Intersections: A small crowd, a larger movement
Last Saturday afternoon, a small crowd gathered in front of Glendale City Hall with a simple mission: to stand up against racial and religious intolerance in a country growing increasingly hostile and divided after a contentious election.
A few people held up signs that read “rebuke your racist remarks” and “president-elect show some respect.”
In a show of solidarity that felt like it was a long time coming, the flag of Armenia was held together with the flags of Mexico and the United States. Another sign read, “Armenians stand with Mexicans.”
The event was organized by Abril Books, the premiere Armenian bookstore in the Los Angeles area that has been the heart of the Armenian-American community for years.
“We’ve learned from the past. Don’t be a bystander,” the call to action, which was circulated online, read. “Join us to tell the world that it is dangerous to target an ethnic group or religion for society’s problems. Let’s sound the alarm before it’s too late. Staying silent now will only make it worse.”
The gathering was small, but any dent in combating a sinister kind of hate that has come right up to the surface is not just important, but necessary. Since the election, more than 700 incidents of hateful harassment have been reported, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Most of the incidents were anti-immigrant in sentiment, followed by anti-Black and anti-LGBT.
They occurred across the country, in Washington and Kansas and Tennessee and Michigan and yes, even California. Newly released statistics from the FBI this month show a surge in the number of hate crimes against Muslims, rising 67% in 2015.
While President-elect Trump is busy getting into Twitter fights with the cast of “Hamilton,” white supremacists were meeting in Washington D.C., giving Nazi salutes in response to Trump’s election victory and hearing speeches from a man named Richard B. Spencer, who has called for the peaceful ethnic cleansing to rid the country of nonwhite, non-European descent residents.
Carl Higbie, a former spokesman for a pro-Trump super PAC said last week that mass internment of Japanese Americans during World War II was a precedent for plans to create a Muslim registry.
How did we get here? How has this become our new normal? How did we stop seeing each other as human? How has this election emboldened one of the ugliest aspects of this country to feel more alive and OK than ever, an aspect that touched even our own region, our own “Jewel City”?
Glendale has played its role in racism in America. It’s a city that the Los Angeles Times called in a 1996 article a “magnet for white supremacists, among them the commander of the American Nazi Party’s Western Division, who lived there briefly in the mid-1960s, as did the Grand Cyclops of the state Ku Klux Klan.”
La Crescenta had racial covenants written into property deeds which barred black families from owning property there. I grew up just miles away from an internment center for Japanese Americans during WWII now known as the Verdugo Hills Golf Course. This history is important and so is the fact that, for the most part, Glendale has overcome it.
But for many of us who come from ancestors who suffered incredible hardships, unspeakable crimes because of who they were and what they believed in, it feels like the days ahead will give us a better glimpse into some of what they experienced, played out in real time.
Depending on who you ask, the reasons that guided Americans to support President-elect Trump are vast. They are diverse and complex and nothing is accomplished by generalizing these reasons. They should be paid attention to, and cannot be distilled in a short column.
However, Trump’s supporters have also made millions of people in this country feel demonized and less human. Their support for a candidate who inspired extremism at levels America hasn’t seen in a long time has inadvertently given racism, sexism and xenophobia a louder voice.
Like the small crowd that gathered in front of Glendale City Hall, now is the time to reach out to the people in your community, to express your support and solidarity, to get to know them, to understand them, to respectfully ask questions about who they are and what they believe in.
When you fill a void with familiarity, fear ceases to exist. Do not let hatred override humanity, no matter who you voted for.
--
LIANA AGHAJANIAN is a Los Angeles-based journalist whose work has appeared in L.A. Weekly, Paste magazine, New America Media, Eurasianet and The Atlantic. She may be reached at liana.agh@gmail.com.