Would you be friends with someone if you found out they were racist?

Quote from superyeah

Asian businesses in Black communities... That's a highly common talking point that I see the Black community discuss.

I'm glad you brought this up because it's something that I feel Asian Americans and African Americans need to have an open dialogue about. Your parents and my parents may had a language barrier that prevented them from effectively communicating and clearing up misunderstandings, but this is why it's up to us younger folks to change that.

The '80s and '90s were a particularly awful time for many Asian people who immigrated to the United States. A lot of them had just fled war, many of them being refugees who saw violence and bloodshed in their home countries firsthand. They experienced a loss of cultural identity and a mistrust of their own governments. After these wars ended, their economies were absolutely destroyed. Families that were once thriving lost it all, so that left people with no choice but to immigrate. However, not everyone was allowed to immigrate due to pending documents and whatnot. It's a complex process. That literally split up families.

The ones who were allowed to immigrate did so because they wanted to make money in America and send it to their families back home. They weren't trying to have a better life for themselves. They weren't seeking to assimilate to American culture or make friends with anyone, not even other Asian people.

They weren't the chaebol families you see now who can afford to send their children overseas to prestigious schools, although that's a common misperception about Asian immigrant families. My family, for instance, had to rely on a deal by the U.S. and Australia for those seeking asylum.

When they got here, it wasn't like they could do anything or live anywhere they wanted. They started from zero. Most of them didn't have businesses, but the ones who did... The only places they could afford to set up shop in were rough, underprivileged neighborhoods.

You and I both understand the crime rate in certain areas have way more to do with socioeconomics than it does with race, but for these immigrants, they only attributed it to race because that was all they saw and all they knew. That's their ignorance coming from homogeneous countries. They were often victimized by assault, robbery, burglary, and theft. Their minds made that correlation between the race of the perpetrator and the crime, especially if it happened over and over again. But they weren't going to just stop working, as this was how they made their money for their families. They were going to be on higher alert to protect their businesses because that was everything to them.

To them, they were just protecting what's theirs, but to many Black customers, it was racial profiling and microaggression. It didn't help that some of the Black community saw this as justification to target Asian people more. This instilled even more fear and distrust in Asian people, reinforcing their perception of Black people. The absolutely worse moment in all of this was the Latasha Harlins incident, which I'm sure you've heard of. L.A. riots made things especially rough.

As you can see, this was where it exacerbated a cycle of misunderstandings on both sides. Neither side could really speak to each other to the language barrier, but if they could, they would have easily cleared up some things.

Our generation's supposed to be different. We were kids at the time all this happened. We went to school together and became friends with each other. We didn't let race get in the way of that because were just kids doing kids' things.

Black culture shaped the art world forever. There's so much influence from Black creatives whether it's fashion or music. I got into hip hop way before I got into K-pop, so when I saw that K-pop incorporated a lot of hip hop in it, I was stoked. It was cool to see people who looked like me doing things I grew up on. Music is a great way to unite the world after all.

I see and acknowledge the love-hate relationship Black K-pop fans have with this genre and the overall K-pop community, and I really hope I can do more to make things better. This issue hits close to home for me due to my experiences growing up as well as my passion for music. There's a whole lot of questionable behavior directly in K-pop and among K-pop fans. It's usually ignorance when it comes to idols, but there's definitely a ton of anti-Blackness among K-pop fans.

Us being open about it won't solve everything, but it's a start.

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Misunderstandings, environment, economics, the makings of a clusterfuck

Black people in America have been economically shackled down since emancipation. Between the Jim Crow laws emerging the late 1800s, to the frequent lynchings and borderline pogoms committed in black neighborhoods for nearly a century etc. The situation became impossible to overcome in the 30s-40s with FDRs New Deal that pretty blatantly excluded black america from recovering from the Depression and turned into unwritten policies that permanently devalued black businesses, residents and neighborhoods. The effects of this can still be seen to this day with black Americans having a harder time getting loans, buying land, be able to sell their homes at market value, getting loans without them being attached to skyhigh interest rates not normally seen by non-black peers with similar credit ratings, urban renewal and it's tendency to run highways through the black community and so on and so on. Most people know this song and dance honestly.

However, this also meant there was and still is a chronic void of business in the black community. And in the cracks created by economically oppressive policy, immigrants, particularly Asians, particularly Koreans, have found a way to rise through it and thrive where black people can't: their own neighborhoods. Asian business ownership in black neighborhoods is incredibly high considering how few actually live there.

The best example of this being the black beauty industry. Billion dollar industry of products targeted towards black women very famous for excluding those same women from opening stores in favor of Korean shopowners. Let alone anything else higher in the ladder. Even in other industries where Asians aren't part of the exclusionary effort, the loans and grants and opportunities being denied to black people are going somewhere. Sometimes just getting caught holding the stone somebody else threw after it ricochets off us.

Even if you remove the cultural differences, the outside pitting of the two communities against each other via model minority vs lazy food stampers, the deliberate politicization of issues like affirmative action, the outcome and tension would still be the same because the structure is largely built on exploitation and competition.

We have a scenario where black people are disvalued consumers putting billions into the economy, none of that money is being cycled back into their own community and are largely excluded from being anything but a consumer. Add in the insult of occasionally subhuman service as well.

Obviously, the Asian community did not create social racism or economic institutional racism towards black people. And normally, they aren't exactly perpetuating the practice. But they are undeniably benefitting it even if unknowingly. And through forced proximity, have ironically become the faces of those faceless institutions and concepts. But you can just as easily argue policies meant to favor and promote equity targeting black people have disadvantaged Asian Americans well.

While I've largely gone on from the black perspective of it, I don't necessarily think that Asians are the bad guy or the situation is onsidedly antagonistic. I don't even think the solution is boycotting or anything that comes at the expense of Asian Americans either. In fact, I'd say things are getting significantly better. Personally, I think it's been shown pretty well that solidarity is growing. Just as well, outside of that specific environment with those conditions both communities get along just fine