As LISC marks the beginning of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, assistant general counsel Ted Shen reflects on the imperative of allyship, and the extraordinary life and example of Grace Lee Boggs—philosopher, activist and exemplary ally in the struggle for racial and economic equity.
Top photo credit: American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs
Amidst the recent hate crimes against the AAPI community, we are reminded of the on-going struggle and suffering of our Black brothers and sisters, who once again have had to bear the deaths of unarmed Black Americans at the hands of police. Although perhaps not well-known, the history of Asian Americans in this country is deeply intertwined, for better or worse, with the parallel Black struggle for civil rights. Indeed, Asian Americans have benefitted greatly from the Black-led civil rights movement. But the model minority myth continues to detrimentally position Asian communities as a minority success story that further justifies anti-Black racism, both from within and beyond the Asian community.
This is not to minimize anti-Asian hate or condone a comparison of victimhood, but only to say that no matter how difficult or painful recent events have been, we must recognize the place and complicity of Asians in the history of racism. As Dr. King famously said, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. While we cannot (nor should we) forget our own unique history of intergenerational trauma, discrimination, and suffering, we must share in the fight against white supremacy and systemic racism.
Being an effective and conscious ally is just one of the ways we can express solidarity and strive for meaningful change in society. Although this issue may seem like a new problem, borne of the past few years, it is important and heartening to recognize that we are the beneficiaries of the work of strong figures who have come before.
Throughout the mixed history of Asian and Black Americans, there have been people who saw beyond the racial wedge that sought to divide the two groups. Grace Lee Boggs is one such individual, and her life and work embodied the values of collectivism and allyship.
A Philosopher and an Activist
Boggs was born in Rhode Island in 1915 to the daughter of Chinese immigrants, and grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens. She attended Barnard College and received a Ph.D. in philosophy from Bryn Mawr in 1940. After graduate school, she struggled to find any work at all, much less in academia, which she later attributed in part to racism against “Orientals.” She eventually found a job in the philosophy library at the University of Chicago, earning $10 a week, and lived in a basement apartment plagued with rats.
One day, as Boggs was walking through her neighborhood, she came across a group of people protesting poor living conditions — which included rat-infested housing. This, Boggs recalled, connected her with the Black community for the very first time. “I was aware that people were suffering, but it was more of a statistical thing,” Boggs said. “Here in Chicago I was coming into contact with it as a human thing.”
Her experience in Chicago inspired her to seek a place where she could be both nurtured and challenged, and she found that place in Detroit. It was there that she met James Boggs, a charismatic auto worker and activist, and they married in 1953. During the 1950s, Boggs “mainly listened and learned” to the Black activists around her for several years before deciding she could play an active role in the Black Power Movement that was emerging organically in a Detroit, a city where Blacks were becoming the majority.
During the upheaval of the 1960s, she became one of the city’s most noted activists, promoting issues that included environmentalism, feminism, Black Power, and labor and civil rights. Living and working in what was considered the epicenter of Black radicalism, Boggs engaged in a combination of theorizing and protesting, writing, meeting and organizing with leaders such as Malcolm X, and mentoring young radicals.
Her willingness to do the work, her ability to listen and learn from Black activists, her commitment to living in the communities in which she organized, and her openness to revising her politics and her values, made her an effective life-long ally of the Black community. Even after Detroit’s downturn in the 1970s and 1980s, she persisted, developing her notions of how to lay the groundwork for engaging people in collective struggle.
In her 1998 memoir, Living for Change, Boggs wrote that “reality is constantly changing and we must be wary of becoming stuck in ideas that have come out of past experiences and have lost their usefulness in the struggle to create the future.” In her later years, she created Detroit Summer, a program that brought hundreds of young volunteers to plant community gardens and work with schoolchildren. She also helped create the Boggs Center, an organization committed to helping activists develop into leaders and critical thinkers. Boggs died in 2015 at the age of 100.
How to Be an AAPI Ally
Being an ally is not a simple matter. We have the responsibility to educate ourselves about how we have benefitted from systemic racism because remaining ignorant is a privilege in itself. Allyship requires practice and necessarily involves difficulty and discomfort. However, below are a few suggestions that might help get you started:
- Understand what being an ally means. Allyship can be defined as “an active and consistent practice of using power and privilege to achieve equity and inclusion while holding ourselves accountable to marginalized people’s needs”.
- Tackle anti-Black racism in your family. While these conversations are some of the most challenging and frustrating, they also represent a (literally) close to home way to make our words have an impact.
- Educate yourself and take individual action. We can’t make lasting change unless we understand clearly why the world is the way it and how we can best make an impact.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Theodore (Ted) Shen, Assistant General Counsel
Ted Shen joined LISC in 2018 as Assistant General Counsel. He helps to manage LISC’s legal affairs and advises on all of LISC’s programs and their implementation. Shen supports LISC’s fund formation work through its subsidiary, LISC Fund Management, LLC, and is a member of the Housing Investment Committee. He previously practiced law for 6 years at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP and Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP. He received his J.D. degree from the New York University School of Law and his B.A. degree from the University of California - Berkeley.