racism sexism intertwine torment asianamerican

In many ways, the growing embrace of this narrative of systemic racism and white supremacy, at least among the intelligentsia, represents the continued assimilation of Asian Americans-like other groups, they too are embracing their victimhood. People participate in a protest to demand an end to anti-Asian violence in New York City on April 4, 2021. “The dangerous and racist ideology” of the “model minority” is “a means to really minimize and silence and erase the diverse, rich Asian experience in order to reinforce and maintain systemic racism and oppression,” Anastasia Kim, an associate professor of psychology at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, California, said in a colloquium on the Atlanta murders. Through this lens, the triumphalist narrative of Asian success is a patronizing expression of racism. Asian Americans-or at least the Asian Americans paid attention to by the mainstream media-apparently have adopted a version of critical race theory, the notion that America is divided into white oppressors and the non-white oppressed, and that history consists of the effort of the former to maintain the “structures of oppression” that ensure its dominance over the latter. It signals the ever-growing expansion into the mainstream of a set of ideas once considered the province of a radical political and academic fringe. Asians may experience a certain residual bigotry, but they have overcome it, the story goes, turning themselves into the “model minority.” The values of hard work, studiousness, and the postponement of gratification won them a disproportionate number of slots at the country’s most coveted schools and helped them become the wealthiest large ethnic group in America.īut that all was ignored in the wake of the Atlanta shooting, with commentary turning instead to a narrative of victimization at the hands of the same supposedly white supremacist America that has, in what seems a contradiction, welcomed them as immigrants and allowed them to prosper. Still, the prevailing narrative for Asian peoples in America over the last quarter-century and longer has told a success story. Looked at historically, these terms do contain kernels of truth when applied to Asian Americans, who have experienced plenty of both exclusion and violence in the past.

The country may be used to this sort of narrative, with its intersectionality vocabulary of racial oppression and sexism. “I think that came from the white supremacist system that we live in,” she added. Similarly in a New York Times podcast, the poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong said, “We have also been victims to systemic racism throughout history,” except, she continued, “we have been conditioned to pretend that it doesn’t exist.” There were no views on the other side of the issue in the Times coverage. Two days after the attack, the page one headline in The New York Times read, “How Racism and Sexism Intertwine to Torment Asian-American Women,” with the article quoting several women excoriating the Atlanta police for even thinking that the massage parlor shootings may not have been racially motivated. Kwon wrote a “letter to my fellow Asian women whose hearts are breaking,” published in Vanity Fair, saying that the Atlanta murders represented “the passing of women shot for what they looked like, killed by a racist gunman and by this country’s white supremacy.” It was almost as if shootings of Asian women by white gunmen were an everyday occurrence, rather than a singular, exceedingly rare event.īee Nguyen, the first Asian woman to be elected to the George state assembly, declared at a rally four days after the shooting that the incident requires us “to demand justice not only for these victims but for all victims of white supremacy.” The Asian-American Association of Massachusetts, a supposedly nonpartisan group established by the state legislature, issued a statement blaming the attack on “misogyny, white supremacy, and the historical portrayal of Asians as the ‘Yellow Peril.'” Instead, a consensus quickly formed among journalists, scholars, and cultural figures writing op-eds and giving broadcast interviews that the shooting represented a pervasive, historical victimization by Asian people at the hands of the white majority. The mass shooting in Atlanta on March 16, which took the lives of six Asian women among the eight victims, appears to be a one-off event-the violent act of a deeply troubled 21-year-old man who, according to what he told the police, was trying to wipe away sexual temptation, in the form of massage parlors that he felt guilty patronizing.īut that’s not how the incident was treated by the Asian American commentariat.

Racism sexism intertwine torment asianamerican