Dec 10, 2020
Talking with my Asian-American parent about Black Lives Matter
An honest conversation with my mother about defunding the police, Black Lives Matter, and our shared humanity
My mother FaceTimed me late last Sunday. I heard a noise in the background, and I could feel my heart starting to race as I had interpreted the noise as what could only be the commotion of being in an emergency room. The last time I was in the emergency room with my mother, my grandmother had agitated delirium from a UTI that evolved into sepsis. My grandmother did not make it out alive from the hospital. But that’s a story for another time.
It turns out that my mother had trouble sleeping, and the noise in the background was coming from her TV. So she decided to call me because she wanted to ask if I could help her troubleshoot some technology issues. Eventually, the conversation evolved into talking about politics, as it often does, especially around the presidential election season, and discussing the movement to defund the police. Earlier in the week, former President Barack Obama had made headlines for criticizing the movement to defund the police, minimizing the phrase “defund the police” to a “snappy slogan.” Depending on where you get your news from, these comments were received with either raving or scathing reviews.
She had a hard time understanding the purpose of it, as police are meant to protect people. Naturally, this point was turned on its head, and I talked about how the police were also theoretically supposed to protect Black people. I brought up George Floyd and how the police had nearly nine minutes to change their behavior and give him a chance to breathe and at a chance to live. The police had nine minutes of opportunity to troubleshoot the situation and find other ways to deescalate the situation. But those nine minutes were squandered.
I brought up Breonna Taylor and how someone who was devoted to helping others and in the group of first responders could be shot dead by another first responder. I thought about all the calls I took as an EMT in high school and college. At the agencies I worked in, it was frequent for both EMS and police to show up to the scene, working together side-by-side. I thought about how many times a police officer had helped me, a petite feminine woman, when an opioid overdose patient was administered Narcan with subsequent agitated and violent withdrawal and how these officers used their physical strength and training to protect me while I tended to the patients.
I also thought about all the dispatches we received and how frequently we were given directions to the wrong location or descriptions of the wrong person in need of medical attention. I thought about how easy it was for miscommunication to unravel and become unwieldy. I thought about how this could have applied to Breonna and countless other lives and how seemingly mundane miscommunications could result in the death of someone who took no part in that well-intended game of telephone.
I thought about Walter Wallace Jr. and how he did not deserve to die because of a mental illness he did not have autonomy over and how this unintended agitation was interpreted as a threat to the police. He was perceived as a threat that was so great in the eyes of the officers that it was enough reason for them to warrant shooting him.
I thought about the number of patients I’ve encountered who had mental illnesses and how they had been brought to interact with the healthcare system while in the handcuffs of the police. I thought about a “frequent flyer,” a derogatory industry term, in my hometown, a Black woman who had schizophrenia and gained a reputation among the local police, EMS, and hospitals as being “unstable” and “aggressive” even though this was not always the case.
I thought about how it shouldn’t have to matter what someone has done in the eyes of a police officer. Whether or not a person gets to live should not be determined by the hands of someone else. Having a spotless background and having a young life dedicated to service should not even have to be a part of the narrative to convince someone of a stranger’s humanity. But I kept these thoughts of justified humanity to myself.
This wasn’t my first conversation with my mother about topics related to the Black Lives Matter movement. But it was the first time that I cried in front of my mother about the topic. If you know my family, we do not cry in front of each other. This kind of vulnerability is not welcomed with open arms. I cried because of the overwhelming sorrow thinking about human lives needlessly lost at the hands of other humans.
I thought about the privilege I had as an East Asian-American and the trust that is instilled in me when people see me in an EMT uniform or hospital scrubs. I told my mother that in some ways Breonna Taylor was supposed to have the same career trajectory that I was having. She was doing good things for her community, and she planned to do more.
The BLM movement is not centered around me. And yet I still feel the need to use narratives that appeal to my mom and her desire to see her own family succeeding and progressing throughout life. How else am I supposed to convince someone of another person’s humanity without appealing to their selfish motives?
Many Asian-Americans have spent 2020 reflecting on their identities. Xenophobia and discriminatory attacks as a result of the rhetoric around COVID-19, compounded by a long history of racism against Asians, got us here. With BLM reaching arguably its highest peak this past summer, many of us are thinking about how we can be better allies to the Black community. Clearly, it is not enough to just standby quietly and avoid instigating conflict. We have to be actively anti-racist and have these uncomfortable conversations around Black racism within our own families.
I walked away from that two-hour FaceTime conversation mentally exasperated. But the more that my mother learned about the humanity behind these Black lives, about the details that were often skimmed over or excluded altogether from her information bubble, the more her voice changed from being defensive against and frustrated with “defund the police” to being genuinely sad, possibly even developing some empathy. She asked why the officer did not just take his knee off of George Floyd’s neck or at least use less pressure on him. In some ways, it felt like I was observing a child lose their innocence.
This was just one small milestone towards helping my parents understand the need for these movements. But it’s a step in the right direction.
