What should we do, for real?

On privilege, solidarity, tragedy, and the danger of making ciphers of the Atlanta victims.

Albert

A message from an anonymous reader of this newsletter stopped us in our tracks this week. “I had hoped after what occurred in Atlanta that you would offer [an] opportunity for the Asian American community to process the trauma and grief of this tragedy,” they wrote. Instead, they found our remarks to be inappropriately sweeping and breezy. Their harshest critique suggested that our stance on hate crime legislation, which we argued would increase the powers of police and prosecutors, was rooted in our social and economic privilege. “If you don’t share in the material conditions of the most vulnerable members of the community,” they wrote, “and cannot even hold space for their grief, please have some humility and do not tell them what they should or should not want.” They continued: “Acts of creation and solidarity so that we all become free sound nice, but what I’ve gleaned from your newsletter has mostly been a demonstration of how much social and cultural capital one can accumu…