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LET US PROMOTE COMMUNITY-BASED RESPONSES TO ANTI-ASIAN RACISM
The National Pilipino Canadian Cultural Centre (NPC3) Society of Vancouver joins in the collective grief and mourning of family members, relatives, and friends of the eight people killed at three Asian-operated spas in Georgia.
Six of the eight people killed are Asian American women who worked in the rest and recreation industry, part of the larger intimate labor and libidinal economy. As Canadians of Philippine and Asian ancestry and interested in arts, culture and education for community cultural development, we feel an affinity for the victims, and solidarity with their families, despite our limited knowledge of their personal lives. As Filipino Canadians, the NPC3 Board members, Artistic Principles, volunteers, and staff lament this tragedy as we are all too aware of the need to support the victims, their families’, and their communities during this difficult period.
This spate of racialized violence occurred at an already terrifying, stressful, and precarious time for Asian Canadian communities and the Asian diaspora worldwide. As Asians, the Filipinos in Metro Vancouver, in British Columbia, and across Canada have also experienced violent attacks, verbal harassment, microaggression and other incidents of anti-Asian racism and xenophobia, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic began.
We live, work and play on the unceded, ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations, a region with high concentrations of Asian communities and businesses. Asian women’s racialized bodies, including Filipina/o/x, work in Metro Vancouver’s burgeoning intimate labour economy --from long-term care homes and daycares to spas, strip clubs, and massage parlours. Asian Canadian women’s erotization, sexualized exoticization and hypersexualization teem in personal ads sections of many local newspapers, social media posts, advertisements, and mass media – from Hollywood movies, e.g. The World of Suzie Wong, to high-culture operas, e.g., Madame Butterfly, and popular musicals, e.g., like Miss Saigon.
Racist and sexualized representations in global media find structural roots and historical support in Canada’s immigration policies that created racial logics based on ethno-racial groups considered “desirable” and “less desirable” to Canada’s national project. Exclusionary immigration policies -- from the 1885 Chinese Immigration Act that imposed a head tax on Chinese immigrants and restricted South Asians and other “Asiatic” newcomers to the 1952 Immigration Act, which restricted migration based on nationality, ethnicity, culture, and place of origin. Asians have also been excluded from mainstream society, such as Japanese Canadians’ internment during the Second World War, or included but made invisible, such as the systematic recruitment of Filipinos as domestic workers and live-in caregivers since the 1980s. These policies created ethno-racial hierarchies tempered by the Official Multiculturalism Policy since 1971.
Under multiculturalism, still, racialized bodies of color are continuously imported, procured, and recruited from Asian countries in the Global South, such as the Philippines to fill Canada’s labour market needs. Despite their critical significance to keeping the Canadian economy afloat and operational, Asian workers, especially in the low-wage service industry, are considered dispensable, their labour cheap, their presence temporary, and their work conditions precarious. Some suffer preventable accidents or meet untimely deaths.
We mourn -- angry, sick, tired, and heartbroken -- by these senseless murders and hate crimes fueled by anti-Asian racism around the world. However, our grief and indignation mean nothing, if not matched by vigilance and stronger resolve to work with all Municipalities in Metro Vancouver, as well as Indigenous, Black, and other People of Color communities to support ongoing community-based efforts in promoting the health, safety, and well-being of our City residents, particularly girls, women, trans peoples, LGBTQ+ communities, the working poor, temporary foreign workers, migrants, and the most vulnerable in our societies.
We call on all levels of government; our non-governmental organizations and community groups; our schools, colleges and universities; our churches, temples, mosques and other faith-based organizations; as well as the international development and human rights community to find lasting, effective and permanent solutions to our systemic problems of poverty, marginalization, social inequality, and oppression. NPC3 hopes to contribute to these efforts through artistic, cultural, and educational programs that challenge harmful racialized gender stereotypes and promote community-based cultural responses to racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, intersectional oppression, and gender-based violence.
We hope to work with Indigenous, Black and People of Color communities and allies across races, ethnicities, nationalities, gender identities and expressions, sexual orientations, and cultural backgrounds in developing cultural-educational policies and programs informed by empathy, care, and compassion.
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