by Prosy Dela Cruz | Mar 27, 2021 | Anti-Racism
Part 2 of 2
“I see, above all, the pressing need to strengthen institutions, which are a vital reserve of moral energy and civic love. The hyperinflation of the individual goes along with the weakness of the state. Once people lose a sense of the common good, history shows that we are left with anarchy or authoritarianism or both together, a violent, unstable society.
We are there already; just consider the numbers of people who die each year from gun violence in the Americas. Since the outbreak of the crisis in the U.S., sales of guns have broken all records.” —Pope Francis, “Let Us Dream,” 2020.
“Where there shall be no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light; no noise or silence, but one equal music.” —John Donne, 2004
In 2004, Harry Eyres of the Financial Times wrote about John Donne, a clergyman and a poet, who confronted the terror of death and saw beyond it a vision of peace, addressing the memorial of a dead woman. Donne spoke at a service consisting of words and music, “the two resources which are all that we humans can or need to bring to bear in the face of death,” outside of London.
What if we bring to our daily consciousness how we want to be remembered at our deaths? Will we be recalled for our fears? Or our strength? Or standing up to hate crimes?
In America, “it has been a year of living in fear for their lives, Pres. Joe Biden said, “they’ve been attacked, blamed, scapegoated and harassed. They’ve been verbally assaulted, physically assaulted and killed.” The 46th US President spoke of six women of Asian descent, who died from a mass shooting, constituting a pattern of violence against Asian Americans: Xiaojie Tan, 49; Daoyou Feng, 44; Delaina Ashley Yaun Gonzalez, 33; Paul Andre Michels, 54; Hyun J. Grant, 51; Soon C. Park, 74; Suncha Kim, 69 and Yong A. Yue, 63.
Eight died from this tragic crime. The gunman, interviewed by Cherokee Police, was reportedly acting out ‘his sexual addictions’, had a ‘bad day’ and was charged by the prosecutor for the multiple murders.
Harry Eyres wrote of the dead woman’s husband of 50 years who got up not once, but three times speaking on the “strength, dignity and fullness of the wife he had admired and loved, while the son spoke of “his mother’s reticence and obliqueness combined with warm care and good sense.”
What if these were our default behaviors towards all in America, especially women and girls?
Unconscious bias of institutions
Archbishop Socrates Villegas, the head of the Philippines’ Conference of Catholic Bishops teaches us “that the design of human beings is relationships…our destiny is relationships – all of us are connected. We are designed to love, to serve, to forgive, to not be separated. Computers have designs. In every human being, there’s a design to embrace, to live together, to touch. God condemned living alone, and created a woman to keep man, company.”
A day after the 46th U.S. President Joe Biden was inaugurated, the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops (USCCB) wrote a congratulatory note, signed by Archbishop Jose Gomez, which criticized the incoming president for his support of women’s reproductive rights as policies of “moral forces of evil.”
Imagine as a woman, reading this, would you not feel less than?
This is the institution which equated taking birth control pills, as abortifacient drugs, and based on that unscientific information, propagated by an unvetted Filipina physician, it became part of a New Mexico’s bishop’s homily advocating against Obamacare, the same affordable health care services, that millions of Americans currently depend on. Would we have reached a million deaths now if without Obamacare, given this pandemic?
It leads me to question – is this institution, USCCB truly pro-life?
Somehow the Universe pointed me to get my answer. I attended the mass officiated by Bishop Pablo Ambo David, digitally streamed from San Roque Cathedral in Caloocan, Philippines, viewed online by thousands.
“There will never be a time when the Church will consciously choose anti-life, or it ceases to be a Church…but through slavery, colonialism, misogyny, bigotry, slavery, we may claim we are pro-life, but espouse anti-life tendencies. In the past, Christians saw nothing wrong with slavery. People can’t be so evil that they can kill a defenseless child in a mother’s womb. It is blasphemy to regard any being as inherently evil because the creator is God and looked at His creations as very good, after the image and likeness of God.
Although we are inherently good, we are capable of committing evil. That’s why I cannot believe any woman as depraved, intrinsically evil to harm her child. It’s a woman’s instinct to not cause harm on her kid, without causing more harm to herself psychologically and spiritually.”
Why did I react? I know a handful in my circle that opted for abortion for their ectopic pregnancies, where the fetus attaches outside the uterus, and if left to mature, would cause blood poisoning to the mother, while others aborted for cancerous tumors.
I also know of moms who chose their infant, even if it meant the loss of their own lives.
When I was hemorrhaging nine days after giving birth to my youngest child, and I was declared code blue, compelling urgent blood transfusions, I made my husband promise to prioritize taking care of my children, before all else.
Speaking the language of the heart, instead of hate
When Lee Isaac Chung received the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film for Minari, he said: “Minari is about a family trying to learn how to speak a language of its own. It goes deeper than any American language and any foreign language. It’s a language of the heart.”
Rumi, a poet, wrote, “It is better to speak the same language of the heart than speaking the same tongue.” In America, we have privileged the English language, yet the Census Bureau reports at least 350 languages are spoken in U.S. homes.
With these many languages, are we passing on a “minimization” of who we truly are? Or are we celebrating the multiplicity of heritages that our new generation is composed of? A friend’s grandchildren are Filipino, Chinese and American in ethnicities and are raised to embrace the richness of these cultures. In my own relations, one is Filipino, Chinese and American; while another is Filipino, Black and American and one is Filipino, Mexican, El Salvador and American in origins, all born in the United States of America.
Recently, the Antioch Police knelt on the neck of a 30-year-old Filipino American Navy Veteran, Angelo Quinto, for nearly five minutes, as previously reported in the Asian Journal. Had the Antioch Police restrained him as if their own family, would they have realized five minutes would kill him?
This was the same amount of time that four LAPD officers took to break the bones and the skull of Rodney King, after a high-speed chase for drunk driving. A bystander, who happened to have his new camcorder, also videotaped it. More than a dozen officers stood by and watched the beating. Even with that ocular proof, the officers were acquitted. The message was – “don’t trust what our lying eyes are seeing, as if it did not happen.”
The flames surrounded us, north, east and west. My children, then teenagers, got scared.
Rather than allowing their fears to grow, I asked my husband to take us near First AME Church. There, as we swept up the trash, the burnt debris, some still smoldering, hundreds of strangers gave smiles and some even gave hugs.
The federal government filed a civil complaint against LAPD officers, and a civil jury trial was held. The jury was headed by then foreperson Ester Soriano-Hewitt, the architect of the LA County’s Dispute Resolution Program. Two of these LAPD officers were found guilty and sentenced to prison terms. In a separate civil trial, filed by the federal government, two were acquitted and the LA City was held liable and awarded Rodney King $3,800,000 in damages.
But can monetary damage wipe out the trauma, the broken families, and generational theft of their futures with their loved ones?
Can we change our culture to dismantle racism, one family at a time?
Last year, during the pandemic, thousands marched in rallies in hundreds of cities in America and 20 countries abroad protesting the death of George Floyd, when Officer Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. That visible taking of someone’s life by a police officer, while his fellow officers stood by, was a betrayal of the public oaths they took. They have all been fired.
Chauvin faces a state trial for his actions and faces charges of second and third-degree murder. The Floyd family filed a federal civil rights lawsuit and the news recently reported that Minneapolis would settle for $27 million.
Recall the day when Joseph Ileto was mistaken for a Latino by a self-professed Aryan white supremacist, Buford Furrow? Furrow was an engineer who worked for several years for Northrop Gurman.
The tragedy was Ileto volunteered to work at the North Valley, when he worked in the eastside. He simply wanted to help another co-worker. He lived with his mother, sister and was the father figure to the family who had lost their father. Joseph often helped out with his co-workers.
Furrow opened fire first with 70 shots in the Valley Community Center, injuring three kids, a counselor and a worker. He drove miles from the center and when he saw Ileto had just delivered the mail, returning to his postal truck, he asked him to mail a letter. He then shot Ileto nine times. Furrow confessed he murdered Ileto, thinking he was Latino or Asian.
Ten years later, Furrow wrote a letter supposedly repenting, “I feel a life based on hate is no life at all.”
Ishmael, Joseph Ileto’s brother, has this to say: “It still hurts that our brother was taken from us and a letter won’t make up for that. It’s a positive thing that he’s saying he’s changed — it gives us some type of hope that people are able to rehabilitate themselves.
And that is a hopeful sign.” Even with two serial losses, a father and a brother, the Ileto family went to rallies nationwide to call for gun control and attended many high school trainings on hate crime prevention.
When we first heard this shooting on August 10, 1999 — we were shocked. We went to a Valley-based memorial, attended by mostly Jews, and we were one of the two Filipino families who attended. It led us to co-organize with the Asian American Legal Center and with Rachel Cometa Estuar’s “give it my all” leadership, as 25 community leaders, to mobilize over 40 groups and attended by over 400 folks. One of those leaders is the incoming Vice Chancellor Anna Gonzalez for Washington University in St. Louis.
Two memorials were held, one was a community vigil in the Japanese American Community Center and I invited my teenagers with their classmates to attend. It moved my teenage daughter to organize a hate crime prevention symposium at her high school and with the support of the teachers, the student body created an art project together.
Hundreds of square cloth fabrics carried the weight of traumatized high schoolers, later threaded together into a quilt, describing their bullying experiences and anguish at mistreatment at home. It became a wall mural, still hanging today by the principal’s office at Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies.
One day, my 6-year-old precocious granddaughter shared being punched in the tummy by her playmate. She was sleeping over in a relative’s house. Instead of an apology, her playmate rushed to her parents to reverse what happened.
I asked her to consider her playmate’s situation: What was causing her playmate to act that way. She knew right away and said, “Grandma she wants to be me when she can just be herself and be happy.”
I also told her she should not allow anyone physically hit or harm her, even if a friend or relative, and to let her parents know. She was in a sports camp when her personality briefly changed. She was irritable. When we talked about it, she said someone was hurting her.
Her diligent and conscientious father taught her a skill: go to him, look at his eyes and tell him, “Stop,” and walk away. She also reported it to the teacher.
That afternoon, her dad asked, “What happened at camp? Did you have a problem?”
“Papa, it worked. I did what you told me.”
Why did it work? She stopped the bully, by taking away the power to be over her. She claimed her agency.
One day, she said, “Don’t worry Grandma, I will not throw away my heart.”
“What happens if you throw away your heart,” I asked?
“When you throw away your heart, you become sassy and bossy. You hurt others, pinching them, hitting them in their tummy.”
She was listening to raised voices on television and told me: “Grandma, it hurts my heart and ears to hear shouting. I am used to kind and gentle voices, like yours.” I became teary-eyed and hugged her.
Footnote: This piece is dedicated to my first-born, Corina, my favorite, beautiful daughter, the mother of my 6-year-old granddaughter, from whom I am getting heart-widening lessons. Corina organized the hate crime prevention symposium in her high school and organized Asian Americans in her college. Today, she takes a multicultural network of family and friends, intergenerational at times, climbing mountains.
She also plays her cello as part of a diverse philharmonic group, which has gone silent because of the pandemic. She works as a paralegal at a century-plus old law firm that teaches her daily what it is to climb a mountain while sustaining a personal code of ethics and healthy lawful operational practices.
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The opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints of the Asian Journal, its management, editorial board and staff.
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Prosy Abarquez-Delacruz, J.D. writes a weekly column for Asian Journal, called “Rhizomes.” She has been writing for AJ Press for 13 years. She also contributes to Balikbayan Magazine. Her training and experiences are in science, food technology, law and community volunteerism for 4 decades. She holds a B.S. degree from the University of the Philippines, a law degree from Whittier College School of Law in California and a certificate on 21st Century Leadership from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. She has been a participant in NVM Writing Workshops taught by Prof. Peter Bacho for 4 years and Prof. Russell Leong. She has travelled to France, Holland, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Japan, Costa Rica, Mexico and over 22 national parks in the US, in her pursuit of love for nature and the arts.
#stophate #antiracism
by Prosy Dela Cruz | Mar 13, 2021 | Anti-Racism
“I confess that when I hear some speeches by someone responsible for public order or a government, I am reminded of Hitler’s speeches in 1934 and 1936. They are typical actions of Nazism, which with its persecutions of Jews, gypsies, people of homosexual orientation, represent a negative model ‘par excellence’ of a throwaway culture and a culture of hate. That’s what they did then and today these things are resurfacing. [We] need to be vigilant, both in civil and religious society to avoid any possible compromise…with such degeneration.”
Pope Francis, Nov. 15, 2019, as reported by Lauren M. Johnson, et.al of CNN.
“The prayer of the heart opens the eyes of our soul to the truth of ourselves as well as to the truth of God. The prayer of the heart challenges us to hide absolutely nothing.”
Henri J.M. Nouwen, “The Way of the Heart,” 1981.
“Hate starts at every house,” Maura Brito said.
Instead of nursing her wounds of indignities, Maura purged them from her heart, by sharing her woes with friends. Her weapons against hate-inflicted wounds are love, forgiveness, prayers and conscientious service to others.
Maura, a Honduran, is a caregiver to Inga, a 93-year-old German survivor who persistently pointed out daily mistakes and deficiencies, like how this object does not belong to this space. “Can you not remember?”
During Inga’s teenage years, she lived in Germany, under Nazism, fed with daily radio broadcasts of hating others, other than Germans. Might that daily diet of hatred towards others affected her adult tendencies?
When Inga’s children would visit, Inga and Maura busily cook dishes for them to share and take home. On Maura’s birthday, Inga also made a special torte for her. But, Maura’s daily diet consisted of occasional thank you and heavy doses of daily pointing out mistakes.
One day, Inga’s son helped himself to groceries, taking them home without asking his mother. Maura was accused of taking them. She felt so angry and declared how she was raised to value honesty.
How was the truth finally revealed? Inga’s son fessed up to his dishonesty. Maura came close to quitting many times, but renews her positive spirit through prayers, forgiveness and projecting her wish to the Universe — that her quality caregiving be paid forward to her blind mom in Honduras.
The coronavirus pandemic transformed this negative default switch of Inga, realizing that 15 years of unilaterally pointing out mistakes, hyper scrutiny to most, she blurted out: “Please don’t leave me, Maura. I know you care about me.” Maura still takes care of Inga, wearing masks, and declined family invitations to preserve the health and safety of Inga, as herself. Of late, she asked friends to pray for Inga, to ease her suffering.
Grace starts at every house, spreading out to neighbors
98-year-old May struggled as a Holocaust Jewish survivor and waited for entry as a refugee in New York. She is quick to display gratitude and graciousness about the “thoughtful deeds” of anyone, including her caregivers, who are both Filipina immigrants. Michelle Dormitorio, May’s caregiver, commutes from Cerritos, a distance of 50 miles round trip.
During the pandemic, she changed her working hours including an overnight stay, to reduce her commute exposure to coronavirus, thereby protecting May’s health. Michelle did not go to family get togethers, to decrease her risk of acquiring the virus, a firewall she created to protect May.
When caregivers for the elderly were prioritized for vaccines, Michelle got hers. While May was in post-surgery and post-rehabilitation, Michelle stayed with her at the facility, making sure May was properly cared for: her meals, her medications, read to her and facilitated her grooming needs. One day when I visited her, her ice cream was lovingly served with strawberries cut to resemble a flower.
May, though a Holocaust survivor, normally expected in survivor studies to harbor bitterness and resentment, instead is generous, filled with love and overflowing appreciation. During neighbors’ visits, she would share how Michelle cares for her as family. May’s graciousness to others is legendary that her grandchildren’s visits last a week and neighbors do not miss a chance to celebrate her birthday. This year, even short hellos by her front window, flowers, and home-baked banana bread with her favorite chocolates were given. “C’mon come in,” she said with a smile, which we politely declined, to prevent viral transmission and a loving thank you card, penned by Michelle days after. (May handwrote all cards, until two years ago).
Grace and hatred grow legs in institutions
In the late 70s, Ralph, my Caucasian regional boss at a public state agency taught me financial literacy. As a new immigrant, I had no idea how to save. He encouraged me to save in the form of monthly deductions to treasury bonds. He told me that was a painless way of setting aside for my daughter’s college tuition. He consistently guided us with heartwarming stories.
During the national recession under the Reagan administration when the unemployment rate rose to 11%, we were restricted to using state-issued vehicles. It was a tight state budget, but it did not prevent us from creatively thinking of ways to be productive. We planned our inspections, one car was used and we got dropped off at different sites. We then took public buses to come back to the office. Our regional collective sacrifice was shared by Ralph, that when the recession lifted, and state vehicles were purchased, we were one of the very first regions to be issued state vehicles. We got a visit from the higher-ups who acknowledged our collective sacrifices to ensure the health mission was served, regardless of tight budgets.
We had a branch chief, with a quick temper, who cascaded blame downward. He often lied that he assumed his subordinates lied, too. It made for chaos, draining our energies, and staff suspicious of one another, thereby shielding him from being accountable to his staffers.
But even as he stayed indifferent to the point of cruelty and inflicting emotional harm — demanding we work more without proper staffing, fingerpointing and shaming folks in meetings — he was supportive of the industry.
He managed to influence a new agricultural practice of planting strawberries above ground, sitting on black ground cover, allowing for water and dirt to flow out, making the strawberries less susceptible to pathogen transmission. Portable toilets, hand washing stations were introduced. By holding industry meetings, he also initiated changes in state regulations for dietary supplements and other agricultural products susceptible to pathogens or disease-causing bacterial transmission.
One day, he was placed under a year’s suspension for abusing his public position and misusing state funds for the personal benefit of a staffer who was known to be favored with more state trips usually unavailable at her position of office secretary and ultimately got promoted to higher positions.
During his absence, his deputy, a Latino, assumed the chief’s role. It made for a lifting of some oppressive conditions — we were now being heard and our ideas actually considered.
I was motivated to work more, penned more reports, including one to a federal agency, which this Latino boss sent to this agency, as if penned by him. He did the ‘dishonesty’ openly by telling me he was going to Washington, D.C., invited to join a meeting based on the report I wrote. I felt a rush of goosebumps, almost an immediate rejection of what I just heard. He now works for that federal agency.
I persisted in speaking my truth, of health disparities, how we were egregiously understaffed, and that the next pandemic would leave us without proper responses. I was made a target of hyperscrutiny —my supervisor was no longer Ralph — but through some magic of internal reorganization, unbeknownst to the public, we got reorganized and a former colleague became my immediate supervisor. He asked me to fire an African American male supervisor who just got promoted. He told me to write him a derogatory performance evaluation, but I refused as it meant falsifying public records. Finally, to stop him, I said, he is free to write up the evaluation and sign it but I will not. I knew it would backfire if I complied with his instructions, which I asked him to put in writing. Refusing to write his instructions in writing, he stopped harassing me to do “the wrong thing.”
I hemorrhaged for three months, working in sustained hyper scrutiny, defending my staff, and my Kaiser physician wrote a note of excusing me from work for a week. A week that was too short, but long enough for my immediate supervisor to write me a negative evaluation that I abandoned my position and did not call in sick. Untrue, as I documented it with a doctor’s note, yet, he persisted in giving me a fabricated performance evaluation.
I got a lawyer who wrote that what they were doing, under the pretext of this, was actually unlawful acts of discrimination, and that got them angrier until I filed a grievance with the Office of Civil Rights. To resolve the grievance, I had mediation. I told them, “Gentlemen, how do you propose to make me whole, bringing me to ground zero when you have taken me 13 levels below ground zero with your acts of disparate treatment?” I was accompanied in mediation by Ester Soriano-Hewitt, the architect of the LA County Dispute Resolution Program. I asked to be left alone as a manager, to be respected to train my regional staff and a department-wide training on hate prevention and sensitivity training for all supervisors and upper management. No monies settlement.
I had an emotionally safe tenure in my last year prior to retirement. Like previous years, since 1992 to 2004, I used my role as middle manager to train and mentor all to be promotable, imparting skills to move up to higher levels of leadership, as well as the attitude of being inclusive of all — be women and Black, Asian, Latino, Caucasian, Middle Eastern individuals. This included resume writing and mock interview sessions privately held to upgrade their oral communication skills. Most have been promoted with the culture of “we are all learners, leaders, and teachers.” By practicing a culture of caring for one another, our regional staff thrived.
Karma has a way of completing the circle and extracting justice. I had another supervisor, another Caucasian male, as a result of “changing chairs,” internally. When I retired, he found himself being sued by an African American, let’s call her Mary for this article. Mary filed a federal discrimination lawsuit in the federal courts, alleging discrimination when she applied for a job with this state agency.
At that time, I led a regional hiring panel, which interviewed Mary, along with two Asian male supervisors. We asked merit-based hiring questions, took copious notes and made recommendations. Sacramento headquarters did the rest. Little did we know our notes would become public records in a Los Angeles federal trial court. I was already retired when I was called as a witness, testified under oath, and got cross-examined. I had a choice: tell the truth to defend the agency or not. I chose my conscience and to sleep with peace in my heart.
My husband questioned why I was going out of my way to defend the supervisor who harassed me to the point of incurring health and physical injuries when I could simply expose him. I told him that the truth is my life’s currency and reforms, not vengeance.
After that day’s trial, my former supervisor was teary-eyed and with two simple words, simply said, “Thank you.” At a Christmas party later that year, regional staffers invited the retired folks. I felt quite wholesome receiving their welcoming hugs.
Did hate persist in that agency? Of late, it took on another form: blatant physical harm to a Caucasian young female peace officer, who inflicted by a fellow male colleague, dared to speak the truth. This time, she received the support of witnesses who came forward as to what they witnessed. I hope in time, she prevails in getting justice and accountability, as hate simply persists, until love becomes the predominant culture.
Fr. Aris Martin reminded me that Mark 7:15, NIV: “Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them, continued on verse 21: ‘from within people, out of the hearts of people, come the evil thoughts, acts of sexual immorality, thefts, murders, acts of adultery.’”
Footnote: I am writing this to honor two civil rights leaders, decades-long friends, who have passed away years ago, teaching me the beauty of a life lived with inclusion and love: Ester Soriano-Hewitt and Raymond “Masai” Hewitt, whose death anniversaries are in March and April. Thank you for your sterling examples of morally aligned lives anchored in racial equality and inclusion. Raymond taught me about Martin Luther King while Ester taught me about democratic leadership skills and the farmworkers’ contributions to our civil rights. May you both rest in peace!
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The opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints of the Asian Journal, its management, editorial board and staff.
