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The Union Square rally was organized to form solidarity between the two communities, which share similar sufferings but have had a complex relationship that presented itself clearly at the event, according to Sing Tao Daily.

Photos courtesy of Sing Tao Daily

This story was originally published by Sing Tao Daily on March 22, and has been slightly condensed. Translated by Rong Xiaoqing.

A rally against anti-Asian hate crimes drew close to a thousand people to Union Square on Sunday. Among the many protests held in response to the shootings in Atlanta that caused eight deaths, including those of six Asian women, this one was jointly organized by young Black and Asian activists to form solidarity between the two communities, which share similar sufferings but have had a complex relationship that presented itself clearly at the rally.

The balmy weather helped draw a huge crowd of participants from all racial groups, with Black and Asian attendees making up the majority. Signs with words like Say no to anti-Asian hate and Hate is the virus were ubiquitous, and many held boards on which Asian lives matter and Black lives matter were written side by side.

Speakers from both communities emphasized that racism and white supremacism are their common enemies. One of the organizers of the event, a Black actor and screenwriter who goes by the name COFFEY, led the crowd to chant together in rhythm: Asian lives matter. Black lives matter. Your life matters. Our lives matter.

A lot of people dont believe in coming together. The first thing they do is the label out Blacks, and Asians too, as criminals. When [a] white supremist did this, they say he has a mental illness. Hell no! said COFFEY. We want you guys to live because we want to live. Thats why we are here.

Power Malu, an organizer and partner of Running to Protest, called for participants to stay together to keep fighting against stereotypes, even when the media attention wanes. He quoted Grace Lee Boggs, the Chinese American civil rights leader who married Black activist James Boggs and fought for equal rights for Black people until she passed away in 2015. The time has come to grow our souls, to grow our relationships with one another, to create families that are loving and communities that are loving, to bring the neighbor back into the hood, Malu quoted.

In a candid and powerful speech, Dao-Yi Chow, a Chinese American designer and one of the organizers of the rally, directly addressed anti-Black racism in the Asian community. The institutions that led to the murders highlighted by the BLM movement are the same that led to the shootings in Atlanta, said Chow.

We have to recognize our own anti-Black racism for decades, Chow added. We cannot be safe until everybody is safe.

The speeches received roaring cheers and reactions. Yuyi Jin, president of the Association of Guizhou, a township organization for Chinese from Guizhou province, said Black Americans have richer experience in civil rights protests and that the Black Lives Matter movement has offered a demonstration for Asian activists to follow. The most important thing is not the conflicts between different communities but the challenges of living in the U.S. for all, Jin said.

To Jie Li and Hang Chen, app-based taxi drivers from Fujian Province, anti-Black racism exists in the Chinese community but is not widespread. But they did notice that the Chinese community didnt stand up in large numbers during the BLM protests last year, either. Thats because the protests then were accompanied by some riots, and many Chinese didnt want to be seen as they were supporting violence, said Chen. Both vowed to support causes of the Black community more often. (City Limits note: While there were serious incidents of violence in a few areas of the city during last summers protests, the majority of protests were peaceful).

But not everyone feels the chasm between the two communities will disappear overnight. I have never seen a real solidarity. Its always that Black people lay the ground and others come to grab the spotlight, said Darryal Dashiell, who is Black and works in the movie and TV industry. Asians have achieved success in this country. What Ive seen more often is that Asians open shops in the Black neighborhoods and treat Black customers badly. If these protests can help us to put aside our differences and focus on our common interest, its going to be great. But I cannot see the hope now.

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In Wake of Atlanta Shooting, Black and Asian New Yorkers Rally Together Against Hate - City Limits

Aisha Ahmad-Post, executive director of the Newman Center for the Performing Arts, poses for a portrait at the University of Denver on Dec. 15, 2020. (Hyoung Chang, The Denver Post)

My first (job) interview was the week the pandemic shut down the world, said Aisha Ahmad-Post during a Zoom call, an I-know-I-know smile punctuating the seeming absurdity of that fact. She got the job, and her start date as executive director of Newman Center for the Performing Arts was Aug. 3.

Playwright and director Idris Goodwin, too, began his job as the pandemic surged and waned, surged and waned (sort of) and the streets were populated with citizens reiterating what should have been a no-brainer, that Black Lives Matter. He now directs the Fine Arts Center at Colorado College in Colorado Springs.

Hired in 2018, Caitlin Lowans had a little more time under her belt as the artistic director of Theatreworks before the pandemic changed everything. The notable Colorado Springs company was on the eve of staging An Iliad, its sixth show in her first full season of programming, when all hell broke loose.

This month marks the year anniversary of the moment when the gathering arts began to crumple under the weight of COVID-19. Throughout the pandemic, under the stewardship of Ahmad-Post, Goodwin and Lowans, the Newman Center, Theatreworks and the Fine Arts Center have stayed the course sharing performances, almost entirely in virtual fashion even as they have course-corrected. Each has been doing the work she/he embraced when they undertook their gigs: building community even in the midst of a community-bedeviling pandemic.

One of the highpoints of the Newman Centers 2010-21 season was supposed to be a visit by Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. It still was a highlight, as the March 5 virtual performance of Marsalis Democracy! Suite, by the famed jazzman and a septet gamely proved. Was it live? Not quite, but it was memorable.

This fall I started having some conversations with the Jazz at Lincoln Center team about a virtual performance, Ahmad-Post wrote in an email. At the time, we were gearing up for the election season and the Democracy! Suite was particularly fitting. As Wynton will tell you, jazz is all about listening, responding, harmonizing, point and counterpoint. Maybe we could all use a reminder about how to be in dialogue, in conversation.

Ahmad-Post, a classically trained musician turned arts honcho, has known of the Newman Center since her time in New York City, when she was producing the New York Public Library systems Live! artists series.

It has all the things that are exciting to me when I think about the role of a performing arts center, when I think about the arts in a regional metropolitan center, she said. Ahmad-Posts goals go beyond maintaining the high-profile tug of the acoustically impressive Gates Auditorium that lure artists of Marsalis caliber, but also support homegrown but globally known creatives like choreographer Cleo Parker Robinson and her dance ensemble. It really has its own thing going on, so what should that look like and what should our conversation with the national and international community look like?

The pandemic has given her room unasked for, to be sure, but valuable just the same to start answering those questions.

Before grabbing the reins at Newman Center, Ahmad-Post had proven she could guide an arts organizations grandest designs while nurturing its deepest values, helming the opening of the Ent Center at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs. The Ent is home to an art gallery, Theaterworks and an Artists Series.

The ambition of that project was enormous, says Ahmad-Post, who asked, How the Center could be part of the Colorado Springs resurgence and renaissance, especially in the arts.

That Ahmad-Post, Goodwin and Lowans share a relationship to the states second-largest city isnt lost on any of them. And the work theyve done has forced arts-loving Denverites to rethink any aversion to that drive south down Interstate 25. I think Colorado Springs is on the precipice of something really big with the arts and culture sector, Ahmad-Post said.

As for the Newman Center, beyond maintaining the high-profile tug of the acoustically impressive Gates Auditorium, Ahmad-Post intends on deepening the conversations between audience, venue and artists: giving local audiences more of a sense of their role in that equation.

I think theres a unique role for an arts center. How do you shape what a community is? How do you build empathy? How do you share stories that are highly specific and also universal?

Goodwin is no stranger to the Rocky Mountain West. He had been a professor at Colorado College for six years. During that time, his reach extended beyond the classroom: As a playwright and director, hed helmed productions at Curious Theatre Company and had his work performed at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts.

When the Black Actors Guild mounted a socially distanced but also virtual production of his hip-hop drama Hype Man last September, it was one of the few plays to be staged for an in-person audience during the 2020 fall season.

Being a professor was a great launch pad and foundation, he said of his time at CC. But I developed a real appetite for doing things in the civic space.

In 2018, he took a job as the producing artistic director of StageOne Family Theatre in Louisville, Ky. The organization introduces youngsters to the arts.

Goodwin and his family were living in Louisville when Breonna Taylor was killed by police. Being there this summer, during that (shooting) and also working in the cultural and civic space for two years its been a very surreal set of months, he said.

This American moment and his role in influencing the direction of a well-regarded multidisciplinary arts organization challenge him in ways he feels hes been moving toward his whole and varied career.

To be in the arts is really advantageous because were in the humanity business, were in the empathy business, the storytelling business, said Goodwin.

I came into my (job) interview basically saying, Are we just a building with some objects in it? Or are we more than that? Are we a conversation? Are we a lifestyle? Are we a cultural engine? Thats what I came in with. So then when we had to shut things down, it was a great opportunity to dig into that conversation.

An Iliad had been scheduled as the sixth show of Lowans first full season of programming, and was to open on March 12.

I was excited about it, said Lowans. Especially for the Springs, because of telling a story of war in a community, many of it comes from the military and veteran community.Lowans has become even more keen on expanding the communities that Theatreworks speaks and listens to.

In the intervening months, Lowans and Theatreworks juked and tweaked. In October, they presented monologist Anna Deavere Smiths House Arrest: A Search for Character In and Around the White House, past and present, having paired eight directors with eight performers for Zoom rehearsals.

For the last two weekends of February, Theatreworks experienced the fruits of all that pivoting. The Mitten: a Midwinter Puppetry Fable, created by JParker Arts and Katy Williams Designs, brought together a lovely, diverse group of puppeteers (across the race, gender, theatre discipline, level of experience spectrums), Lowans wrote in an email. And the warm response from the audience made me hopeful for the interdisciplinary adventurousness of audiences to come. The show sold out.

An Iliad is back on the companys slate for a late spring/early summer production in 2021. Whether it will unfold indoors, outdoors or virtually has yet to be confirmed. Before that, Theatreworks is providing two more pieces in its Sunday series of free virtual readings: Kate Hamills adaptation of Little Women, (April 11) and Aubergine by Julia Cho (May 16).

Lisa Kennedy (lkennedywriter@gmail.com) is a former film and theater critic for The Denver Post.

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Is Colorado Springs' theater scene on the cusp of something big? - The Know

LEWIS HAMILTON will be allowed to continue his anti-racism campaign ahead of F1 races this season.

Last year, the reigning world champion used the moments ahead of the national anthems to highlight causes, such as the Black Lives Matter movement.

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Hamilton also wore a t-shirt bearing the words "arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor" at the Tuscan Grand Prix to raise awareness of the woman who was shot by police in her own home.

Hamilton also chose to take a knee before the races but his decision was not universally copied, with six of the 20 drivers choosing to remain standing.

There was some criticism that it diluted F1's We Race As One campaign, used to promote anti-racism and equality.

The issue was raised by F1's new CEO Stefano Domenicali during testing earlier this month in Bahrain and the sport will make some tweaks to its pre-race procedure.

The rainbow will be dropped from their message and the sport will use time on the grid to raise awareness to a number of issues, such as sustainability and diversity.

However, drivers have been told they are free to express themselves during the message.

That means Hamilton can again take a knee if he wishes to do so.

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An F1 spokesman said: "The whole of Formula 1 is united in its support for #WeRaceAsOne and the drivers will all show their own support for the initiative ahead of the grand prix.

"The drivers will be free to show their commitment in their own way before the race and there will be no requirement for them to make a specific gesture.

"The important thing is all of them being together in full support of our initiatives on sustainability, diversity and inclusion and community."

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Lewis Hamilton will be allowed to continue anti-racism stance and highlight Black Lives Matter by F1 chiefs... - The Irish Sun

(Jon Chase)

The toxic consequences of drawing a crude line between Americas past and the state of our modern institutions cannot be understated.

In a blog post this past summer on Medium, progressive activist Tim Wise compared the supposedly self-evident existence of systemic racism in the United States to Isaac Newtons First Law of Motion, which asserts thatevery object will remain at rest or in uniform motion in a straight line unless compelled to change its state by the action of an external force. Wise suggests that since historical events and patterns leave legacies, the United States legacy of racism has a sort of inertia of its own.

Unfortunately for those such as Wise, the dubious notion that modern racial inequalities are intrinsically tied to a larger historical narrative of endless racism turns out to be at odds with reality.

Of course, the clearest error in thinking is apparent from the very beginning: Why would anyone believe that systemic racism behaves in the same way as a law of physics? Not only is the social reality of American life more complex (and infused with endlessly more variables) than a cosmic principle, there is also extensive evidence to suggest that a variety of institutions have taken steps to eradicate racial bias. Some examples include:

I could go on; however, the main point is crystal clear: Why would a system designed to threaten the well-being of racial minorities also take such concrete and extensive steps to help them?

Furthermore, what is to be said about racial disparities in which black individuals outpace their white counterparts, such as when black applicants for medical schools are accepted at higher rates than white applicants? Does this serve as evidence that such systems were designed to be unfair to whites? Just as it would be absurd to make that claim, it is equally preposterous to deduce that every system in the United States is racist simply because of a. the existence of disparities and b. various historical facts about the country.

On the subject of history, a detailed examination of various American systems and their origins might be of use to those who assert that racisms inertia continues to metastasize in our current institutions. Perhaps the most easily identifiable example is the founding of the United States itself, which, according to many on the Left, ingrained systemic racism into the very fabric of our society. While it should come as no shock that there are explicitly racist clauses within many of our countrys early documents, various other texts were written to prevent the spread of racist practices. Take, for example, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which was purposefully designed to stop the spread of slavery to western territories. As Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen explain in their book, A Patriots History of the United States:

When the individual initiative [to free enslaved people] did not suffice, Northerners employed the law. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the first large-scale prohibition of slavery by a major nation in history, would forbid slavery above the Ohio Rivervirtually all these men [the founders] believed that slavery would some day end

A preponderance of historical evidence suggests that the very men who designed allegedly racist systems in the United States eventually established policies that gave way to the end of slavery, despite living at a time in which slavery was commonly practiced around the world. The fact that the Founders laid the foundation for future abolitionists such as President Abraham Lincoln speaks volumes about the competing intentions of the United States founding. Such facts fly in the face of the racist inertia argument. The origins of Americas institutions are simply too complex to have moved in a singular direction, with such quantifiable and longitudinal consequences.

Additionally, claiming that entire institutions are sinister by design disincentivizes people from using those same institutions to their advantage. This becomes clear when examining the history of relations between ethnic minorities and the police, an institution often accused of being forever inextricably linked to its allegedly racist roots. As Thomas Sowell notes in his book Ethnic America, many ethnic minorities did not make sizable gains until they cooperated with police to lower crime in their towns and neighborhoods. Regarding Chinese Americans in the early 1900s and their interactions with the criminal group known as the tongs, Sowell writes:

The[c]ompanies ordered their member merchants to refuse to pay more protection money to the tongs. Chinatown residents began to cooperate with police in apprehending and prosecuting criminalsChinese festivals and parades received police protection and became civic events attracting large crowds of non-Chinese.

Sowell goes on to explain that the protection of Chinese communities by the police led to greater investments in education, which, in turn, increased the net worth of these individuals in the years that followed. Simply put, if the racist origins of American policing carried some sort of inertia with it, why did low-income Chinese immigrants with little educational background benefit so overwhelmingly from police presence in their communities?

The toxic consequences of drawing a crude line between Americas past and the state of our modern institutions cannot be understated. It is precisely this kind of pseudo-historical logic that legitimizes radical ideas such as the head startmyth, which claims that all white people are the beneficiaries of historical privilege, invoking the image of an unfair foot race between black and white people to make the point. Similar to the inertia argument, this myth falls apart once one realizes just how complex our nations history (or any nations) truly is. To be clear, many white privileges failed to benefit said people and often only exacerbated poverty. A prime example is the Homestead Act of 1862, a land grant that resulted in thousands of white farmers losing intergenerational wealth after failing to produce crops in the West.

When all is said and done, taking time to research the actual particulars of American history reveals something much more profound than a simple story of malignant design. The United States history tells the story of a nations struggle to uphold its own exceptional ideals, while, along the way, confronting evil institutions such as slavery, black codes, and Jim Crow laws. It should be abundantly clear that the burden of proof belongs to those making the claim that the United States is systemically racistand not to those arguing that American history is far too complex to make such broad generalizations.

J. Edward Britton is a composer and essayist. He is a graduate of Oberlin College.

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In Reply to Tim Wise: America's Past on Race Should Not Be ...

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