Racism
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The GOP continues to mimic the former president’s racist rhetoric
Even now, three months after Donald Trump’s White House exit, the former president’s presence continues to loom over the GOP. In a radio appearance with right-wing radio host Joe Pags last week, Republican Sen. Ron Johnson claimed he didn’t feel threatened by the pro-Trump rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol to challenge the presidential election results, but he might have if the mob had been Black Lives Matters or Antifa protesters. Johnson compared BLM to Antifa, basically saying there’s nothing scarier than a bunch of angry Black people (and the white people who support them).
American history is filled with politicians, journalists, organizers, and citizens claiming they don’t have a racist bone in their body
Humans are notoriously terrible at accurately assessing themselves. That’s why medical researchers question the validity of self-reported data and pollsters rely on more subtle questioning to tease out people’s attitudes than a straightforward ask. And yet, at the highest echelons of American journalism and governance, human self-knowledge is still presumed to be easily accessible, particularly when it comes to racism.
The day after the Atlanta spa shootings, in which six of the eight massacred were women of Asian descent, Captain Jay Baker, the spokesman for Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office in Georgia, relayed that the suspect himself claimed the attacks were…
The mass shooter in Atlanta embodied the flawed logic that racial stereotypes reflect fact-based truths
Racism introduces absurdism into the human condition. Not only does racism express the absurdity of the racists, it generates absurdity in the victims.
— Chester Himes
Our nation is mourning the recent attacks on the Asian American community. On Tuesday, a man murdered eight people at three Atlanta-area massage parlors. This comes amidst the global pandemic where anti-Asian hate speech and violence are on the rise.
As we watch the coverage of this tragedy, many of us are privy to the absurdity of racism in America. This absurdity was even articulated by the man who carried out the killings. The…
The Atlanta shootings were a culmination of centuries of hypersexualization of Asian women
On Wednesday, I learned that the white man who murdered six Asian women in Atlanta denied that his actions were racially motivated. Like many Asian American women, I was overwhelmed with disgust.
Typical. How many times have white men tried to excuse their actions toward me by saying, “I’m not racist, I’m just — ”
By this point in my life, I don’t really care what comes after that. The excuse is always racist. And the man never has to face consequences for it.
In the case of the Atlanta killing spree, the excuse was particularly infuriating. The shooter told…
An anti-Semitic slur used during a Twitch livestream embodies the casual toxicity found in gaming culture
My very first experience using live voice chat while gaming was at a friend’s house playing Halo. At the time, it felt novel to talk with strangers while playing a simulated war game online. I had a mix of apprehension and curiosity. And though I enjoyed Halo a lot, I wasn’t the best at shooting games. But I gave it a shot anyway.
I put on my friend’s headset, expecting some form of trash talk. I doubt more than a couple of minutes had passed before the person on the other end asked, “Are you Black? …
The Conversation
Alexander Chee and Cathy Park Hong on how the pandemic has cracked open discrimination against Asian American communities
In the fall of 2019 I received an email from the poet and critic Cathy Park Hong telling me she had written an essay collection, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. She asked me to read it and consider it for a blurb. I receive roughly three or four requests like this on most weeks, sometimes as many as three or four a day, but I am a fan of Hong’s, and I remembered her indelible 2014 essay on whiteness and the avant-garde in poetry. If a collection from her meant more of that, I knew I wanted to see…
The opposition to the nominations of Deb Haaland and Xavier Becerra follows a familiar trend on the right
This week, as the U.S. Senate began the nomination hearings for President Biden’s Cabinet nominees, I saw a familiar pattern develop. Regardless of their actual record and without even having a chance to discuss it, nominees of color, such as Deb Haaland, Neera Tanden, and Xavier Becerra, have been painted as “famously partisan” people with “radical” ideas.
This is not the first time I’ve noticed such a trend. At the height of the 2020 election, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s name was frequently invoked as a foe in ads for Republican candidates in races across the country, an obvious boogeywoman the GOP…
Doing so only hurts both the Black and Asian communities
Last week, Laura Huang, an author and associate professor at Harvard Business School, addressed in a tweet the exponential rise in anti-Asian hate crimes over the past year. “I want to see how passionately people (incl other POC) will stand up for Asians,” she wrote. “Those of you who were so vocal w BLM, where are you on the 1900% increase in Asian-directed hate crimes?”
These hate crimes, such as the assault of a 64-year-old grandmother in San Jose, California, earlier this month and the murder of 84-year-old Vicha Ratanapakdee shortly before, are part of a wave of violence toward…
I’m in high school now, but I’m scared of the vitriol I’ll face as a Black man covering the news
Former President Donald Trump branded the news media the “enemy of the people” on dozens of occasions during his time in office, whether to castigate a journalist on Twitter for unfavorable press coverage or to incite chants of “CNN sucks” at campaign rallies. The phrase “enemy of the people” has been historically used by autocrats across all eras, from the Roman Empire to Germany’s Third Reich to the Soviet Union. Trump brought this derogatory label and its ugly history to the presidency. …
The president must take a lesson from Abraham Lincoln in how to address a grieving, divided nation
One hundred and sixty years ago, President Abraham Lincoln gave his first inaugural address to a nation on the verge of civil war. Understanding that his speech could very well be the nation’s final attempt at peace, he called for unity between the North and slaveholding South. “We are not enemies,” he pleaded, “but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.” Less than a month after Lincoln spoke, the Confederacy rained cannon fire on Fort Sumter.
Four years and hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers slain later, Lincoln…
