In the spirit of building us up and for us to know better and do better, I’d like to offer some perspective. I hope you’ll listen with your heart @EmericanJohnson.

Dear @LunaOi_VN em rất kính mến chị và tôn trọng chị. Em hy vọng chị sẽ mở rộng trái tim để nghe em

I'm sharing knowledge from my experience as an anti-racist & anti-oppression educator doing community organizing with people who are socially marginalized.

I'm also a người Việt who have lived both in VN and the US.

These past couple days I have witnessed sadness and pain in the Viet leftist/commun*st diaspora in the west who saw a tweet by a white person living in VN saying "turns out Viet people are not mindless drones."

I too felt hurt seeing this tweet.

Adding salt to the injury, the tweet came from someone who is in an intimate relationship w @LunaOi_VN, a person whose perspective we have learned a lot from and appreciate – especially as people in the diaspora who have been severed from our ancestral homeland in multiple ways.

A lot of us pointed out that this statement is racist, and we received the pushback that "this is what I USED to think."

I'd like to help you understand why this is not helpful, @EmericanJohnson, if you're committed to being anti-racist, pro-Vietnamese, and willing to listen.

I understand your intention. I believe you that it's what you used to believe due to circumstances of your birth, socialization, & education."

In fact, in anti-oppression training, we don't view racism, sexism, etc. as personal moral failings, but rather systemic indoctrination.

Because systems of oppression like racism manifest in multitudes of ways, it's inevitable that we ingest & internalize toxic messages & beliefs. No one is exempt

The work for people who wanna unlearn that, then, is to continuously uncover these messages & consciously remove them

The way that you go about unlearning racist indoctrination, and to be anti-racist, is important, because you can create more harm in the process.

For example, if you want to examine toxic messages you've received about race, you need to do that in a race-based caucus.

You need to be with people who share a similar racial background as you, who may have grown up in similar settings as you, and who are committed to the same anti-racist journey as you.

That last part is important because you need to have a community to hold you accountable.

In a caucus, you can say things that –– if you were to say them elsewhere –– you would create further racial harm.

You can say things like, "growing up this is what I used to think about people X, looking back, it's from these shows I used to watch," etc.

You and your comrades/friends/community/support group can then deconstruct the sources of the beliefs you used to hold and how those beliefs impact your own behaviors and society at large.

You can examine racism from ideology to internalized to interpersonal to institutional.

You can reflect how racist beliefs are perpetuated and your role in that process. You can make a plan to eradicate it. You can make a plan to repair harms done or make sure no more harm will be done in the future.

When you say "I used to think ____ about X people" in public, it does not help us. It brings up other instances of us facing that racist stereotype.

It reminds us again that racism against us is alive and well, and this is what people in power and dominant culture think about us

I organize w non-Black Asians in support of BLM and we do teach-ins on anti-Black racism. When we work on unpacking anti-Blackness in our families & communities, we do not do that with Black folks. We create a container of safety, accountability & responsibility among ourselves.

Saying "I used to think [racist thought] about X people, but turns out they're NOT like that" in public appears self-serving – whether you intend it to be or not.

It looks as though you're saying "I used to be racist but I'm good now, give me a good ally cookie."

This is why non-white people are weary when our white mutuals tell us they're "doing an anti-racist book club"

We will inevitably hear things like "I used to think ___ about your people"

We don't need to know what you used to think. We want to know what you will do about it now

This is not to say you shouldn't read anti-racist books. Please do.

This is also not to say you can't acknowledge your anti-racist journey. By all means, reflection is important & necessary.

We need more people to bring more people along to dismantle systems of oppression.

You can always say, "I've been unearthing narratives that I used to believe in and hold dear and even repeat to others. Now I realize those narratives are deeply problematic & gave me a sense of superiority to other humans while in fact they just cut me off from my own humanity."

Hello everyone, thank you for engaging with this thread and asking further clarifying questions.

The purpose of what I wrote is to help EJ understand why there was an outpouring of sadness and anger in response to his statement.