A 14-year-old Black boy named Cyrus Carmack-Belton walked into a Shell convenience store in Columbia, South Carolina on May 28, 2023. He left his backpack at the door, per the store's policy. He took four bottles of water out of a cooler, then put them back. When the Chows accused him of stealing anyway, he shook out his pockets to show he hadn't taken anything. He grabbed his backpack and left. A few minutes later he was running down the road, chased by the 61-year-old Asian store owner, Rick Chow, who shot him in the back with a Glock.

The trial is happening this week. Chow is charged with murder. He says he was defending his son. The jury will decide what to call it. But a child is dead, and the killing happened the way Black people have been telling Asian shopkeepers it would happen for forty years.

In 1991, a 15-year-old Black girl named Latasha Harlins walked into a Korean-owned grocery store in South Central Los Angeles to buy a bottle of orange juice. The shopkeeper, Soon Ja Du, accused her of stealing it. They fought. Latasha set the juice down on the counter and turned to walk away. Du shot her in the back of the head. She got probation.

I am Asian. I'm writing this because we are about to pretend it is not the same story.

Here is what every Black person I know has told me, in one way or another, about going into Asian-owned businesses: they follow me around the store. They watch from behind the register. They speak to me differently than they speak to white customers. They put their hands on the counter when I walk in. They make me feel like a suspect for the crime of buying something.

This is not a feeling. It is a documented practice. It happens in Korean delis in Brooklyn and Chinese takeouts in Atlanta and Indian-owned gas stations in the suburbs of every major city. It happens because Asian shopkeepers have absorbed exactly the same anti-Black assumptions everyone else in this country has absorbed, and then we get to act on them while pretending we are the neutral party in the room — the "good minority," the one that doesn't see race.

Now look at where the stores are. Korean liquor stores. Chinese takeouts. Beauty supply shops. Nail salons. So many of them sit on Black blocks, ringing up Black dollars, sending Asian children to college on Black dollars — and treating the people whose dollars they are taking like criminals. Then when something goes wrong, when somebody picks up the wrong bottle of water or stays too long near the cash register, the shopkeeper picks up a gun.

This is not a Black problem. This is an Asian problem. And the reason we don't talk about it is that we made a deal a long time ago and we are afraid to break it.

The deal is the model minority myth. It says: work hard, be quiet, don't make trouble, don't ask why the streets you do business on are the way they are, don't ask why the police protect you and not the people on the other side of your counter — and you will be allowed to live near whiteness. You will not be white. But you will be useful to whiteness. You will be the comparison.

There was a time when Asian Americans refused that deal.

The Black Panther Party was founded in 1966. By the late 60s, a Japanese American organizer named Richard Aoki — who had spent his early childhood in an American internment camp — was a Field Marshal in the Panthers. He gave them weapons. Yuri Kochiyama, also Japanese American, also a survivor of the camps, was holding Malcolm X's head in her lap as he was dying.

There was a poster that came out of that era. Yellow Peril Supports Black Power. It got passed around at marches. It went up on dorm-room walls. It said something we have forgotten: we are not the buffer between Black and white. We have a side to choose, and the side we are supposed to be on is the one with the people we have been trained to be afraid of.

We need that solidarity more than we need our proximity to whiteness. We need it more than we need the model-minority bargain. We need it more than we need our shops or our quiet or the protection of the same police forces that would kill us too the second we became inconvenient.

The choice is not theoretical. The choice was made by an Asian man with a Glock in his hand, chasing a 14-year-old down a road over four dollars of water.

Cyrus Carmack-Belton. Fourteen years old. He didn't take anything.

The water is still on the shelf. The next 14-year-old is somewhere walking into a store right now.

— Michelle