Supporting Black Communities As An Asian American

Sharing experiences as a minority and understanding the unequal impacts of racial bias

(source)

Coming from a town that is 79% white¹, I was no stranger to racism growing up. The cultural differences between my home and upbringing clashed with that of a “conventional” white American family. At the same time, the shared values on education and existing biases such as the model minority only served to help me and my career. That’s not always the case for people of other minorities. Knowing how it feels to be marginalized, those experiences shape why I believe so strongly today that we should take action to address the inequality that black communities consistently encounter. Here’s my story.

On the bus rides to elementary school, I felt different. On some days, we would play games tossing around the best insults we could think of at each other. Between the “Yo mama” jokes, there were always ones with racial or cultural undertones. It didn’t help to have a family name that could be mispronounced as another word for toilet. Though, I was secretly glad that I didn’t have the misfortune of having another common Chinese name (Wang). It never seemed quite fair to me at the time. My other friends all seemed to have more commonly accepted names like “Smith” or were more part of a culture that…