Hi everyone, I am Anika (and I am Renee) and we are two of the three leaders at Needham Highschool’s Asian Student Union Club. 

Anika: Today I wanted to talk to you all about what it means to be an ally. For those of us who are not a direct target of the ongoing hate crimes we have seen this past year, we must use our voices for those who are. We cannot wait for situations to get exceedingly horrific before we acknowledge that they need to get better. We cannot treat these hate crimes as a trend. But what we can do is show our support for our community and our peers by using our resources, like our social media platforms to educate and learn, and recognize that racism and hate crimes have been a part of our society long before the beginning of the pandemic. By standing up for our Asian brothers and sisters, we can finally acknowledge the real virus; hate. 

Renee: We should not be paying for someone else’s ignorance with our own lives. In a country supposedly built on justice and equality, there is so little of that apparent in society today. Hate is so common and this isn’t an issue that just the people targeted have to to deal with. This is a societal issue that needs to be addressed because it is all our responsibility as a community to remind ourselves and everyone around us that we are valued the same because we are all human, and that is why you are all standing here today.

So leaving here, rather than telling you to put yourself in other people’s shoes, I encourage you to stay in your own shoes and reevaluate yourself.     Before entering your classroom, office, restaurant, reflect on who you are and what you bring to create a loving community because in a society so clearly built on violence and hate you are the first step to the change we so desperately need. Thank you.

Hi everyone, thank you so much for coming out here today. My name is Allie Jiang, I’m a senior at Needham High School, but most importantly, I am a Chinese-American. I would firstly like to say that my heart goes out to the entire Asian community, I am sending so much love and support; the recent events in Atlanta are deeply saddening, but we must keep in mind that this hate crime is not an anomaly, atrocities like this one have been occurring for ages. There have been 3,800 + reports of hate incidents targeting Asian-Americans since last March which is a 150% increase in comparison to the previous year. It’s ABOUT TIME we addressed why these crimes are happening; the extreme xenophobia and white supremacy in our nation’s history have undoubtedly led to the multitude of hate crimes today. 

On Tuesday, March 16th, eight people, including six Asian women, were shot dead by a white man at three Asian-owned day spas in Georgia. And although the media currently fails to explicitly say it (because the media sucks), this is an undeniably racially-motivated hate crime fueled by xenophobia. The police, who later arrested the shooter, told law enforcement that he had a “sexual addiction”, while the Sheriff said and I quote: “The killer was pretty much fed up, at the end of his rope… yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did.” Reducing the shooting to the perpetrator having a “really bad day” because he wanted to “eliminate” a “temptation” from his “sexual addiction” ties into another problem: Asian fetishization. Asian women are tired of being seen as disposable, interchangeable, exotic, tired of being objectified. The culmination of racism and sexism that Asian women face leads to domestic abuse, exploitation, trafficking, and overall degradation of our bodies.

I would also like to add that the reason why hate crimes against Asian Americans are rarely ever talked about in the news, or in the media, is because we are constantly silenced. And part of the reason why we are silenced is due to the Model Minority Myth, which characterizes Asian Americans as a polite, law-abiding group who have achieved a “higher level of success compared to the general population.” And because of this so-called “success”, we aren’t able to speak out about our struggles because we should be so “grateful to live in a better country.” We have to address how Needham and surrounding towns have upheld the model minority myth. 

Ever since elementary school, I’ve been told to “go back to my country.” In middle school, I was called a multitude of slur words that I will not repeat. Microaggressions like “of course you’re good at math” started becoming repetitive. And especially in high school, racism towards Asians is seen as funny jokes. And it’s because racism towards our community is so normalized to the point where people can’t see the line between being racist and being funny. It’s the fact that in the entirety of my ten years being in the Needham Public School System, I’ve never had a unit or read a class book that focuses on Asian American racism. Do you see a problem here? We are not actively encouraging our students to be anti-racist in our curriculum. We aren’t having the necessary conversations with our younger students in the classroom.

People like me are tired of brushing off racism like it doesn’t exist. We are tired of sticking up for ourselves, only to realize that it’s no use. The Asian community is tired. To those of you staying silent during times like these, SPEAK UP. WE NEED YOUR VOICE. What can you do, you may ask? Well, the best thing to do is educate yourself. Read books, follow activists, and sign petitions. If you haven’t noticed a pattern by now, most of the issues in America root from an unjust system founded on white supremacy and misogyny. We all need to recognize and understand this in order to create change. And change will only happen if all of us come together as a community.

Hello everyone, My name is Veronica Hulbert and I'm a Senior at Needham High. I'm an Asian American, ¼ Korean and ¼ Chinese. Before living the states, I lived overseas in Asia for 8 years. 3 years in Hong Kong. 6 Years in Shanghai. It wasn’t until I moved to the states that I learned what stereotypes were. I quickly learned that because of my race I was "supposed to be good at math” I was "only supposed to get A's”. As a fifth grader, I had no idea what my peers were saying around me and if I was supposed to laugh along with them or let it pass me. Other names and slurs were passed around daily in my middle school as if it was NORMAL. As if these minority groups were OK with being targeted.The worst part about this all is that fifth to eighth grade me went along with these stereotypes and normalized them - despite knowing they were wrong and untrue. It felt hard to speak up against these microaggressions because there were so many other kids around me who jokingly threw them around everyday. 

But the purpose of the speech isn't for me to keep listing all the stereotypes and instances every other Asian American like me has probably gone through, the purpose is to see what needs to change. OUR EDUCATION SYSTEMS NEED TO CHANGE. And they need to change tomorrow. There can't be any more excuses saying that “it will take forever to change our education system" or "we don't have any power to change what we teach to our students”. As long as there is a student, a classroom, a teacher, there will always be room for topics revolving around equity and race. My whole idea is that we'll never truly grow out of our racist ways and thoughts if our systems today aren't torn down and rebuilt.That goes to our school systems, our government systems, our police systems.This applies to all the minorities and movements who have been targeted throughout history because of the corruption in the SYSTEM. 

If we don't want to normalize stereotypes WE must teach our younger generation early on the history our people. At school, we barely scratch the surface of topics that revolve around arising systemic racism and how that still plays out in our society today. For example, the 1882 Chinese exclusion act, the Japanese internment camps, THESE TOPICS were only briefly mentioned vocabulary at our school in History class. How can two major events that caused so much pain for so many Asian individuals be crammed together in a history syllabus as just another 50 vocab terms to study. 

We don't have enough units on how many terrible events lead to what our society has become today. I can only briefly remember two instances in my whole high school career that mentions anything about the microaggression and systemic racism towards Asian Americans. If we truly want to change the way for the future and stop all the anti asian hate, it has to start at the origin. It has to start by teaching our younger generation how all the microaggressions, stereotypes, racist treaties and acts created the hateful and twisted atmosphere that still makes many Asian americans stay silent. It's starts by changing our conversations in the classroom.

By speaking out against microaggressions. By letting your peers around you understand why something they said makes you uncomfortable. And making sure they understand why it's NOT ok to say racist jokes. By starting with these small acts we can move forward as a community to help better the younger generations so we don't have more hate in the future. And these acts need to start TODAY.