Building AAPI Collective Power

A collection of resources focusing on dismantling the structural violence that continues to affect Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Check out the categories below to take steps toward direct political action, donations, and education about the intersectional issues impacting AAPIs.

We've chosen to emphasize resources that address the continual need for change and sustained action. Our actions have to go beyond reactionary measures—we must proactively create the worlds and relationships that enable our collective liberation.

This Carrd also aims to uplift the many robust resource lists currently circulating. If you have suggestions for events, fundraisers, calls for immediate aid, or other resources to add to this site, please submit them below. We need help, and we want this site to be as accessible and community-controlled as possible.

We're continuing to expand and update as resources come in.
Last updated April 19th, 2021.

Please visit the "Why You Need to Take Action" tab for our complete statement.

We recognize that events over the past year are not anomalous racist responses to COVID-19 but part of a pattern of violence committed by both state and non-state actors across history. Though we are all shaken and grieving in response to recent murders and attacks of AAPI, we also recognize the importance of having this conversation within the context of the myriad ways that AAPIs have been continuously hurt through avenues of both physical and non-physical violence.

Even while addressing harms, we believe in our intrinsic and cultivated community power. We have especially aimed to center the ongoing campaigns and organizations that are building collective power among AAPIs— as well as highlight narratives of strength, identity, and love.

WHY you need to take action

The mass shooting of Asian women in Atlanta, situated in the context of anti-AAPI violence across the United States during the pandemic, has brought forth a critical moment for all of us.

Violence against Asian American and Pacific Islander communities goes beyond the individual-level bigotry and explicit racism apparent in singular hate crimes. Structural violence inflicted upon AAPI communities has been woven throughout our ancestors’ and our lived experiences.

At this moment, it is clearer than ever that "model minority" and "white proximity" rhetoric are not accurate descriptions of AAPI realities. The relative economic privilege of some subsets of AAPI does not stop racism. AAPI have been marked as targets for incredible violence because racism and structural violence against AAPI has never ended, despite the myth of the "model minority" that has somehow achieved whiteness through economic advancement.

In fact, we see systematic dehumanization, exploitation, and policing of AAPI bodies in exclusionary immigration laws, border enforcement that deports and separates families, Islamophobic government surveillance programs, policies that disinvest from education and services in our communities, continual land dispossession, and displacement from corporate- and state-driven gentrification.

Historically, the Japanese American internment camps of WWII, American imperialist wars and military occupations across the Pacific, the deaths of Vincent Chin, Yang Song, the mass lynching of LA Chinatown in 1871 , and others robbed of their humanity all show that anti-AAPI violence has always been part of American history. The United States has continually denied the validity of the violence we face— violence that permeates race, class, religion, gender identity, sexuality, immigration status, and a multitude of intersections. Most recently, we’ve seen not just violence against Asians but specifically violence inflicted at the intersections of race, gender, and class— against working-class Asian women in Atlanta.

White supremacy has also systematically and deliberately erased narratives of AAPI collective power, as well as the cross-movement and cross-racial coalitions that have historically empowered all of us.

But our power will persevere.

This moment shows us exactly where we can stand together to take action and radically uphold each other. Our power comes from organizing collectively at the multitude of intersections across our communities. We urge members of both non-AAPI and AAPI communities to take action, and we've put together this Carrd to get you started.

JOIN US.
HERE'S WHAT YOU CAN DO.

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