Actions for solidarity

For this post, we handed the keyboard over to UX Director and Google Design team lead Margaret Lee.

Earlier this month, I shared my story on navigating the mismatch between personal upbringing and professional roles. What I didn’t share was the extent of the bias, sexism, and racism I’ve encountered throughout my life.

I continue to be deeply angered by the shootings in Atlanta that left eight people dead, including six women of Asian descent—an inevitable crescendo to a year of mounting violence and hatred towards the Asian American, Pacific Islander, and Asian communities. I grieve and stand alongside them in solidarity and in the fight against racism and hatred.

As Google’s Eva Tsai, Director, Marketing Analytics and Operations, shared in a recent essay for the Keyword: “Outrunning and dismissing injustice is no longer an option.” We cannot afford to be silent. We cannot not engage.

Months ago, Google Design shared resources on designing for equity, and today I’d like to continue that conversation with resources focused on action.

Our team has found agency in culling our respective feeds for ways to take action. Here, we’ve broken those into four parts: learn, practice, celebrate, and support. Our hope is that this collection of links gives each of us many ways to take a step forward—no matter where you’re at in this journey—and reach across cultures to hold up one another.

—Margaret Lee, Director, UX Community & Culture

Start by learning and listening

• Listen in on an honest conversation between two Asian American designers on how they've navigated their identities at work via So Where Are You From?
• Or this episode of Still Processing, where the hosts hand over their microphones to Asian American colleagues, friends and listeners to hear about their experiences with racism
• Learn the names of Asian women leaders that history books may have missed through the Instagram account @17.21women
• Watch this PSA by Titania Tran, Jamon Sin, and Mimi Munoz and get comfortable with the question: “What will you say, when you can’t say you didn’t know?”
• Find out why our current definition of leadership doesn’t match the rallying cry for diversity, equity, and inclusion, from Google UX Director Margaret Lee
• Seek out personal experiences on racism and discrimination as an Asian American, like this reflection by Google Director Eva Tsai

Practice being a better ally

• Think critically about stereotypes in design, and how to break them
• Sign up for bystander intervention training through Hollaback! & Asian Americans Advancing Justice or learn de-escalation and Upstander strategies from the Center for Anti-Violence Education to respond to anti-Asian harassment
• Make your allyship cross-cultural by learning about Black/Asian solidarities, past and present
• Report incidents of anti-Asian violence to Stand Up Against Hatred and Stop AAPI Hate
• Familiarize yourself with the NYC Stop Asian Hate toolkit
• Support the next generation of emerging BIPOC designers via Office Hours, a global mentoring series for creatives who identify as Black, Indigenous, and people of color
• Take notes and implement tactics from Tatiana Mac’s talk: Building Socially-Inclusive Design Systems

Celebrate AAPI+ creatives

• Pick up a copy of Banana magazine, the design-driven publication whose pages blur Eastern and Western boundaries to create a collective voice for contemporary Asian culture
• Download Source Han Serif, the open-source Pan-CJK typeface family from Adobe Type and Google Fonts that lets designers mix Chinese, Japanese, and Korean alphabets with ease (and style!)
• Hire talented individuals from the Asian & Pacific Islander Who Design directory
• Read AAPI voices and add their books to your bookshelf or syllabi. We recommend Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong, The Making of Asian America: A History, Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, and Yolk by Mary H. K. Choi.
• Support creative Asian businesses and makers like Omsom, Wing On Wo & Co., Virginia Sin, Eny Lee Parker, Poketo, O-M Ceramics, and get to know the creators behind Create to Stop Hate, an AAPI Artists Auction.

Lend your support

• 18MillionRising.org, working to activate Asian America through technology and popular culture
• AAPI Community Fund, a campaign led by activist and cultural leaders issuing grants to trusted organizations working to rectify the racial inequalities in our society
• AAPI Women Lead, an organization creating spaces for Asian & Pacific Islander women to tell their stories
• Asian Americans Advancing Justice, an organization advocating for the civil and human rights of Asian Americans
• Asian Americans for Equality, a NYC-based non-profit that advances racial, social and economic justice for Asian Americans and other systematically disadvantaged communities
• Dear Asian Youth, a group of Asian youths striving to uplift marginalized communities through education, activism, and celebration
• Donate directly to the families of victims of anti-Asian racism and violence
• Save Our Chinatowns, a grassroots initiative passionate about supporting Chinatown communities in the Bay Area through art, conversation, and shared love of food

Something else you'd like us to include? Tweet us @googledesign.