Jason Wu is the attorney in charge of The Legal Aid Society’s Harlem Community Law Office. He is co-chair of GAPIMNY, empowering Queer and Trans Asian Pacific Islanders, and also serves on Manhattan Community Board 11, and the board of directors of CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities. Their writing and political commentary focuses on race and inequality, cross-racial solidarity, and intersectional social movements.
If you could give your younger-self advice, what would it be?
I would share this quote from Grace Lee Boggs, “You don’t choose the times you live in, but you do choose who you are to be.”
Do you have any event/movie/music suggestions for our readers to check out in celebration of AAPI Heritage Month?
Learn about unsung heroes and Asian American movement figures like Kiyoshi Kuromiya. The publication “Them” created a short video on his life, using his actual voice to narrate, that’s worth checking out. He was born in a Japanese concentration camp during WWII and was active in the civil rights and anti-war movement, and made significant contributions to HIV/AIDS activism. https://www.them.us/video/watch/kiyoshi-kuromiya
How has your heritage shaped the person you are today?
My heritage has enabled me to better understand the world, and to connect my lived experiences to those of past generations. Heritage is not just about language or food, as wonderful as they are, but also about my political identity. Our collective histories of struggle and resistance give us strength to fight for collective liberation, and it means that we build on those who came before us and we never do this work alone.
What can New York policymakers do to support the AAPI-community in the short-term? In the long-term?
Our policymakers have to engage in principled struggle to combat inequality and stop the political cowardice of selling out the most vulnerable, because ultimately none of us are free until all of us are. Until we address the root causes of violence in our society, we are doomed to repeat these cycles of violence. We must redistribute resources away from systems, like prisons and war, that kill and destroy and towards those that affirm life.
