December 3, 2020 IN: Our Voices, Staff Blog
Help advance the national dialogue around racial solidarity and standing with Black communities
Dear SEARAC family,
In May, Southeast Asian American communities were outraged and heartbroken at the murder of George Floyd, and SEAAs across the country pledged solidarity and support to the Black communities rising up to demand justice. For Breonna Taylor, for Sandra Bland, for Jacob Blake, and for the countless other Black lives lost to police violence, we were able to hold space for Southeast Asian Americans to come together and discuss how to show up meaningfully for Black lives.
With your support, we can continue to uplift important educational materials for our communities through our Solidarity Resource Hub, which offers recordings of powerful community conversations, toolkits for uplifting Black lives, safety tips for protesters, and advocacy tools. Your gift will enable us to shift our community call programming to include more conversations with the inspiring social change agents who are leading this work, such as our June community call, which featured SEAA leaders from AYA: A Radical Black Healing Collaborative, Hmong 4 Black Lives, SEAC Village, Southeast Asian Freedom Network, and Viêt Solidarity & Action Network.
“The overwhelming response from many Hmong community members is that what happened to George Floyd was inhumane and unacceptable,” shared Ze Thao of Hmong 4 Black Lives. “Part of the reason for the emergence of the Hmong 4 Black Lives coalition is to create a central Hmong politicized space that can address the deeply rooted history of anti-Blackness, white supremacy, and colonization that Hmong Americans benefit from and also use to inflict harm even in our own communities. Former Officer Tou Thao belongs to our community. Even more personal for me, he is a member of the Thao clan. We need to claim him, we need to hold him accountable, and it needs to come from our own community as well.”
Slide from SEARAC’s June 2020 Community Call, featuring youth organizers sharing resources, discussing strategy, and pledging SEAA solidarity with the Movement for Black Lives
As we look ahead to 2021 and beyond, we recognize the hard work necessary to dismantle our own entrenched anti-Blackness, and we speak up as allies to BIPOC communities. Through your support, we can continue our journey to support racial justice efforts nationwide. Your gift will help build our policy analysis to ensure that our work is inclusive of the demands of BIPOC communities, including the Black community.
In partnership,
Kham S. Moua
Director of National Policy, SEARAC
PS: The powerful header images featured on all of our end-of-year campaign emails this week highlight the incredible work of our partners across the country supporting SEAA communities. In this header, clockwise from top left: Freedom, Inc., The Cambodian Family, and Mekong NYC.
