Asian-Americans are urged to join activities on multicultural concerns of minority in the U.S., other than Peter Liang's cause. (Photo : REUTERS)
Everything that happens to Asian-Americans may be likened to a referendum on the state of the people, according to an article written for the New York Times by Jay Caspian Kang, a contributing writer.
Kang said that the reason could be because Asian-Americans seldom join any political advocacy or discourse on their status as Americans. And this is true, he said, for immigrant populations who are considering their citizenship status.
The gathering of thousands of Asian-Americans on Feb. 20 to protest the conviction of former NYPD police officer Peter Liang in the killing of Akai Gurley, a 28-year-old black man, broke that silence, Kang said.
The case stemmed from an incident where Liang and his partner were on patrol in the Louis Pink Houses in East New York, Brooklyn. Liang, who had his gun drawn, opened a door to a stairwell. The gun was accidentally fired; a bullet ricocheted off a wall and hit Gurley. Reports said that instead of giving Gurley medical treatment, Liang and his partner argued over who would call their supervisor.
The incident occurred in November last year, less than a week before a grand jury in St. Louis decided not to indict Officer Darren Wilson in the killing of Michael Brown, the article said.
On Feb. 11, the Brooklyn court convicted Liang of manslaughter and official misconduct, becoming the first NYPD officer convicted in a line-of-duty shooting.
Many Asian-Americans felt that Liang had been used as a "sacrificial lamb" to appease the uproar against police violence that started two summers ago in Ferguson, Missouri.
According to the article, the Feb. 20 protests mark the most pivotal moment in the Asian-American community since the Rodney King riots, when several Korean-American businesses were burned.
Kang said that riots have been triggered by the killing of Latasha Harlins, a 15-year-old black girl who was shot in the back of the head by Soon Ja Du, a Korean store owner, in a confrontation over a bottle of orange juice. He said that the tensions between Asian store owners and black neighborhoods had been brewing for years and they continue today.
Kang said that Asian-American protests have brought to understanding what needs to be examined more seriously. For instance, some members of the Asian-American community believed that Liang deserved the conviction, but also wonder why it was the Asian cop who took the fall while other officers equally deserved punishment.
Some Asian-Americans point to the deaths of Rafael Ramon and Wenjian Liu, two police officers who were murdered in their patrol car in Dec. 2014, during the height of protests against police violence in New York. The two received an outpouring of support and grief and Kang asked: "Would it measure up to what it might have been if he were white?"
He said that although many believed that Liang should be in jail, the follow-up question is: Why only Liang? Why should protections be extended only to white officers but not to everyone or to nobody at all?
Kang said the Asian-American protests in the streets show that they have begun to wake up from that multicultural dream and realized that their concerns are lumped in with the rest of the minority groups of America. He urged Asian-Americans to participate and join the discourse on race, privilege and justice, which Kang said is a more just cause than the freedom of Peter Liang.
