Thirty-three.

Anti-racism is not a zero-sum game.

As I grew up in North Hollywood, I lived on a block of homes inhabited by low-income families. My father was focused on completing his education at the University of Southern California and tutored chemistry to collegiates on the side; my mother worked odd jobs, such as selling our avocados.

How I loved our avocados! Back in the 1990s, the superfruit hadn't yet completed its rise to cultural prominence in the States, but those in the know knew it to be a treat. I, not even five years of age, knew avocados as the edible objects that fell from the tree out front, and my grandmother—when she visited us—always sliced one into halves for my snacktime. How I loved that tree! To me, a child, it was a benevolent, supermassive being that just so happened to have taken root on the frontmost lawn of our home. The fruits it bore were innumerous, so my mother tried selling them to nearby corner stores. That tree, my very own Giving Tree, watched over me for the first few years of my life.

In that neighborhood, I made my first friends ever. They were two boys, siblings, who lived just down the street, and they were the ones with whom I'd most often be found playing outside. I remember calling them my brothers. I was the youngest of the group, so I remember not their faces but rather their kindness. They looked after me; they included me in the games we'd play and we shared whatever candies we were gifted by other neighbors. One time, we found a discarded shopping cart, and we raced down the road with it, them pushing it and me inside. The cart struck an errant rock or pothole, I can't recall which, and it careened, flipping all the way over. I was a bloody mess, but I'm okay now, basically unscarred.

February is Black History Month in the United States, and it's not lost on me that the first people I met in life, who chose to befriend me of their own volition, were Black. I'm thinking of Whitney Houston, who famously told an MTV interviewer, "We need a longer month!" I'm thinking of Aretha Franklin, who was monitored by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for her support of the Black Panthers. I'm thinking of Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, Marsha P. Johnson, and the trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming Black forebears of the LGBTQ+ civil rights movement. I'm thinking of Yuri Kochiyama, whose friendship with Malcolm X illustrated her lifelong interest in bridging ethnic groups like Asian and Black Americans in the shared pursuit of achieving racial justice and equality.

Yuri and her family were among the many Japanese Americans targeted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066, signed and issued on February 19, 1942. In her early twenties, Yuri was interred at one of the many concentration camps for two years. Her experiences there naturally heightened her awareness of American human rights abuses. (Today, over eighty years later, the Democratic Party looks favorably at President Roosevelt's legacy, having glossed over the entirety of his history.)

When I was around the same age as Yuri was when she was interred, I was in the midst of my own intellectual coming of age in college. I chanced upon her name and story as I researched systemic racism and the people who gave their lives to dismantle it. I was very much a product of my times: as I shaped my curricula, I was influenced by what seemed to be an endless spate of racist homicides in the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, among others. I felt helpless, so I tried to learn. I read Kimberlé Crenshaw, Judith Butler, Audre Lorde, Edward Said, Franz Kafka, Frantz Fanon, Toni Morrison, Amy Tan…and I tried to house these seminal writers underneath the umbrella of my undergraduate thesis, which I proffered to a panel of professors that I'd gathered from different colleges within my university, because I was angry. I felt helpless and angry at the magnitude of all the injustices being continuously perpetrated (and, therefore, consistently un-preempted). In Lee Lew-Lee's 1996 documentary, All Power To The People, Yuri explains that "the humanity in this country, because of the racism, [is] not the kind of humanity that anyone could love." She was describing Malcolm X's disdain for racism, hypocrisy, systems of oppression. Today, her words are still evergreen.

Asian Americans owe a great debt to Black Americans. Whenever I've said these words to my Asian American peers, I'm often met with generic agreement or blank, vacant expressions. Some of it might be a result of cultural and linguistic barriers—I've mentioned before that the majority of Asian Americans speak a language other than English at home. The rest, I think, is simply a lack of information, whether due to an inability or unwillingness to find said information. Black American civil rights activists, such as the Black Panthers, opposed and protested the wars in Vietnam and Korea; the Vietnamese and Koreans equally disseminated literature unto the [Black] American militants, linking their shared struggles. Inclusion frameworks for the purpose of achieving equitable diversity and representation, frameworks that Asian Americans adopted or followed, were built to address the systemic inequities afflicting Black Americans. So, when I read that 76% of Asian American adults opposed the factoring of race or ethnicity into college admissions decisions, I thought it was emblematic of my people either not knowing or caring about the reason for affirmative action's existence, like many other similar issues. (That reason is that affirmative action was meant to level the playing field by addressing and partially righting systemic factors, such as income gaps, that would disproportionately and unfairly affect applicants of color, predominantly Black.) In effect, by consenting to join the plaintiffs in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, my people chopped into pieces the very ladder that they had selfishly climbed. Students for Fair Admissions later questioned the decline in Asian American enrollment, as victims of their own racist crusade.

Generic agreement generates just as much ennui. Not comprehending exactly why or how means that such agreement is as steadfast as reeds in the winds; wherever the winds blow, so too will such reeds follow. Mentioning that debt is meant to inspire action, and such uninformed agreement rings as both hollow and performative. (I think, in this instance, of Yin, who had read similar texts as I did but still insisted on wearing box braids for her New York ID card photograph.)

I'm still frustrated when I try to engage some of my peers on these topics. Because they haven't done the requisite learning, they don't understand the contexts in which these matters exist—it's like trying to explain exponents to someone who has yet to learn basic addition. I once quoted Annie Dillard's aphorism on how we choose to spend our lives; I am afraid that too many of my people are either willfully or accidentally incurious. I understand that power does not concede, that it has a vested interest in preventing that concession. Still, I'm of the opinion that we, as human beings blessed with the ability of cognition, must exercise that freedom while it still exists.

If there's to be any one takeaway from what I'm attempting to convey, it's that collective liberation is not a zero-sum game. I'm thankful for the blessings I've received as I retrace the paths blazed ahead of me by the innumerous many, and I hope to follow in their footsteps by accomplishing some good with my life. It is the very least that I can do.