Community Activists: Armenian Americans have felt the effects of systemic racism on their "skin" as they show solidarity with the Racial Justice Movement
By Shant Mirzaians
Carene Rose Mekertichyan was on the front lines during the 2020 summer racial justice protests. She is a biracial Armenian American activist who grew up in Silver Lake, Calif. Her particularly unique identity has been an effective conduit to raising awareness about social justice issues for all marginalized communities.
Since the George Floyd protests, she has been encouraging her friends and family to be more informed on issues surrounding social justice, “I had started sharing daily action items on my Instagram stories, to just give people very specific concrete curated things that they could do daily.”
Amid summer 2020’s racial justice protests, young Armenian Americans took to the streets, made signs from cardboard boxes and donated to mutual aid organizations to show solidarity and support for the movement.
Particularly with the younger generations, Armenians living in Los Angeles empathize with the struggles of the Black community and the decades of oppression rooted in systemic racism.
Without personally experiencing the oppression that their parents or grandparents experienced before living in the United States, they draw from the stories of their family and ancestors, and they relate to and advocate for marginalized communities.
“We as a people know very intimately what it is to be oppressed, to be the victims of colonialism, to be a displaced indigenous people, to have our community under threat of complete erasure and annihilation,” said Mekertichyan.
Mekertichyan’s mother is Black and father Armenian and they raised her to be knowledgeable of her family history from both communities. It’s the reason she’s vocal and outspoken about social justice issues. “I’ve always understood the importance of recognizing that there are always different issues happening in the world at the same time,” she said adding many of these issues are interconnected through colonialism and white supremacy.
Some critics within the Armenian community claim that activism for other people’s causes will shift focus from Armenian struggles and risk losing their identity.
“Injustice is injustice,” said Gev Isakjyan, a board director of the Armenian National Committee of America-Western Region, “how does speaking truth to power hinder our ability to fight for our own cause?”
The Armenian National Committee of America is a national grassroots advocacy group with local chapters that organize protests and lobby public officials on Armenian issues. They were among the Armenian organizations that participated in the protests last summer.
Isakjyan says that the Armenian community works towards and fights against injustice because “we’ve felt it on our skin.” Activists like Isakjyan and Mekertichyan feel the notion of justice is universal and all encompassing. Whether it’s justice for survivors of genocide or victims of police brutality, Armenian activists seek to shift society’s priorities to providing relief to those marginalized. There isn’t a limit on activism that becomes depleted over time.
Critics also claim that Armenians rarely see the same level of activism returned in favor from other groups. Razmig Sarkissian is an Armenian American from Montebello, Calif. that has been a member of the Armenian Youth Federation and the United Human Rights Council. He said that activism isn’t something that’s “transactional.”
“In some ways, it’s an immature way of looking at organizing and human relationships and movements for justice,” adding that establishing relationships with others through activism can help further the community’s goals. He admits that he can understand where that sentiment comes from, “Especially when the Artsakh War blew up and began to overlap with the racial justice movements, there was a lot of trauma that you were seeing vicariously through social media.”
In late September 2020, Azerbaijan invaded the region of Artsakh, a de facto republic that has historically been populated by Armenians but that Azerbaijan claims as its territory. Artsakh was transferred under Azerbaijani control by the Soviet Union in the 1920s. When the USSR dissolved, Armenians in the region petitioned for reunification with Armenia and were met with state sponsored pogroms which lead to war in the early 1990s that ended in a cease-fire. With support from Armenia, Armenians in Artsakh established their own independent government until Azerbaijan renewed aggression in 2020. The 2020 war ended in early November with Armenians losing parts of their historical homeland.
The Armenian experience of institutional racism, displacement and violence is the source of their empathy for the racial justice movement.
The Armenian diaspora is spread across the world in large part due to a genocide perpetuated by Ottoman Turks in the early 20th century. Armenians were second class citizens within the Ottoman Empire and were not granted equal rights. “We were fighting for equal rights and equal protection and due process within the Ottoman Empire back in the 1800s,” said Sarkissian.
During World War I, the Ottoman authorities sought to cleanse the country of Armenians by executing educated Armenians and community leaders while forcibly moving civilians out of the region resulting in the death of over 1.5 million Armenians.
Survivors of the genocide fled their ancestral homeland, and though some managed to reach the United States, most sought refuge in neighboring Middle Eastern countries. Following regional conflicts, their descendants eventually emigrated and settled in the United States. Many from Armenia itself also moved after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. According to the US Census Bureau, the greater Los Angeles area is now home to over 200,000 Armenians, with unofficial estimates ranging from 400,000 to 600,000.
“As Armenians we understand what oppression and suffering is, and so we have an obligation to speak up when others are oppressed, that has always been an element that has run through our community,” said Areen Ibranossian, an Armenian American whose family emigrated from Iran in the 1980s.
For several years Ibranossian worked in the Los Angeles mayor’s office as well as for city council members. He is now the senior vice president of 360 Strategies in southern California, a public relations and communications firm that provides consulting and research services to public officials and businesses. Ibranossian said that Armenian Americans have historically been “surprisingly” apolitical on issues of social justice, meaning that regardless of party preference there has been “community uniformity” on supporting these issues, but admits that it may be a bit different today.
“What's happening to our community is what happens to a lot of ethnic communities in America,” said Ibranossian, which is that “they politically mature and move away from easy categorization and fall more in line with kind of general societal groupings.”
[Photo: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. rally at Boston Commons - April 23, 1965 - (photographer unknown)]