Portal to Liberation
A World Free From Police, Prisons and Borders
The Portal to Liberation is a continual campaign to challenge the current police state and culture of policing in order to conceptualize a world without mass incarceration, immigration and deportation for San Diego Asians. Through action and education we will push our community to deepen our commitment to ending the structures that threaten Black life.
Since its early beginnings, Asian Solidarity Collective has navigated between dialoguing/uplifting our own struggles and showing up in solidarity with the Black community. Arundhati Roy called this pandemic a portal, where the inadequate, violent world we’ve known is disintegrating, making way for a new world we must conjure for ourselves. In this new world, we see San Diego Asians as compassionate, capable beings able to hold space for our unique experiences of mass incarceration, immigration and deportation, while simultaneously fighting to abolish the police state and the culture of policing that threatens Black life.
Through focus areas of action, political education and digital organizing/mass education, we will enter this portal leaving our indifference and anti-Blackness behind us.
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In this moment of global uprising, we must wage revolutionary love by embracing the humanization of one another including our own struggles.
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We must choose to be on the right side of hxstory by centering those on the margins of our own communities, by being in solidarity with Black communities in demanding the defunding of police and by showing up for the freedom of all BIPOC communities.
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Together, we are a force that can combat anti-Asian racism, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, Xenophobia, and all forms of oppression.
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More than 40% of migrants in the U.S. come from Asia. Out of 18 million Asians in this country, more than 1.7 million are undocumented and Southeast Asians are 5 x more likely to be deported for criminal convictions. It is clear that Asian communities are also highly impacted by mass incarceration, immigration and deportation.
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Within a span of 5 months between 2019-2020, 2 Filipinos, Dennis Carolino and Toby Diller, were killed by the San Diego Police Department. In May 2020, a 74 year old South Korean man died by suicide while in the custody of ICE. These tragic incidents are not isolated. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and ICE are deeply entangled with the Criminal Justice System through unmeasured programs that give ICE access to jails. The collaboration between ICE and the Criminal Justice System was forged to uphold an inherently anti-Black and anti-Indigenous system. It is critical that we continue to build a mass united front for our shared liberation.
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By being in solidarity with BIPOC communities we not only fight white supremacist heteropatriarchy, we also show our humanity for one another as we build collective power and action towards collective liberation.
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We can and we will create the society we aspire to become and live in, by putting transformative justice strategies into practice.
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We are in this hxstoric moment where we must reimagine a world without bars and borders. We must support the call from Black lives that guide us into an abolitionist framework to divest from the prison industrialist complex, law enforcement and ICE. In solidarity with BIPOC communities, we will create alternative practices such as restorative healing spaces and transformative justice approaches that model a world free from the police and the culture of policing.
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Collectively, we will ride this portal towards our collective liberation.
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Our movement-leader ancestors including Grace Lee Boggs, Yuri Kochiyama and Black feminists and abolitionists have led us to this moment of collective struggle. We will honor them by learning from their legacy and continuing the passage towards our collective freedom.
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Asian Solidarity Collective mourns and is in solidarity with Black people and communities who are outraged and hurting by the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the police. We condemn all actions of not just the Minneapolis Police Department, but the state-sanctioned violence that Black lives have continuously faced for hundreds of years.
Asian Solidarity Collective firmly believes that the system we are under is historically rooted in white supremacy and heteropatriarchy where anti-Blackness is the fulcrum and the blueprint to how it functions. The origins of policing was predicated in slave patrols where white men patrollers policed Black ex-slaves as a means to continue to keep them under control. It is with this foundational understanding that we ask our Asian American communities to join us in solidarity to push back against the systems of white supremacy that are in place that have taken the lives of George Floyd and countless of Black lives, including Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and Tony McDade.
We must be in solidarity for Black lives and understand that our freedoms are bound together. If we understand that all forms of oppression are connected, then we must move in collective action with the understanding that “when Black lives are free, we all get to be free.” We must know that our attained privileges that we benefit from are from the result of the Civil Rights Movement, Black liberation movements, the legacy of Black abolitionists, and Black feminists. It is through ancestral guides, like Yuri Kochiyama and Grace Lee Boggs who were committed to solidarity and movement building, that we are moved to do more than just show up, but actively work to address anti-Blackness within ourselves and within our communities.
We must come together as a community of co-conspirators to further our commitment to action and show up for Black communities across the country - demanding justice for George Floyd and all victims of law enforcement. We must do so not just because we know that all forms of oppression are connected, but because we move in the spirit of revolutionary love that values Black lives. We must choose to struggle for our collective liberation.
We are moved by the actions that have sparked across the country and we believe that these actions are a righteous act against the systems of oppression that have unjustly, violently harmed, and murdered Black lives. We call upon our Asian American communities to take heed to their demands for justice. Furthermore, it is imperative that we, as Asian Americans, stay dedicated to cross racial-solidarity and intersectional building. It is when we work together with Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color communities that we can truly move towards liberation.
Asian Solidarity Collective is actively working with diverse coalitions in San Diego that we have built since our inception, making sure that our struggles intersect, interweave, and interject against systems of power, privilege, and agency. We support the various actions our partners in the struggle have laid out and continue to build those support by welcoming others to join these movements. We encourage the Asian and Pacific Islander communities to join both the county-wide and nation-wide movement to address the violence against the Black community as well as support those who critically make the interjection of intersectionalities. We encourage everyone to donate to organizations that centers Black identities and Black communities in San Diego such as March For Black Womxn San Diego, We All We Got San Diego, and the Dede McClure Community Bail Fund. We move with the pace of trust and the pace of the community, encouraging and empowering others to join the journey for liberation, to create a just and supportive community, and to deconstruct systems of oppression that have too often targeted Black lives. This, in the words of Black Lives Matter, is “not a moment, but a movement.”
Asian Solidarity Collective's Statement
in Solidarity with Black Lives
Portal to Liberation Endorsers
