Dear Community,

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On Wednesday morning, many of us woke up to news from Atlanta about the tragic murders of eight people, six of whom were Asian American women, all committed by a white man.

In response to this violence, we may have felt overwhelmed with grief, pain, anger, fear, helplessness, numbness… We may have also felt disconnected to it all. It wasn’t in my town… It wasn’t because they were Asian - It was because of their line of work…They weren’t all Korean…The killer was “just having a bad day.”

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Meanwhile, many immigrant women, similar to the sisters murdered in Atlanta, continue to work hard in low wage jobs to earn money and feed their families despite fearing for their lives.

 

Meanwhile, Asian women continue to be sexually subjugated and dehumanized, bound across time and space to the traumatic legacies of “comfort women” and migrant brides.

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Meanwhile the Asian American community is quietly raging over a year of this pandemic, lost businesses, isolated families, deportations of adoptees, injustice toward the undocumented, and 3,795 (and counting) reported incidents of violence nation-wide motivated by hate and fueled by anti-Asian rhetoric and foreign policy. Please visit www.stopaapihate.org for detailed reports on violence against Asian Americans and to report hate crimes.

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Members of our Korean community will feel a range of emotions about this incident and remember in different ways moving forward. There is space and freedom to grieve and be angry. However, we call on our community to reflect on how our own responses impact our individual health and the health of our community. We hope you join us in our intentional commitments:

• We will not distance ourselves from these women and forget our own stories of immigrant struggle. We will honor them and remember.

• We will acknowledge these murders as unjust and rooted in oppression – the same white supremacy, xenophobia and racism that we routinely face as Korean Americans. - We will remember the pain of our long, colonized history and the discrimination we routinely face as Korean Americans.

• We will rise above self-interest, and recognize our long history of collective resistance before coming to this land and the interconnected immigrant communities that we have built together. We will no longer be quiet and raise our voices against oppression and for our community.

• We will not suppress but rather explore our feelings and the pain caused by this incident by sharing our stories with our family members and our community. If you are looking for ways to do this, please consider participating in the many community building programs we offer.

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We stand with our Asian American community in this time of grief and condemn the racist hatred that motivated the killings on Tuesday night and oppresses our community members each and every day. As we mourn, we look towards a healthy and thriving community. We will strive for healthy and safe environments through much needed cultural- and language-specific support for our youth, elders and families. We are responding compassionately to address the challenges that this pandemic has brought to our bodies, our living conditions and our mental health. And we call on our local and state governments, neighbors and community members to support and invest in our community in this time of crisis.

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In community,

Joomi Kim

Executive Director