This time last year I was involved in organizing a response to anti-Asian racism at the Huntington Country Store. The language on their website and on posters in their store repeatedly referred to COVID-19 as the “China Coronavirus.” At the same time harassment and hate crimes against members of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders communities were rising to alarming numbers, nationally.
For many of us it was clear that the anti-Asian hate spreading from former President Donald Trump’s White House all the way into small communities in blue states was causing escalating harm. Words matter and words that spread hate and fear cause harm and violence.
The owners of the Huntington Country Store wouldn’t talk to us and when we arranged a peaceful group of concerned citizens to deliver a letter and express our concerns we were met with threats of violence from people defending the store’s right post racist signs. We were told there would be “armed patriots” there to meet us. We had people remove their masks to blow smoke in our faces.
In the weeks that followed organizers were targeted and threatened with all kinds of violence, including sexual assault. In trying to change language that feeds a culture of racism and violence we were met with more racism and violence. Sadly this was unsurprising.
What was surprising was the response of some of the people we would have considered progressive. Some oppose racism in theory but found it “too confrontational” to deliver a letter and hold signs with anti-racist messages in front of a store that was spreading hate in our community. Others felt that we should “support local businesses” apparently at the expense of vulnerable AAPI members of our community. Most confusing were the people who felt that the signs were “just words” and therefore not worth the work. Those violent words are part of the systemic dehumanization of Asian people.
Ultimately, emboldened by their violent friends and allies, the owners of the Huntington Country Store doubled down, kept their anti-Asian signage, posted additional hate-filled material on their website and added the same sentiment to each of their receipts. We considered this unfortunate but expected, given who we were dealing with. We hoped we’d exposed something important about the blatant, dangerous racism that exists right here in western Massachusetts.
At the very least we’d let people know what the Huntington Country Store stands for so they could decide whether or not to support it.
Anti-Asian violence escalated over the following months, regular news segments detailing cases of bullying or harassment of community members, business owners and even children. In South Hadley a young Asian man was shaken when harassed in public. In Sunderland an Asian woman on her bike was followed and threatened by a man in a truck. I wondered if local people ever linked these stories to the language at the Huntington Country Store, if maybe now they could see the connections we were trying to expose last year.
In March there were the Atlanta shootings which resulted in the targeted deaths of six Asian women. Suddenly a #Stop Asian Hate movement was born and local organizers were quick to plan vigils in response. The word “shock” was used a lot, but to anyone who was paying attention there should have been no shock. What happened in Atlanta was the inevitable outcome of our collective inaction, our unwillingness to confront racism. If more of the people who showed up at those vigils would come out to confront racist language maybe that young man in South Hadley would not have been harassed. Maybe the woman in Sunderland would not have been threatened. Maybe those women in Atlanta wouldn’t have been murdered.
But by April the Atlanta shootings were no longer a front-page story and we were back to dismissing the role of dehumanizing racism in creating a culture of violence. Some of the most offensive Dr. Seuss books were discontinued and white progressives were again unsure anti-Asian words/images are a dangerous problem.
In an April 6th letter to the Gazette David Ball claimed that “Nobody ever became a racist by reading Dr. Seuss.” Ten days later guest columnists Jennifer Page, Joy Ohm, Megan Paik and Mia Kim Sullivan responded. Speaking from a place of vulnerability and direct experience they asked; “Do all children ‘surely,’ ‘instinctively,’ reject racist caricatures as Ball claims? If that were the case, we would not have been yelled at — in Northampton, Amherst, and in nearby towns — to ‘go back’ to another country. Our children would not have had elementary school peers taunt them with nonsense sounds, contorting their eyes and trying to force them to say they were Chinese.”
These painful experiences are real. Dehumanizing language and images are causing harm to local AAPI people, but Ball felt the need to rebut their column (and their lived experience) and defend his position. This time he explained how certain he was that Seuss’s racist images of Asian people never impacted him and therefore could never have impacted anyone. This is common and flawed logic because it assumes that we are all aware of any racism we may hold and ignores the nuances of how and where systemic racism takes root. Children who grow up laughing at racist caricatures don’t consider themselves racist but they do find it funny to make fun of Asian people for how they look or speak. No one reads a sign in a store that says “China Coronavirus” and makes a conscious choice to blame and target Asian people but it happens and it harms. It’s never as simple as white people want to make it seem, which is why we need to listen to and amplify (and not rebut) the voices of those most impacted.
The Dr. Seuss letters impacted me because they reminded me so much of a time eight years ago, when I removed my son from the Amherst public schools in part because of how anti-Asian racism was handled by his classroom teacher and the school’s administration. At the time we were questioning the appropriateness of comic books with racist imagery in elementary classrooms. Otherwise progressive parents fought for their kids’ right to read any material they wanted to at school, regardless of the impact. When my son raised concern about the images in the books his teacher gave him a journal and suggested that he write privately about his feelings instead of sharing them with his peers. Not confronting racism directly would make him a “classroom leader.” As his parents we tried to start a public conversation about the impact of racist materials on children, but we found that people were more interested in turning it into a debate about censorship.
The issue, like so many issues of racism in classrooms, and like the language at the Huntington Country Store, and the local harassment and violence went largely unaddressed by this so-called progressive community.
If we as a community are complicit in desensitizing children to racism at a young age then we should not be surprised when the adults of our community are unwilling to confront racist businesses and business owners. And when those words or images result in harassment and violence we should not act shocked. The time to act is before people are harmed and lives are lost and we are already way too late.
Ali Wicks-Lim lives in western Massachusetts.