ARSTM’s commitment to supporting AAPI people and causes, and denouncing white supremacy and anti-Asian hate

Last year, the ARSTM leadership made a statement condemning anti-Black racism and the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, David McAtee and other victims of police and vigilante violence. In it, we wrote, “We recognize that white supremacist violence, and more specifically anti-Black violence, is historically intertwined with U.S. institutions, policies, and culture, and that it is also acutely visible in individual instances of oppression.”

This week, that same white supremacist violence has led to more murders. Eight people were murdered in Atlanta and Cherokee County on Tuesday, six of whom were Asian women. Xiaojie Tan, Daoyau Feng, Hyun Jung Grant, Delaina Ashley Yaun, Paul Andre Michels, and three as yet unidentified Asian women died, and one man, Elcias R. Hernandez-Ortiz, is critically injured because of white supremacy and specifically anti-Asian hate and violence. These murders and injuries are simply the most visible anti-Asian hate crimes currently in the news. On Wednesday, Xiao Zhen Xie and an unidentified 83-year-old Asian man were attacked on the street in San Francisco by the same assailant. Throughout 2020, anti-Asian hate crimes rose by 149%.

The work of calling white supremacy what it is and dismantling it, brick by entrenched brick, is ongoing.  No one statement or one action or one email will undo it; it’s laughable to think that they could. So the current ARSTM leadership stands by what we, last year’s leadership, wrote:

As rhetoricians of science, technology, and medicine, it is our ethical responsibility to acknowledge and reckon with the injustices central to the topics we study. And it is our responsibility to critique and resist the use of science, technology, and medicine as tools for the oppression of Black, Brown, and Indigenous People. We can and should use the rhetoric of science, technology, and medicine to call out and address institutional racism and to amplify and support those who are already doing that work, from #BlackInSTEM advocates to anti-surveillance community groups to reproductive justice activists and beyond.

To this list, we will add the need to amplify and support those resisting anti-Asian, Asian-America, and Pacific Islander (AAPI) hate and discrimination, those educating us about the history of anti-AAPI hate and discrimination in the U.S. in particular, and those fighting the use of stereotypes, dehumanization, and assumptions about sex workers to justify racist misogyny. This work can and should inform our guiding action plan for growing ARSTM as an explicitly anti-racist organization.

If you would like to provide immediate material amplification and support, I have done basic searching and vetting of these donation fundraisers:

And finally, in this moment and any other, if there is anything I as an individual or we as the ARSTM leadership can do to support you materially, morally, or otherwise, please do not hesitate to reach out. This organization is all of ours, but only when all of us are welcomed, heard, and able to thrive.