How to Stop Asian Hate and Support our Asian Friends and Colleagues: an interview with Tara VanderWoude
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Tara VanderWoude:: speaker, advocate, and social worker, and her husband.
Anti-Asian hate crimes skyrocketed last year. How do we talk about the painful experience of Asian Americans living in the United States? What does it mean to create space to hear from and grieve with your Asian friends or coworkers?
Tara VanderWoude is a Korean American advocate, social worker, and educator. She speaks with power, insight, and eloquence about the challenges facing Asian Americans and how you can be a part of the solution, actively combating hate and showing support when it matters most.
You can find the Handle with Care: Empathy at Work podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and Spotify. And you can listen to the episode here…
Here are three key take-aways from my conversation with Tara.
The Asian American experience is all too often overlooked and under-acknowledged. How is your language compounding this sense of exclusion? As you talk about equity in the workplace and in culture, are you remembering to include the marginalization of Asian Americans? This was a personal take-away for me and I am going to be adjusting my language, moving forwards, to incorporate the Asian experience when I talk about excluded groups.
It really is THAT bad. If you are a member of a majority White culture, you have probably had the privilege of not thinking about the Asian American experience. As I listened to Tara, to the MANY stories she had of sexual predation and harassment, to the stories of threat and humiliation that her children have experienced, I realize there is so much going on that I have no idea about…and that is in addition to the awful violence populating our news page. Tara encouraged us, if you have a social media presence where you talk about things you care about, give voice to this reality. Help build awareness that Anti-Asian hate is not OK. I have linked resources in the show notes because remember, the Internet has a TON of helpful resources and you should not make your Asian friend the equivalent of a good Google search.
As a friend or coworker, work to pay radical attention to your Asian friend or colleague as they express feelings of pain. Allow them to express their feelings without forcing them to justify them (like an Interrogating Edward). Send a text, or a Starbucks card. And if you don’t know what to say, that is OK too. You can say something like, “I don’t even know what to say, but I want you to know that I hate this for you and I am here with you.”
