Black Lives Matter supporters seek backing from other minorities

Associated Press

NEW YORK

The latest deaths of black people at the hands of police led Jaime Sunwoo to undertake something she had always struggled with – a conversation with her parents about race.

After two much-publicized deaths in July, the 23-year-old Korean-American from Brooklyn showed her parents a crowd-sourced letter initiated by Asian-Americans specifically to urge others in their community to support the Black Lives Matter movement. Translated into Korean, the letter led to an unusual moment when Sunwoo’s mother talked “about our intentions for the movement and what we want to achieve,” her daughter said.

Sunwoo, who said her family did not discuss racial issues when she was growing up, said she had never articulated the ideas “so coherently and all at once” as the letter did.

That letter and similar versions in other languages have been circulating in an effort to enlist Asians, Hispanics and other minorities in the movement and to cast light on connections between different minority groups.

“A system that doesn’t value black lives cannot value Asian-American or Asian lives either,” said Jenn Fang, who writes about issues including Asian-American activism at the Reappropriate blog.

From the beginning, Black Lives Matter supporters have included protesters and activists of all races. In this latest campaign, minority supporters are turning to the people closest to them, trying to convince them that the movement is their fight, too.

Karla Monterroso, an advocate for increasing black and Latino representation in the technology field, helped write a letter in Spanish and English aimed at Hispanic communities.

The Spanish letter references the deaths of Anthony Nunez, Melissa Ventura, Pedro Villanueva and Alex Nieto, who were all killed in interactions with police. Their deaths did not receive as much attention as those of some black men whose deadly encounters with officers were caught on video, such as Alton Sterling, who died July 5 in Baton Rouge, La., and Philando Castile, who was killed the following day in a suburb of St. Paul, Minn.

For Latinos, “not being able to get their stories told around this leaves the black community alone in a struggle that is really shared,” she said.

Translating the letter into many languages helps bridge a gap between generations, Fang said, because members of an immigrant generation and those who were born and raised in the United States often understand the political world differently.