My mother is an immigrant from the Philippines. Most of my family immigrated here when I was kid. They were escaping martial law, government corruption, state sponsored violence, and a brutal, capricious dictator. I remember when my grandfather was dying and he asked me to read from “The Conjugal Dictatorship,” a book a friend of his had written.

“You know,” he said, “they had him killed for what he wrote. They threw him out of a plane without a parachute.”

In one of his many jobs my grandfather was a contributing editor and member of the National Press Club. He was a political cartoonist in a time and place where that could get you killed.

I don’t offer these stories to suggest that their history somehow relieves them (and other Asian Americans or POC with similar tragic histories) from the responsibility of expressing solidarity with Black Americans.

And I don’t bring this up because they would be shocked or surprised by this moment. By the time I really knew them, they had long developed a resilience to the vicissitudes of governments. Though I know they would’ve been disappointed, angry, and scared.