DETROIT, MI — A crowd of more than 100 people gathered in front of Spirit Plaza Saturday to listen to speeches and march in solidarity with a nationwide protest against hate crimes directed towards Asian Americans in the wake of the Atlanta spa shootings that left eight dead. Michigan Senator Stephanie Chang, D-Detroit, was one of the speakers in attendance.
“We’ve been through a lot,” Chang said. “Our communities know this history of oppression it’s not new and we know we are going to be able to get through this again. I am so grateful for this community for our strength and our resilience and I know we are going to be able to get through this.”
Sen. Chang went on to encourage the crowd to continue to speak up and to work together with different communities of color. She also referenced the media’s handling of the Atlanta Spa shooting.
“I also think its important to lift up that some of the media rhetoric has been around ‘well it’s a sex addiction’ or ‘it can only be race or sex.’ We all know that’s wrong,” Chang said. “We know that racism and sexism work together and we’ve seen it in our own lives. We know the fetishization of Asian American women is a real thing many of us have had to deal with that. That intersectionality is something we cannot forget and something we have to continue to talk about in a personal way because I think it’s really important for people to hear our stories and hear our own histories.”
Following the speakers, protesters marched on Woodward around Campus Martius Park twice and then listened to more speakers to end the evening.
This was the second rally the city held since the Atlanta spa shootings. Many protesters said they thought this could just be the beginning, including Martha Bryan, who said she was representing the Filipino Americans in Detroit.
“As our community, sometimes we think we have to stay quiet,” Bryan said. “We have to just take it and submit to all these things especially going with this model minority idea, so I’m glad we’re finally doing this because it’s time. “It’s time to stop the silence and to see the support of not just Asian people but everybody. “As a teacher of an inner-city school in Detroit it is important we speak up, educate and actively fight racism and injustice of all kinds for our current and future generations.”
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