A Black Detroiter's image of the Asian in Metro Detroit, and what we all still have to learn

There's no way I could have ever met Steven Yeun when we were kids

Steven Yeun, Grace Lee Boggs, Vincent Chin

I did not have any meaningful interaction with anyone of East Asian descent until I was 18, my freshman year at Michigan State University. Of course, I had seen East Asian people in real life before, but never outside of a customer-service setting: Restaurants, beauty supply stores, laundromats. Maybe there were some at summer MIPA (a scholastic journalism program for high school students) camp in East Lansing, I can’t remember.

My schools in Detroit were almost all Black with some white students here and there and a smattering of Latinos — having not grown up in Southwest, I can count on one hand total for the latter. At Renaissance High School, there was one Indian chemistry teacher, Ms. Patel, and one Indian student three years above me. Arabic was taught as a language in some DPS schools, but I’m struggling to think of relationships that held any sort of weight with Arab Americans before I started at State. A distant cousin of mine who lived on the east side, and then the Macomb suburbs, married a Filipina in the early 1990s, and I have half-Filipino cousins that I’ve met maybe five times — once at said cousin’s funeral a few years back. One of my uncles in Ypsilanti is married to a half-Japanese, half-white woman, but spending my life growing up with the Detroit side of my family meant I wouldn’t really come to know my Ypsilanti side until my early twenties.

I’d say I’m part of the last generation that grew up in peak majority-Black Detroit. When I worked at the mayor’s office, one of the stories I loved publishing over at The Neighborhoods was about a young Arab-American woman who pushed Cass Tech, and later DPSCD as a whole, to consider not holding proms during Ramadan. This would’ve been unheard of in my grade-school years, but I’m not bemoaning that. But I am thinking about Black Detroiters, and what has shaped our image of Asian Americans regardless of nationality.

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One would think that a white supremacist massacre of Asian Americans would, in an instant, galvanize what’s allegedly a progressive nation, vaccinated, stimulated and finally out of the dark age of Trump, against any such attack of their own. One would think.

But this is America, which is not the land of the free, but is and always has been a land where freedom has a range of most to least. A land where we’re always in competition and comparison of who’s got what, and how we leverage it against each other.

Less than 24 hours after eight Asian Americans were murdered — and I will say murder, even if my J-school education asks me to wait for a proper trial and conviction first — in metro Atlanta by a white gunman with a stated grudge, we as Americans did not collectively call for stricter gun control, nor did we quietly gather with tea lights at our town squares. Instead, white people were told “here’s what you can do for Asians now” — as if this is the time and not the nearly two centuries Asian Americans have been American — and Black people were asked, if not demanded, to show solidarity.

That Black people have some misgiving about this unduly request is warranted, and should be understood and analyzed just as much as the context around why a bored white man having a “bad day” had Asian women in his crosshairs. The response to this call for solidarity was met with sentiments of “but what have Asians done for us?” and “aren’t they the ones killing us, too?”, rightly yet unfortunately so.

The relationship between Asian and Black Americans at-large has rarely been healthy. Usually one points to the murder of Latasha Harlins in Los Angeles by a Korean shop owner, a prelude to the Los Angeles riots of 1992. (Or, heartlessly, a clip from “Don’t Be a Menace to South Central Without Drinking Your Juice In the Hood” — you know the one.) That’s before you get into the local conversation in Metro Detroit around the ownership of beauty supply stores, nail salons and convenience stores, and who benefits from the Black dollar; the long-simmering tension between Black Detroiters and Arab-Americans, which I detailed in BLAC a few years back; and, of course, the largest stain in Detroit’s Asian American history, the murder of Vincent Chin by two laid-off white Chrysler employees.

Chin, who was Chinese, was blamed for the Japanese car industry’s increasing presence in the American automotive market. His killers were white. Still, though how many Black people do you know who, to this day, won’t buy a Toyota?

Black relationships with Asians are informed by trauma. And within the city limits of Detroit, where the vast majority of Black people in the region are born, raised and have their life experience molded, we only see Asians on TV and in movies.

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I tried to explain to a good friend of mine, half-Thai and half-English and only living in the U.S. for seven years, that until I made East Asian friends in college, I’d only seen them on TV.

I might be the only person in the world who had VHS tapes, fished out a bargain bin at the Kmart in Ypsilanti, of “Hashimoto” cartoons. “The Joy Luck Club” was a favorite movie of my grandmother’s. On “The Young and the Restless,” her favorite soap opera, it was revealed that Jabot Cosmetics scion Jack Abbott had a long-lost half-Vietnamese son from a short romance he had with a Vietnamese nurse while he served in Vietnam, giving America’s No. 1 daytime drama its first front-burner storyline with Asian characters. (They were dropped from the canvas after three years.) Bruce Lee lived in archival footage on pop-culture countdown shows, but I came of age just as Jackie Chan and Jet Li films started to dominate theaters. I never got into anime and manga and Pokemon, but a few Renaissance kids did — and one day, I’ll have to write a whole thing about the East Asian aesthetic integrating into the R&B of the time (hello, Dru Hill, Ja Rule and Christina Milian’s “Between Me and You,” Janet Jackson’s “Doesn’t Really Matter” video, and every female singer doing at least one performance in a cheongsam and chopstick hair accessories). Lucy Liu in “Charlie’s Angels,” Kimora Lee Simmons, and that’s about it.

So when Troy High School graduate Steven Yeun shouted out Taylor during the Academy Awards broadcast on Sunday night and gave every local outlet an easy pageview grab (did someone marginally famous say something nice about Detroit? Quick, to the CMS!!), I went back to my own life experience. I’m sure every millennial Metro Detroiter started to wonder last night — including one of my best friends from MSU, who is Korean-American and from Troy — if they’d crossed paths with Yeun at some point. Not me. Yet again, I’m only seeing him on TV. But I know I’m in a healthy contingent of people that never would’ve seen anyone like Yeun despite growing up only a few miles away from him.

I said I was part of the last generation of Detroiters who grew up in peak-Black Detroit. But that meant the suburbs during my time were comprised of everyone else not-Black. All I knew about Troy growing up was that Somerset and Kmart’s headquarters were there. My impressions of Taylor were everyone else’s: Taylortucky. Downriver. Off-limits to a certain kind of person, certain meaning Black. Don’t drive too fast down Telegraph, and all that.

There are plenty of Black people in Taylor now, but it still blows my mind because my formative years in Detroit were shaped by Black people only moving to your Southfield- and Oak Park-type suburbs. But last night, the image of Taylor (and Troy) projected to a national audience was not the Taylortuckian F-150 driver we might think of when we think of the suburb, but a gifted Asian-American actor up for one of the Academy’s highest honors.

(Oh, and what was the national image of the Asian American in Metro Detroit before last night? Ah yes, the positively uplifting “Gran Torino,” that one movie filmed in Minneapolis but took place in Highland Park and didn’t even have any Black people in it.)

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I am thinking, and increasingly angry as I get deeper in thought, about why I never knew about Vincent Chin’s murder until I was a sophomore at State and I just happened to be covering an anniversary held by the Asian/Pacific Islander student association for the student newspaper. I had heard the name Grace Lee Boggs in passing for years and didn’t put a face to the name, nor learn any real history about her, until well into my 20s. While researching songs written by Stevie Wonder for other artists, I only recently stumbled upon the singer Tamiko Jones, a half-Japanese, half-Black Detroit native who recorded for Golden World (and did a cover of “Creepin’” years before Luther Vandross).

Obviously, Asian Americans are everywhere in Metro Detroit. And I fault no one in particular for not having any education about their presence, beyond restaurants and stores, in the region during my formative years. But if anyone’s wondering why Black Detroiters, and perhaps Black people nationwide, are perhaps a bit chilly on #stopasianhate when we’re still trying to get Black lives to matter, consider our physical segregation in where we live, what little imagery of the Asian American experience we were given on screen and in culture at large, and why the majority of our interactions — thus far — were either violent, like the Harlins incident, or tense, like every time some of us go into a beauty supply and wonder where the dollar is going to.

Even though I went to a public state school for college, I recognize my privilege in having gone to college at all, and also acknowledge that I chose a career tract that gave me an opportunity to mingle with people from almost every background. Not everyone has that, and I’m certainly not saying that to brag — but instead contextualize why we still have a long way to go with Asian American (be they East, South or Middle East) relations across Metro Detroit. We can’t even begin to fix the rift between Black Metro Detroit residents and Asian Metro Detroit residents if we don’t even acknowledge that we’re both here.

I don’t know where it could begin. Maybe it starts with teaching Vincent Chin in history classes. But it also means that not every education about Asians should be revolve around trauma; Grace Lee Boggs’ influence on social justice is still widely unknown to the city at large, despite her titanic stature outside the state. (That could be said about a lot of Detroit things — hello, techno — but…another day.) I’m so glad Steven Yeun is here now so we can stop pretending that Jeff Daniels is the only good actor from here and riding his dick just because he went to Central and talks about it in interviews sometimes. I don’t know what else to say, and I’ve already said a lot, so I’ll just stop here.