Aapi Quotes

Make no mistake about it, Ava. I plan to win you back. I will earn your forgiveness and trust. Even if it takes years or even a lifetime.

I can’t think when Brad looks at me like that. Like I’m everything. Like he can’t get enough. Then he goes and kisses me like he can’t stand not touching me for a single second.

The immensity of the infinite unknown was formidable, but for that brief moment, she did not feel small. With her sisters and a warm drink and flickering firelight, she only felt . . . Possibility.

I’m not going to push for more than you’re ready for. Right now, just take the time to figure things out. Hopefully you can start to see me not just as your friend but as the guy who is hopelessly in love with you.

If you go to an “Asian American and Pacific Islander” event, you’re not going to see Samoans, you’re not going to see Tongans, you’re not going to see Māori. We’re half of the acronym, but not even close to half the representation. The Indigenous story is always washed away by the immigrant story. Americans are proud to say that “we’re a nation of immigrants,” but that’s also saying “f*ck the Indigenous people.” We’re proud to be mixed in Hawaii, but we need to acknowledge that that comes at the price of Indigenous people. We can support each other, but there’s a difference between inclusion and erasure.

Avani rolled her eyes. “You read too many romance novels.” “I read exactly the right number of romance novels,” Rani returned. “You’ll see. This family needs me.

There are two ways in which the U.S. prison regime, once concentrated, springs into wider social life so as to etch white racism more deeply into the present and future of the U.S. body politic. First, the way the prisons display racialized populations enables whites to play upon a cruel calculus that often pits the various groups of color against one another. Consider one example. A/AAPI members, who make up only 1 percent of the prison population, often find themselves used in this white calculus. Their low number among the imprisoned can be seized upon by members of white society in another version of the “model minority myth,” which generally has interpreted A/AAPIs as ideal citizens and achievers, masking the ways Asian Americans have in fact experienced racism in the U.S. and are seen as falling short of white ideals.

Dylan Rodríguez, writing on the ways Asian Americans are maneuvered within the U.S. social and penal ideologies of criminalization, notes that especially white law and order ideology uses A/AAPIs’ alleged “decriminalization” as a lever for loading ever greater negative stereotypes onto blacks and Hispanics. In Rodríguez’s terms, Asian Americans function as a “cultural/political fulcrum that historically militarizes white civil society against its more ominous Black/Brown racial antagonists and cultural pathogens.

This social leveraging masks how A/AAPIs themselves increasingly experience mass incarceration,[99] and also how some of its youth have experienced racist violence from white vigilantes and police groups[100]—even if their frequency of exposure to carceral violence is less than for blacks and Hispanics. Really,

Even though these groups, particularly the latter two, constitute only 1 percent or less of those currently imprisoned, their presence requires foregrounding if for no other reason than that their members and families, too, suffer the onerous conditions of incarceration. A/AAPI groups (the fastest growing immigrant community in the U.S. at this writing) have experienced, especially among South and Southeast Asian groups, a quadrupling of their rate of incarceration over a single decade.[84] Between 1990 and 2000 there was an unprecedented skyrocketing of the A/AAPI incarceration rate by 250 percent.

Envision, though, this imagined setting: if the entire 2.3 million imprisoned were placed in one huge outdoor arena and grouped in accord with how race/ethnicity is constructed in the U.S., one would see a massive group of 40 percent as black, the other large group, at 39-40 percent, as white. Then, one would find Latinos at 19 percent of all U.S. incarcerated, and American Indians and AAPIs each at 1 percent. Surprisingly, perhaps, in spite of the fact that there are many more Hispanics in U.S. prisons than American Indians, both American Indian and Hispanic groups have approximately the same percent in prison relative to their numbers in the U.S. population (about .8 percent).[88] The presence of these groups reminds us that we dare not think of the imprisoned only in terms of the black and white dichotomy.

With 60 percent of all prisoners being prisoners of color, that leaves 39-40 percent as white. The 60 percent “prisoners of color,” though, is of course not a homogeneous group. Within that 60 percent, according to studies of the 2010 U.S. census, the largest group of color is made up of “non-hispanic Blacks” who make up a full 40 percent of all the U.S. incarcerated in federal, state, and local prisons and jails.[82] The next largest group among prisoners of color is that of “non-white Hispanics,” or Latinos, who make up 19 percent of all incarcerated. Then one drops down to Asian/Asian-American and Pacific Islander (A/AAPI) groups and American Indian groups, each constituting about 1 percent of all incarcerated. (The

Secondly, what is overlooked by the rhetoric of “mostly blacks and Hispanics” are those prisoners who are Arab-American, A/AAPI, or American Indian. Even

Nothing is too much to ask for because time is so precious and fleeting and because anyone who has ever truly loved you should want the most for you and because you should want the most for yourself, too.

They think Chinese is synecdoche for Asians the way Kleenex is for tissues.

In the popular imagination, Asian Americans inhabit a vague purgatorial status: not white enough nor black enough; distrusted by African Americans, ignored by whites, unless we’re being used by whites to keep the black man down. We are the carpenter ants of the service industry, the apparatchiks of the corporate world, we are math-crunching middle managers who keep the corporate wheels greased but who never get promoted since we don’t have the right ‘face’ for leadership. We have a content problem. They think we have no inner resources. But while I may look impassive, I'm frantically paddling my feet underwater, always overcompensating to hide my devouring feelings of inadequacy. There's a ton of literature on the self-hating Jew and the self-hating African American, but not enough has been said about the self-hating Asian. Racial self hatred is seeing yourself whites see you, which turns you into your own worst enemy. Your only defense is to be hard on yourself, which becomes compulsive, and therefore a comfort: to peck yourself to death. You don't like how you look, how you sound. You think your Asian features are undefined, like God started pinching out your features and then abandoned you. You hate that there are so many Asians in the room. Who let in all the Asians? you rant in your head. Instead of solidarity, you feel that you are less than> around other Asians, the boundaries of yourself no longer distinct but congealed into a horde.

Mental Health and Asian-Serving Organizations AAPI Women Lead: imreadymovement.org American Psychological Association: apa.org Asian American Health Initiative: aahiinfo.org Asian American Psychological Association: aapaonline.org Asian American Suicide Prevention and Education: aaspe.net Asian Mental Health Collective: asianmhc.org Asian Mental Health Project: asianmentalhealthproject.com Division 45: Society for the Psychological Study of Culture, Ethnicity, and Race: division45.org Filipino Mental Health Initiative—San Mateo County: fmhi-smc.org Mental Health America: mhanational.org The Mental Health Coalition: thementalhealthcoalition.org National Alliance on Mental Illness: nami.org National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance: nqapia.org Red Canary Song: redcanarysong.net South Asian Mental Health Initiative and Network: samhin.org The Trevor Project: thetrevorproject.org Therapist Directories

Justice Beyond Month (Sonnet 1182) Pride that ends with the end of June, is but an episode of looney tunes. Divergence that dies with April's wake, is no inclusion but bark of buffoons. Black history that ends with the end of February, is not solidarity but a hashtag cacophony. Women's history that ends with the end of March, is no celebration but a sacrilege of equality. When AAPI are only visible in the month of May, It ain't no visibility but a mockery of life. When nativeness is welcome till October 15th, It ain't integration but desecration of light. Awareness is justice when it reduces prejudice. But one that's trendy only in specific months, is no awareness but a different kind of malice. Acceptance is awareness, awareness is life. 100 calendars fall short to celebrate mindlight.

Our respective racial containment isolates us from each other, enforcing our thoughts that our struggles are too specialized, unrelatable to anyone else except others in our group, which is why making myself, and by proxy other Asian Americans, more human is not enough for me. I want to destroy the universal. I want to rip it down. It is not whiteness, but our contained condition that is universal, because we are the global majority, by we, I mean nonwhites, the formally colonized. Survivors such as Native Americans, whose ancestors have already lived through endgames. Migrants and refugees living through endtimes currently, fleeing the floods and droughts and gang violence, reaped by climate changed that's been brought on by western empire. In Hollywood, whites have churned out dystopian fantasies by imagining themselves as slaves and refugees in the future.

My ancestral country is just one small example of the millions of lives and resources you have sucked from the Philippines, Cambodia, Honduras, Mexico, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, El Salvador, and many, many other nations through your forever wars and transnational capitalism that have mostly enriched shareholders in the States. Don’t talk to me about gratitude.

In Pryor, I saw someone channel what I call minor feeling: the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one's perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed.

The indignity of being Asian in this country has been underreported. We have been cowed by the lie that we have it good. We keep our heads down and work hard, believing that our diligence will reward us with our dignity, but our diligence will only make us disappear. By not speaking up, we perpetuate the myth that our shame is caused by our repressive culture and the country we fled, whereas America has given us nothing but opportunity.

Asians are always mistaken for other Asians, but the least we can do to honor the dead is to ensure they're never mistaken for anyone else again.

In her satiric play Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, the playwright Young Jean Lee said: "The reason why so many white men date Asian women is that they can get better-looking Asian women than they can get white women because we are easier to get and have lower self-esteem. It's like going with an inferior brand so that you can afford more luxury features. Also, Asian women will date white guys who no white women would touch.

Some people have a great fashion of calling things they do not like yellow. You exclude the yellow man. You fear the yellow peril. I edit a white paper turned out by yellow men, and many white men turn out yellow papers.