My Diverse: Issues In Higher Education colleague Emil Guillermo recently wrote about Angelo Quinto’s death. In his piece, Guillermo articulates the details of a mother’s worst nightmare—watching helplessly as a police officer puts his knee on the back of her son’s neck for nearly five minutes, long after her son stopped being responsive. Though taken to the ICU, Quinto died three days later.
Quinto was killed on December 23, 2020. His story came to light over a month later, and slowly news outlets have reported on it. So, I will ask again. Where is the outrage over Angelo Quinto’s murder? Why are there currently no protests under Quinto’s name? Why have none of my friends even heard of the name Angelo Quinto?
Over the past few days, I’ve been struggling to articulate how I feel about these questions. I had already known of Angelo Quinto since reading his story in the New York Times, but Guillermo’s piece enraged me in a newfound way.
You see, I had not known that Angelo Quinto was Asian American of Filipino descent. The New York Times article never mentioned that Quinto was a person of color, let alone a Filipino American, even while referencing race in the killing of George Floyd, which prompted “nationwide protests against racism and police brutality.”
I was furious that my Filipino American brother was killed, but I would’ve felt the same rage for any person who died at the hands of police brutality. What amplified my anger was the fact that the New York Times and other reputable outlets like CNN did not find it worth mentioning that Quinto was an Asian American man. And of the articles that did mention Quinto’s race, most did not express that this killing was race-related.
Without a doubt, Quinto’s physical appearance as a man of color affected the police officers’ decision to use a deadly restraining method though he was not resisting. By not acknowledging Quinto’s identity as an Asian American who was born in the Philippines, one is erasing a critical aspect of who he was, how he lived, and how he died.
This racial erasure is not new. Asian Americans are often left out of the racial discourse that operates on a white-Black binary. I understand this because whites see Blackness as the antithesis of their whiteness and corresponding superiority. White supremacy thrives primarily off of Black dehumanization. You cannot talk about race without discussing whiteness and Blackness, nor should you.
