Start a Conversation with Letters for Black Lives

An Open Letter Project on Anti-Blackness



Letters for Black Lives is a set of crowdsourced, multilingual and culturally-aware resources aimed at creating a space for open and honest conversations about racial justice, police violence, and anti-Blackness in our families and communities. The project started out as an intergenerational note from Asian American children to their parents, voicing concerns and support for the Black community.

The goal was to create a starting point for difficult conversations. "Talking about race and police violence in Asian communities has always been difficult," said Christina Xu, one of the letter's lead organizers. "There are language and cultural barriers, media access issues and unresolved distrust between communities."

The letter first appeared as a Google Doc last Thursday, July 7 and has attracted contributions from hundreds of people around the world, ballooning into an international, multilingual project spanning translations in over thirty languages and dialects, as well as additional versions spoken from the perspectives of other communities who share similar concerns (Latinx, Canadians, African Immigrants, among others).

Many more are now building on the project with their own voices through audio, video and images.

An Open Letter to Our Asian American Families About Black Lives Matter

Hundreds come together to create a multi-lingual resource to talk about anti-Blackness and police violence.



Sometimes, believe it or not, the internet works together for good. That's what happened this week in the wake of news that yet another Black man, Philando Castile, had been killed by police during a traffic stop in Minnesota, following the fatal shooting of Alton Sterling by police officers in Louisiana.

On Thursday, hundreds of Asian American internet users came together and organized via Google Docs -- YES, GOOGLE DOCS -- to draft a crowdsourced open letter to our own Asian American families addressing the shootings Castile and Sterling and the urgent issues of the Black Lives Matter movement.

It can be difficult to find the words and contexts to talk about these issues with our Asian parents and relatives. Sometimes there are language barriers. Sometimes it's hard to explain the common ground in our struggles. Too often there's simply the impulse to ignore another community's struggles and look the other way.

The letter aims to help start that conversation. It began as a series of tweets from Christina Xu, who'd seen how Asian Americans had reacted negatively to previous police shootings of black Americans -- particularly, the shooting of Akai Gurley in New York City -- and wanted to do something proactive to change their perspectives.