems with their assertions. That's how deeply embedded white supremacy is, it's so normal, that it's invisible to the majority. You only spot it when it fits your stereotype of white supremacy, which again still relies on stereotypes—which further reinforces white supremacy.

Like an abusive ex wanting to get back with you, the same people screaming solidarity against Black people are the same ones who blamed—and are still blaming—Asia and Asian Americans for COVID-19, sharing racist tropes about bat soups and so-called wet markets and assaulting us on the streets just a month prior.

Whether white people are conscious of it or not, they are engaged in a dangerous game of divide and conquer. And when I say dangerous, I mean to minorities not to the white majority. These memes are in essence speaking for Korean Americans, telling us how to think and feel, co-opting our voice and our ability to tell our own narrative, all for the purpose of attacking Black Americans. It's gaslighting 101, straight out of the Trump playbook—and it works. The meme attempts to do the same thing the media did in 1992, diverting the problems of institutional racism and making it a minority-on-minority city problem—so-called minority-on-minority crime.

That's why the aftermath of the Rodney King verdict is called the 1992 “riots” rather than what it should be called—the 1992 Rodney King Uprising, because the narrative was intentionally shifted away from anti-racism and onto urban chaos. You don't need nationwide police reforms if it's a riot about violence and looting. And shifting the narrative works, we're living through the proof right now because nothing has changed since '92.

If you live in LA and someone brings up the 1992 so-called “riots,” it's not to bring up anti-racism but the opposite, to reinforce racism. It is brought up to reinforce negative stereotypes about inner city crime, violence, looting, and dog-eat-dog tension between minorities. The fact that the Uprising in LA is still presented in the mainstream culture this way is indicative of the larger institutional problem of racism.

This minority-on-minority narrative has been so effective, many white liberals believe that it's more likely for minorities to be racist than for white liberals to be racist. That's why Amy Cooper calling the cops on a Black man bird-watching in Central Park was for many so eye-opening. But white supremacy is bipartisan, just as whiteness is bipartisan. Just as whiteness doesn’t care about gender or sexual orientation, neither does racism.

The Korean American generation back in 1992 didn't have social media. No one wanted to speak with them or hear their story. A young Asian American journalist working for an outlet like this one wanting to hear my thoughts didn't exist.

If you can't speak the language and you have no outlet, others speak for you.

So I wanted to, at least for myself, reclaim our voice. As I was walking my son around my neighborhood, I wanted to show people that it wasn't the war zone their implicit bias was picturing. Other than the required COVID-19 precautions, I can still walk my son in his stroller with no problems. I wanted to share the things I was seeing, which were Justice for George Floyd and Black Lives Matter signs. 

I also wanted to share what I wasn't seeing—armed Koreans menacing people. So I sent out that tweet to say, “Here's the stereotype in your mind, and here's reality. Work on yourself.”

If you talk to people from my parents' generation, they'll tell you that when they first arrived here, they felt like babies. Now that I have a son, I finally understand what they meant. My son is a little over a year old, and his biggest frustration is that he can't communicate. When my parents—or any immigrant from a non-English speaking country—say, "I was like a baby," that statement has a different context than it does for native speakers. It isn't to say they’re innocent and pure—it's to say when they arrived here, they lost their words. 

So others got to write their narrative: “This is how they feel, these are their problems.” And if that's what you hear in the media and also in classrooms, many of us grow up believing a narrative about ourselves we didn't get to write, and our sense of ourselves gets painfully distorted.

The model minority stereotype make white Americans the ruling class and Asian Americans the good child, pitted against the bad children—which are Black, brown, and indigenous people of color. It's all from the same playbook as the rooftop Korean meme—divide and conquer. Even the Asian Americans who buy into the model minority myth never think they're the equal of whites, but rather their internalized inferiority seeks white approval. So instead of allying with our Black and brown siblings, some of us ally with the white ruling class. Anti-Blackness always comes with internalized self-hate.

Asian Americans are tools in a white supremacist order that existed before our parents ever moved here. In order for us to declare that we’re a new generation and a new Koreatown, for us to stand in solidarity with Black people and with other people of color, we can't simply say "Black lives matter." That by itself is toothless. We also have to decolonize and remove our own internalized white supremacy. The effects of which won’t only support our Black comrades, but will promote healing within ourselves.

Just as there's been divide and conquer between minority groups, the same tactic has been used to divide Asian parents from their children. If you listen to our own jokes and our pain points, you’ll see that we constantly compare our upbringing to white standards; our parents to some idealized mythical white parent. This is part of white supremacy's paternalism that is only being explored now in some Asian American circles.

There are extreme examples of white supremacy, but in everyday life, white supremacy is just as the name implies, it makes white supreme—making it the default, the supreme standard. Even the extremes of white supremacy come from that assumption, that whiteness is right, and you the nonwhites are wrong—you are bad. When that's the framework for how you think about yourself, your parents, and other minorities, it is a cause for great pain not only within but also between minority groups.

Yes, we must support Black lives and we must protect Black bodies. Yes, we must be in solidarity with our Black and brown siblings. But we also have our own work to do within our own communities, which starts with decolonizing ourselves from white supremacy and healing from its effects.

The order of events that took place was a perfect storm in a lot of ways. Amy Cooper gave us the correct narrative this time to understand the murder of George Floyd—that white supremacy is internalized and at the bedrock of the American institution.

For Asian Americans, having the pandemic and seeing how the media fed us anti-Asian racism and xenophobia, with both Trump and Biden making xenophobic statements, we saw how divide and conquer can work the other way, where we were the enemies of not just white Americans but other minorities. If that didn't happen first, maybe there actually would have been a couple of rooftop Koreans somewhere. But you can only fool us for so long before we recognize we minorities are always blaming ourselves and not the majority that pits us against each other. This is why Yellow Peril must support Black lives. 

Here is the article: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/roof-koreans-meme-know-real-story_n_5ee110a1c5b6d5bafa5604f3 

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