Asian American feminism, politics, and pop culture
Photo by Adam Krypel on Pexels.com
Nothing stings quite like the pain of erasure. Nothing hurts quite like the onslaught of racial violence rendered invisible in the public eye. Nothing dehumanizes quite like the cavalier dismissal of the racism, the misogyny, the attacks, the murders.
Nothing demoralizes quite like the insistence that everything is alright because it is all happening just over there – just out of sight.
Continue reading “Stop Ignoring Our Pain. Stop Discounting Our Trauma.”State House Representative Gerald Brady at a press conference. Screenshot of footage by NBC10.
Content warning: Racist and sexist slurs
In late June, Delaware State Representative Gerald Brady (D) sparked backlash after an email he wrote was published by Delaware Online / The News Journal. In the email (which Brady sent from his official government email address to the email sender rather than to its intended recipient), Brady criticized efforts to protect sex workers using racist and sexist slurs referring to Asian women.
The email sender had forwarded to Brady a Princeton study that had found that decriminalization of sex work in New York City had led to a reduction in sex crimes, and had called on Brady to support efforts to decriminalize sex work in Delaware. Neither the original email nor the attached study made any mention of Asian or Asian American women.
Continue reading “Delaware State Representative Who Used Anti-Asian, Misogynistic Slurs in Email Won’t Seek Re-election”A person holds a hand-written sign that reads "I'm Not a Virus".
By Guest Contributor: Amy Zhou
This piece was originally published in The Wake Magazine.
I often wonder: will I ever be American enough for the country I was born and raised in? Will I ever be Minnesotan enough for the state that I grew up in? From Chinese exclusion to Japanese internment, has there ever been a time when Asian Americans weren’t a hair’s width away from being aliens? Our history has been manipulated and molded into something palatable that whiteness is comfortable with. We have been doled out slivers of humanity on the condition of our complicity. But anything — a war, a pandemic, a skit — can expose how dispensable we have always been to them.
I miss the bustling streets of Shanghai with their never-ending streams of pedestrians going to and from work. The smell of cigarettes and a slight hint of sewage, but also of the cong you bing frying on a nearby street cart. I miss the yell of Chinese and the concert of people moving, going, hustling, doing. The streets of Shanghai are where I’m from; my parents immigrated in 1990. I was born nine years later in Corpus Christi, Texas, a world away from the origins of my blood. I grew up grossed out by the Chinese food my mother made and embarrassed by my parent’s accents when we went out in public. So much of my life has been spent trying to assimilate myself into my whiter surroundings, rejecting all the yellow parts of me.
Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang at the Sept 12 Democratic primary debate in Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas. (Photo Credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Earlier this week, the FBI released a report detailing the attempted hate crime murder of an Asian American family — including the brutal stabbing of a two-year-old and a six-year-old child — by a man who blamed his victims for the COVID-19 outbreak. The attack is part of an alarming nationwide surge in racist anti-Asian violence currently being documented both by the FBI and Asian American community activists, and ranging from incidents of racist harassment and slurs to violent physical assault.
Most Asian American progressives have spent the last few weeks working tirelessly to address the growing epidemic of anti-Asian racism. We have been working to document the attacks, amplify stories of victims and survivors, draw connections to Asian American history, and create resources to support the traumatized — all in an effort to raise awareness about the current anti-Asian racial climate, and to urge the country to not give in to dangerous, hateful racism.
Andrew Yang has a different take.* Implying that Asian American progressives have been overly “negative” in calling out racism, the former presidential candidate wrote a painfully insensitive op-ed yesterday in the Washington Post (paywall).
In it, Yang instead suggested that the current pattern of anti-Asian violence is how people are “wired”. But, says Yang, Asian Americans can prevent hate crimes against us by “embrac[ing] and show[ing] our American-ness in ways we never have before.” Barring that, Yang suggests Asian Americans rush to find a cure for the novel coronavirus so that “any racism would likely fade”.
Continue reading “Andrew Yang is Wrong: Respectability Politics Won’t Save Asian Americans from Racist Violence”A Japanese reporter questions President Trump. (Photo credit: Screen capture from NBC News video)
In a press conference marked by erratic and un-presidential behaviour, President Trump made racially charged remarks against a Japanese reporter, telling him to “say hello to Shinzo” — the prime minister of Japan — before complaining that he couldn’t understand the reporter’s accent.
The unnamed reporter, who was clearly fluent in English, asked the president about reports that Trump was considering placing punitive tariffs on Japanese auto imports. That’s when Trump made the quip about Prime Minister Abe and the complaint about the reporter’s accent. Trump then defended the idea of US-imposed tariffs on Japan — one of America’s closest allies in the Pacific rim — by complaining of a trade deficit between the two countries.
“Japan does not treat the United States fairly on trade,” said Trump. “They send in millions of cars at a very low tax… They don’t take our cars.”
Continue reading “Trump Makes Racially-Charged Remarks Towards Japanese Reporter in Controversial Press Conference”
