[This is a Virtual Ruby event. Nonmembers are welcome to join;  please donate if you are able! This event will take place over Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81688257402?pwd=cGdGYWRHSEUxbFhQQ01PUm0rbmNpQT09]

How can Asian Americans be better allies to the black community, and work toward realizing a world free of white supremacy? Asian-American Rubies, join us for a study group aimed at learning and growing together.

We're continuing our conversations as a study group, to delve more deeply into histories that we want to know more about, in order to better inform our allyship and antiracist work. We will focus on one topic per week (for example, history of groups working together across divides; what worked, what didn't, how did things end; bay area black history) and read texts/ watch documentaries/ educate ourselves more deeply on those topics. This August meeting's reading assignments are forthcoming. Please ask to join our Google group:

Cathy Park Hong writes, in her essay collection, Minor Feelings: “In 1968, students at UC Berkeley invented the term Asian American to inaugurate a new political identity. Radicalized by the black power movement and anti-colonial movement, the students invented that name as a refusal to apologize for being who they were. It’s hard to imagine that the origin of Asian America came from a radical place, because the moniker is now flattened and emptied of any blazing political rhetoric. But there was nothing before it. Asians either identified by their nationality or were called Oriental. The activist Chris Iijima said, “It was less a marker for what one was and more for what one believed.””

“Solidarity does not assume that our struggles are the same struggles, or that our pain is the same pain, or that our hope is for the same future. Solidarity involves commitment, and work, as well as the recognition that even if we do not have the same feelings, or the same lives, or the same bodies, we do live on common ground.” ― Sara Ahmed

We'll be looking to a few different resources and texts, including the Asian American Racial Justice Packet, Ellie Yang’s “Anti-Racism for Asian Americans” document, and more.