In the spring term of my senior year, I should be enjoying my last few months of being a high-schooler. Instead, I feel compelled and, in a sense obligated, to write to the Monitor about the events of March 16 in Atlanta, Georgia. As I browsed the Monitor’s website, I was incredulous at the mere three articles about the shooting and hate against Asian people, articles which were overshadowed by pieces about the number of grocery stores in Concord.
Even worse, only one of the three was from the perspective of an Asian woman and even that was a “machine generated transcript” of a radio interview. Maybe this is a symptom of the larger dismissal of the Asian and Asian-American experience in America. Certainly it is a symptom of a larger problem in New Hampshire.
It is not enough to simply state the facts of the shooting or simply state instances of hate against Asian people in other places. To put it bluntly, there is not just racism elsewhere, there is racism in New Hampshire, in Concord. So, with the lack of attention towards stories about Asian discrimination in our own community, I’ll offer up my own. Although I lived in Texas and Maryland where I dealt with microaggressions, it was last year in New Hampshire that I experienced blatant, overt racism for the first time in my 18 years of life. It was a Saturday, my white friend and I were strolling down Main Street, on our way to Gibson’s when a car driving toward us began to slow down. My heart began to pound, as some primal instinct informed me that something about this situation felt off and potentially dangerous. The window rolled down and a man stuck his head out the window. The color drained from my face and a coldness crept into my fingers. He shouted, “Ew, she’s going to give me the coronavirus” and drove away. Perhaps counterintuitively, I felt relief.
When I saw his window roll down, all I could think was, did he have a gun? At the time, I convinced myself that was an overreaction. Now, especially after March 16, I’m not so sure. Of course, after I regained my senses I was utterly mortified as my white friend stood with her mouth agape. All she could muster was “well that was racist.” I didn’t have a much better response and simply nodded my head and kept walking. This event occurred on Feb. 3, 2020, back before the pandemic severely hit the U.S., back when school was in session, and back when everything was relatively normal. Subsequently, I don’t believe this incident can be merely chalked up to the general increase in hate against Asian people during the pandemic – which at that point, hadn’t officially begun (and which in itself is an excuse for people to express their racism) – as much as a symptom of larger racism in New Hampshire, a 93% white state, according to the U.S. Census Bureau in 2019.
For all of my life, I’ve attended predominantly white schools and lived in predominantly white neighborhoods, trying desperately to assimilate and doing a pretty good job too. It was this event in New Hampshire which showed me that regardless of the Nike Air Force Ones I wear or even my birth certificate, a large portion of America will still see me as an Asian foreigner. With this unchangeable fact realized, I’ve leaned into my identity and community within the past year and written about the scarcely expressed Asian-American experience. I encourage the Monitor and readers of the Monitor to do the same: instead of stopping at simply recognizing the national issue, dive deeper, examine the local community for the instances of discrimination your fellow Granite State people of color and even more specifically Concord residents of color suffer everyday because it is our state and our town that we must take responsibility for. After all, this is the Concord Monitor and we are not just U.S. citizens, we are also Concord residents. So, why is it that we are focusing on everyone else but ourselves?
(Victoria Chen lives in Concord.)