On February 21, 2021 The Loft hosted More Than A Single Story: Crossing Generations & Racial Lines featuring Douglas Kearney, David Mura, Alexs Pate, and Bao Phi.
This panel presented two generations of collaborations between African American and Asian American male literary artists. The intersections between these four artists explore how poetry and literary culture can form new relationships and understandings and new forms of dialogue between their respective communities. diaCRITICS is proud to publish a transcript of this panel, edited for clarity.
Throughout June, we’ll be publishing this conversation in parts. Read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
Bao Phi: I want to touch briefly on what Alexs was saying. A lot of people are part of these friendships and like not just Black and Asian, Native, Latinx. There’s a lot of cross-racial, but I want to say that you’re right. People don’t talk about this enough unless we’re at each other’s throats, if we are at each other—
Alexs Pate: If there’s an incident.
Phi: Right. If we are at each other’s throats then no one will shut up about it.
Pate: Right.
Phi: Suddenly it’s all about Black and Asian people if something messed up happens. But like our actual friendships, no one—you’re absolutely right—no one brings it up.
Pate: It’s really important that we hold on to that and that is the thing that should be proselytized. That is the thing that should grow because—and it can grow and it does grow. It’s growing on campuses all over the country now. It is in various different communities and it doesn’t get talked about. We’re always waiting for that one moment when things go bad and it’s not just one moment. I don’t mean to minimize that either. The violence and the inappropriate behavior and all of that race stuff that is interracial needs to be dealt with. It needs to be done, but it needs to be dealt with by us, like as a part of a community and a family.
I just wanted to go back to this surreal [question]. I didn’t really have a surreal moment, David, until I remember making the film. So we’re being directed by Arthur Jafa [AJ], who’s now a major, major, major auteur in the world, and he filmed our movie, Slowly This. He went to Manhattan and he rented out a restaurant that was our set, and it was the people who were there. I mean, help me remember. Julie Dash was on set, Isaac Julian was on set.
David Mura: Bell Hooks.
Pate: Bell Hooks was on set. Tthere were at least two or three more—
Mura: And Jessica H on was on set.
Pate: Jessica H was on set. The way he did his work, he just peopled them around us. They were at the bar. They were at the next table and the focus was on sort of dinner with Alexs and David, sort of My Dinner with Andre. My Dinner With Andre is one of my favorite movies, so I can’t compare, but the point was that was surreal. we didn’t even know AJ or we didn’t know what AJ would eventually rise to, but he was a mad filmmaker. He wanted David to look like…
Mura: Chow Yun-Fat.
Pate: Chow Yun-Fat. He had David set up. He costumed him exactly that way. It was the most surreal time that I think I’ve spent in our process.
Phi: Quick story! We went to like a Perkins or a Baker Square after an Asian American Renaissance gig, and we’re sitting there and there’s this group of younger Asians sitting at another table. They keep looking at us. I’m like, “OK, what’s about to go down here? Eventually, as we’re about to leave, one of the young dudes rolls up to David and says, “Excuse me, are you Chow Yun-Fat?” And we all stood up, we all busted out! This was like the Baker Square and we all started busted out laughing at this dude standing there. And we can’t tell if he’s kidding or not and but then he says, “No, really, are you Chow Yun-Fat?” (laughs)
Mura: That’s how you know it’s not an “all Asians look alike” thing.
Douglas Kearney: Right, right. That’s a good case in point. So surreal. One surreal performance was being in that little studio. I don’t know where it was. A little studio out of out of town. I’m doing a recording for one of your mini CDs…that one didn’t get like that one—and you end up making the massive piece of refugiography. But doing poetry while Jose James was doing like vocal. He’s like reaching into the piano and playing the strings of piano. So that was a surreal performance. But I want to say that one of the wildest performances we had was when we got that commission to do an ekphrastic response to the Russian avant-garde exhibit at the Weisman.
So we had gotten this commission and we sent out a couple of emails. They contacted us. They said, “We’d like to see some of the project as it’s developing. Can we have a meeting, like a phone meeting tomorrow.” And we were like, “Duh, yes we will, yeah. We could totally do that!” So we go to the email exchange. We should probably get together soon because the thing is in a week and a half, so we should probably make this thing. But we were doing these pieces and it was like responding to like Kandinsky’s work. Bao is doing these abstracted, like jagged polyrhythmic angular pieces that are so different from the kinds of things that he was doing usually and we were just in the moment responding to the work and the gig at that space, so it was just kind of, like that to me was a surreal performance. We were having, like the images were being screened on our bodies because we were all in white, so all the images of the paintings were being screened on our bodies and we did this like forty-five minute libretto that was for that. That was a surreal performance.
Phi: That’s when you know you made it. It’s when you’re doing shit that you think, “Oh this is what crazy ass white artists do—”
Kearney: Yeah. (laughs)
Phi: They usually get paid like fifty times what we got paid to do that stuff. But yeah, I remember that. That was nuts.
Kearney: That was. It’s fun though.
Mura: I’m gonna introduce another question because we talked about the ways in which oftentimes Asian American and African American relations are only heightened or focused on when something of a conflict arises.
When Alexs and I did our show, we were focused on the tensions between the Korean American community and the African American community. But then things like Yuri Kochiyama, who was a longtime activist in Harlem and who was friends with Malcolm X, she was there in the front row when Malcolm X was shot and cradled his body and there’s a photo in Life of that. She doesn’t show up in the film about Malcolm X. She’s erased, that connection is erased.
Recently, there’s been a rise in Asian American hate crimes because of the Trumpian rhetoric associating nations with the coronavirus. There was an eighty-four-year-old Thai man, Vichar Ratanapakdee, who was shoved to the ground and died because of the injuries, and ninety-one-year-old Asian man in Oakland who was also shoved to the ground. This has been highlighted because of these anti-Asian incidents, but also, the people who were arrested for these attacks were Black, right? Another thing on that is there’s a nineteen-year-old Chinese American, Christian Hall, was shot and killed by police in the past year in Pennsylvania. And Ben Crump, who is the lawyer for George Floyd’s family and many other families with deaths unfortunately by police, is representing them. There’s ways in which the incident can either heighten and pull us apart or bring dialogue.
It’s also the same with the suit about affirmative action at Harvard and Yale. I think the white people, in my opinion, use Asian Americans as a wedge to say this isn’t about race. So Asian Americans and certain portions of Asian American applicants and white applicants said that they were being racially discriminated against. My argument about that is that they work in white and Asian Americans because where do Asian Americans score the lowest? It’s not in grades, it’s not on test scores. it’s on personality, it’s on character, and it’s how our character and our personalities are judged to be less interesting, less likely to be leaders, less friendly, less people you want to have a beer with. But who’s doing these judgments? The white teachers, the white counselors, the white admissions people, right? Anyway so that’s in our—that pitted a certain portion of Asian Americans against African Americans. So I guess, what do you have to say about the ways that these tensions get highlighted, but also how we can talk past these things?
Phi: I appreciate spaces and friendships like this. I’m gonna touch on both.
Something that Douglas and Alexs have also both said is that these conversations need to happen as long as the end result is not one side or the other saying, “Oh you know what, you’re more oppressed, or like, you’re right,” those type of conversations, which I think is our current climate and that’s very disappointing to me.
For instance, with the anti-Asian hate crime stuff that’s happening, there are some Asian Americans whose response to that is very anti-Black and that should not be acceptable to us. We should not hate Black people. We should actually ask the question: how do Black people participate in Orientalism and anti-Asianness?” the way that we should be asking how Asian people participate in anti-Blackness. One of the police officers who was standing by when George Floyd got murdered was Asian American. Again, we shouldn’t hate Asian people for that, but we should ask Asian people, how do we participate in anti-Blackness.
What’s disappointing to me is that it seems like so many of the conversations have some type of hierarchy. Even the leftist Asian Americans that I kind of agree with, they use a lot of rhetoric and thought processes that de-center Asian Americans in this moment. There’s a way in which we can be critical and center our own communities in this moment without being anti-Black. I think we should be pushing towards that, but a lot of these conversations that I see coming from the left use rhetoric such as, “Well, now we know what Black people feel every day,” and I’m kind of like, who are you talking about? I’m 46 years old. There’s not been a day in my life where I have not walked out of my house and thought that my race did not make me some type of target. My parents—elderly, still in Phillips—they have those fears, too. Every day. So what Asians are you talking about when you say that? I’m not saying that our oppression is the same. It’s not. It’s not the same. But there’s a way in which we need to talk about how they’re different, not more or less, but that’s not happening and I feel like there’s this hierarchy where if you are an Asian leftist, you have to actually kind of capitulate and say all of these rhetorical things, which I just don’t agree with.
I don’t like the way that I see it and I wrote this to you all before is that we all—Native people, Black people, Asian people, Latinx people, Arab people—we all experience racism differently. This is the last thing I’ll say before I be quiet: Black people are portrayed as violent, aggressive, volatile, and so white supremacy teaches us that Black people need to be policed violently. That is what we are taught and people who are not Black participate in that. Everyone can. Concurrently we’re taught that Asian people are weak; we’re passive, we’re weak, we’re submissive, we won’t speak up for ourselves, we won’t fight back. Everyone who is not Asian is also taught that, right? And that is how we affect racism on our bodies. Again it’s not better, it’s not worse, right? The conversations need to go there instead of this whole, “I’m less oppressed than you, let me be an ally.”
With that being said, I do believe there are times when we do need to de-center ourselves and say like, “This is actually something that’s happening to Black folks right now and we need to stand with them unequivocally.” I believe that, but solidarity is not unilateral. Solidarity is not unilateral. There’s more to Asian people than being enemies or allies and I think that we all really need to take that in and I’m grateful for places like this to have conversations because I feel like I can’t have this conversation a lot of times, unless it’s people I really trust because I’m gonna be taken the wrong way.
Kearney: That becomes the question, right? What are we fighting for when we want to make sure that whatever negative experience we’ve had is the worst? I understand emotionally, and intellectually, and physically, affectively, however you want to talk, I understand that impulse. There is a sense that people get hurt. People are hurt and their pain is leveraged or mobilized…But the tactic of erasing other people’s pain isn’t going to help. To me, the point isn’t to be the one with the stick. It’s to get rid of the damn sticks. So if we’re just fighting, who gets to hold a stick? We’re actually not changing anything and this doesn’t come from nowhere.
One of the things I really appreciate about Bao’s statement is he talked about how we are taught and then how we pass that teaching on. I wanted to amplify something about that. We all receive some of the same messages about each other and ourselves so it’s not even strictly an act of “I don’t see myself that way” and “everybody else does.” We’re constantly grappling with what we’ve taken in and there are some people who are much farther along with that and they can completely understand that this is all external—what’s being thrown at them, how to perceive themselves, like no, that’s not me and there’s all kinds of ways that people have different sorts of experiences with that. But there’s a constellation because you can think anything you want about yourself, like nobody who is brutalized by a police officer is saying “you should brutalize me.” So I can have a self-perception that will define some of my experience, but community allows us to have a self-perception that can be reflected with care back at us. Eventually, we have to be able to look in any direction and see somebody who’s willing to reflect back to us who we are and we can’t do that in a world where there are more than one kind of person without looking at each other and hearing each other and seeing each other.
Like the fight that Bao and I had that was like the fight that David and Alexs had was over an event for celebrating Malcolm X’s birthday. They curated a show and Bao was on that show. Now I need to say something about this like right now because I think it’s important. I had been in the Twin Cities for like a year and a half. I hadn’t put no time, but I still felt entitled to have been in that performance. It was entitlement and all of that went on full display because I wrote this poem and it was just about, like you say now, like oh, “it’s just being in my feelings.” No, it was a destructive moment and Bao responded with his own poem. I remember maybe this is the most surreal experience. We read both poems at one reading, but that was a moment when I was actively pushing against an organization that was saying, “Malcolm X means something to Bao Phi, too. Bao Phi means something to the community for whom Malcolm X means something. Bring Bao Phi into this reading.” That was a moment when I would have been on some old, “Hey, how come it’s not me?” And for what? What would that have done?
So when I talk about “what are we waiting for,” it’s not abstract. I’m not coming at this academically. It’s the thing that we wrestle with. Ratanapakdee, when he was killed, when the teenager killed him, when the dude killed him, I saw it on the newsfeed and I immediately started texting Bao and I’m going to tell you, something in that moment knowing that I was reaching out to him. Suddenly, it was like, “Well, what am I going to say? What am I going to say? Is it his loss? Is it my place to be like, Yo, I’m sorry. That was messed up. I know it was a Black person?” Like, I’m not saying that in this moment as an example of anything I’ve unpacked. I’m saying that is the unpacking. That’s the work.
Contributors’ Bios
Douglas Kearney’s work as a poet, performer and librettist has been featured in many fine publications and venues in print, in-the-flesh and in digital code. His first full-length collection of poems, Fear, Some, was published in 2006 (Red Hen Press). His second manuscript, The Black Automaton, was chosen by Catherine Wagner for the National Poetry Series and was published by Fence Books in December 2009. In 2010, it was named a finalist for the Pen Center USA Literary Award in poetry. In 2008, he was honored with a Whiting Writers’ Award. He lives in the Valley with his family and teaches courses in African American poetry, opera and myth at California Institute of the Arts.
David Mura is a memoirist, novelist, poet, and literary critic. He has written the novel Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire and two memoirs: Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality, and Identity.
Alexs Pate is the President and CEO of Innocent Technologies and the creator of the Innocent Classroom, a program for K–12 educators that aims to transform U.S. public education and end disparities by closing the relationship gap between educators and students of color. The Innocent Classroom has partnered with districts and schools throughout the United States, training more than 7,000 educators. The success of the Innocent Classroom has led to the development of Innocent Classroom for Early Childhood Educators and Innocent Care training for healthcare professionals to build connections with their patients. Alexs is the author of five novels, including the New York Times best-seller Amistad. Prior to these pursuits, Alexs was a professor and teacher at Macalester College, the University of Minnesota, Naropa University, and the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast Creative Writing Program, where he also earned an MFA.
Bao Phi is a spoken word artist, poet, children’s book author, arts administrator, and father.
