April 2021 Newsletter - In Solidarity
In the wake of the shootings in Atlanta, I want to offer love to the Asian community. On Tuesday, March 16th, a Georgia man targeted Asian women working at massage parlors and killed eight people—including six Asian women. Here are the names of those who lost their lives:
Soon Chung Park, age 74
Sun Cha Kim, age 69
Yong Yue, age 63
Hyun Jung Grant, age 51
Xiaojie Tan, age 49
Daoyou Feng, age 44
Delaina Ashley Yaun, age 33
Paul Andre Michels, age 54
In the past year, there has been a painful global increase of anti-Asian violence and racism against the Asian Americans and Pacific Islander community. My heart breaks for AAPI women who have endured this uptick in crime against them in an already otherwise impossible year.
I want to offer my solidarity with AAPI neighbors and colleagues in the face of this violence and unconscionable harassment. It is vital that each of us vocally and loudly condemn anti-Asian racist violence and rhetoric.
AAPI physicians are fighting COVID-19 amid these rising incidents of racism. Published last year, Dr. Lindsey M. Zhang's piece, "Work in the Time of Coronavirus," is a timely and essential read about being an AAPI healthcare worker during the coronavirus pandemic.
I also want to highlight the work of my colleague, Dr. Carol Pak-Teng, whose organization APA EMerge works to accelerate the careers of Asian Pacific American physicians.
Further Resources to Support the AAPI Community
If you're looking for ways to offer support, please consider visiting the following links. Below are Asian Americans and Pacific Islander organizations currently accepting donations, training, and offering further education to stop AAPI hate.
Asian Americans Advancing Justice - Atlanta
Bystander Intervention Training to Stop Anti-Asian/American and Xenophobic Harassment
Around the Web
Asian American doctors and nurses are fighting racism and the coronavirus
“Across the country, Asian American health-care workers have reported a rise in bigoted incidents. The racial hostility has left Asian Americans, who represent 6 percent of the U.S. population but 18 percent of the country’s physicians and 10 percent of its nurse practitioners, in a painful position on the front lines of the response to the coronavirus pandemic. Some covid-19 patients refuse to be treated by them. And when doctors and nurses leave the hospital, they face increasing harassment in their daily lives, too.”
I Got My Covid Vaccine. Now Can I Hug My Mom?
“People want to know what they can do after they are vaccinated against Covid-19. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently shared guidelines for fully vaccinated Americans. The agency says vaccinated people can gather indoors in small groups without needing to mask. This includes meeting indoors with unvaccinated people from one other household as long as no one unvaccinated is at high risk for severe Covid-19.”
One ER Doctor Reflects on a Career of Being the Only Black Person in the Room
“Black doctors need to exist in order to be hired,” writes Adaira Landry, M.D., M.Ed., an emergency physician and assistant professor of emergency medicine at Harvard Medical School.
“At 35, I am now an emergency medicine physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a faculty member at Harvard Medical School. For the past four years, I’ve sat alone as the sole Black woman faculty member in my departmental meetings, committees, and clinical spaces. Like many other Black faculty in this country, I carry a burden to lead diversity and inclusion efforts, a task within medicine that typically falls on the very people who feel isolated and unsupported in the first place.”
How Are You?
How are things going for you this spring? What are you looking forward to the most once you and your loved ones are vaccinated? I’d love to hear from you. Please don’t hesitate to send me an email or connect on Twitter.
Love,
Tracy
