More than the Saying on the Back of a Dollar Bill
/By Troy Flint
The light at the end of the tunnel is getting brighter. Thanks to the miracle of modern medicine, more and more people are getting vaccinated against the threat of COVID-19. I’ll be eligible for a shot by the end of the week. Unfortunately, there is no vaccine for racism. The division that plagues this country will long outlive the virus that has defined the past year-and-a-half. So, as the parent of two young children, much of this spring will be spent using current events as a teaching tool for lessons our society should have learned long ago.
Since the country went into quarantine, hatred has flared up as often as COVID-19 outbreaks and we’ve experienced a wave of violence against Asian Americans. This culminated in the most despicable fashion on March 16 when eight people were killed during a murder spree in Atlanta and six of the victims were women of Asian heritage. While the six homicides were the most violent and dramatic illustration of the discrimination Asian Americans face, they punctuated a larger trend that received insufficient attention prior to the tragedy in Georgia. The advocacy group Stop AAPI Hate used its online reporting tool to record more than 3,800 reports of hate incidents nationwide in 2020.
The statistics also reveal a disturbing intersection between racism and misogyny. In addition to the targeting of women in the Atlanta murders, women of Asian descent are reporting harassment at a much higher rate than their male counterparts. In a March 30 column in USA Today, Stop AAPI hate founders Manjusha Kulkarni, Cynthia Choi, and Russell M. Jeung noted that women reported harassment 2.3 times more than men and often described a sexual component to the abuse. Overall, the hatred ranges from verbal harassment to shunning, to being coughed or spat upon, to assault – and the alarming statistics don’t include the large numbers that go unreported.
Most of these tragedies have been underplayed in the press, in the public conversation, and in our school curriculum. No matter the decade, the ethnicity, or the manner of persecution, the common threads tying these hate crimes together are fear, resentment, and xenophobia. No successful, democratic society with egalitarian aspirations can allow these qualities to flourish, especially one like the United States. As a country, we must do more to present the full tapestry of American history, not to tear it down but to provide the perspective we need to form the “more perfect union” referenced in the Constitution. We owe that to our children, to ourselves, and to our country.
It is disgraceful that, at this point in the American experiment, we are still fighting the same battles that characterize the ugliest parts of our national history. As a parent, helping my children understand the persistent and corrosive nature of racism in American life and developing a commitment to fight it – even if the victims are of a different ethnicity – is one of the most significant contributions I can make to fighting this national scourge. It’s important my children realize our history and our present are littered with and have at times been defined, by racism. They must also know that acknowledging the persistence of interpersonal and institutional racism does not mean it is inevitable, nor does it give us a license to ignore it or shrug our shoulders and accept it. And they must accept that our fates are intertwined and that demonstrating solidarity in another person’s fight for equality is essential for your own.
Recently, my daughter asked me what the “E Pluribus Unum” on the back of a dollar bill meant and I explained that it’s Latin for “out of many, one”, an ideal the country has never come remotely close to meeting. For the nation as a whole, it may be a largely empty slogan, but for our family, it’s something to aspire to.
Photo by Mika Baumeister