Must Asian-Americans Cast Their Stones at Tou Thao?
In the midst of the Black Lives Matter protests, Asian-American writers and activists have flocked to urge fellow Asian-Americans to speak up in support of Black Lives Matter. Many argue that Tou Thao, an Asian-American officer who stood guard while Derek Chauvin suffocated and killed George Floyd, symbolizes Asian-Americans’ silence on racial strife in America. They cast silence as adjacency to whiteness, a miscalculated strategy of social mobility and position of privilege that only foments further harm against Blacks by playing to the myth of the model minority.
Arguing against silence, these writers fill Thao’s. Jeff Yang on CNN interprets Thao’s silence as indifference, avoidance, a sign of apathy. Sara Li in InStyle casts Thao’s inaction as complicity. Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt in Truthout characterizes it as “bystander syndrome.”
For Jeff Yang, the mirror image seen in Thao is one Asian-Americans must deflect: “His inaction was painful to witness — and a stark symbol of why, now more than ever, Asian Americans cannot afford to be voiceless watchers of this moment.” Thao is our other, the one we cannot be.
Similarly, for Larry Lin, Thao’s moment of inaction is his moment of awakening: “I confess that I, like the Asian American officer at the scene of George Floyd’s death, have been a part of the…
