Lately, politics seems like a competition of who can toot their horn the loudest. Even our own CAUSE speakers warn us, “You must be able to put yourself out there, self-promote! It feels uncomfortable, but that’s the only way you can make it!” And yet on Friday, I made the ugly discovery that so many things happen outside of the public eye, things that should make waves, but instead happen without causing a ripple.
During my first day interning at the CAUSE Office I was asked to look at the 2021 Annual Report, and I saw the term “redistricting” repeated over and over, but I couldn’t quite grasp what CAUSE had accomplished. I simply had the vague notion that CAUSE had succeeded in something fairly significant. Little did I know, the very people I had begun to grow comfortable with, Nancy, Farrah, Charlie Woo, Juily Phun, mobilized activists across the country to save the Southern Californian Asian American community from losing essentially all representation in Congress. I was stunned that not only was it possible for our electoral power to be taken overnight, power we have taken centuries to amass, but even more shocking, the person who suggested the idea was an Asian American woman.
That gave me pause. I didn’t believe she was delusional. I thought, “No member of our community would ever suggest such a thing without justification.” It turns out, she was advocating to divide the Asian-American-majority district in half based on socioeconomic class, so that low-income AAPI families would be grouped with other low-income POC, and the same with high-income AAPI. Suddenly, I began to understand. Perhaps more than any other factor, socioeconomic disparity ruptures our community. Asian Americans have the largest wealth gap out of any racial group in the country, and that means that low-income AAPI have often expressed feeling unseen and unheard by the wealthy AAPI who claim to represent them in film (ie Crazy Rich Asians), in data, and in government. I could see why someone might believe it would be for the better if we split up based on socioeconomic class.
But Nancy and Juily, who led the workshop, firmly believed that would be a mistake, and it made me reflect on what it means to be Asian American, or what it means to believe in my Asian American community. What I heard from Nancy and Juily was both a determination and a fundamental faith that we, in all our disparate needs and vulnerabilities, were stronger together, that we could and would solve our issues together. Though the rich diversity of our community makes it feel daunting, overwhelming, or at times even pointless trying to solve issues for the whole AAPI community, it is also what makes us powerful: it is our community members who open our eyes to completely different lifestyles and world views, who come to the table with different tools and networks, who somehow find themselves fighting for and with people who could not be more different from them.
I also believe that Nancy, Juily, Farrah, and Charlie were fighting for our agency. It doesn’t even matter what party or policy we vote for if the Asian American vote isn’t numerous enough to make any difference. Juily explained that “it wasn’t about Judy Chu, and it wasn’t about Young Kim, it was about our voice being heard on a federal level.” And in fact, through their redistricting efforts, they saved both seats, one Democrat and one Republican. Juily added on, “Just because we’re both Asian American doesn’t mean I expect us to vote the same way. And just because you’re a person in power who looks like me doesn’t mean I’m going to agree with you. But representation matters because if there are enough of us at the table, you don’t have to speak for the whole community, you don’t have to pretend like we’re a monolith that can be represented univocally. And that’s why we need more of us in office, in the halls of power.” Again I heard that faith in community. They were not pushing their personal agenda, but rather simply trusting that we were better together, that we would benefit our community simply because we understood our own communities best.
I walked away from Friday’s session with that sense of wonder in my heart that CAUSE has gifted me many times over the past three weeks. Of course, I was horrified that such a monumental battle for power happened so quietly and suddenly, that we were so close to losing decades worth of community organizing and mobilizing. But even more so, I was amazed that it was the very people around me that saved us, who were alert, determined, and well-connected enough to get the maps redrawn. I learned it takes a nationwide army of passionate, civically engaged community members to preserve our power, while it only takes one person to lose it all. But Juily and Nancy weren’t discouraged, they were fired up. They came out of hours of frustratingly slow redistricting committee hearings with their fighting spirit still flaming, and I recognized that their zeal was rare but so necessary in this long fight. Watching them win this unseen battle, I felt both assured we had such powerful warriors fighting on my behalf, and inspired to continue looking for my own way to fight for my community.
