Articles Feature

Asian Americans and Race: It’s Complicated

4 Tackle Identity Question at Journalists Conference

Hundreds at N.Y. Times Train for ‘Unconscious Bias’

Judge Throws Out Class Action Suit Against CNN

Cortes, Ex-Fox News VP, Sues His Former Company

U.S. Muslims Perceive ‘a Lot’ of Discrimination

Black Producers Defend ‘Confederate’ Show Idea

Short Takes

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4 Tackle Identity Question at Journalists Conference

When four Asian American journalists get together in public to talk about what that identity means, the conversation can veer from some Asian American men’s newfound attraction to the alt-right to how much to write about race to whether others truly consider Asian Americans to be “people of color,” as they do African Americans and Hispanics.

“Race Relations in the U.S.: Our Place as AAPI Journalists” was the title of a session Thursday at the Asian American Journalists Association convention in Philadelphia, a gathering that attracted 839 people, according to Kathy Chow, executive director. “AAPI” refers to Asian American Pacific Islander.

Participating were moderator Iris Kuo, CEO and cofounder of LedBetter, a research group that runs a database and application showcasing the number of women in leadership at the world’s top consumer brands and companies; Jay Caspian Kang, a correspondent on “Vice News Tonight” and writer-at-large for the New York Times Magazine; Jeff Guo, who writes about media, politics, data and “the unknowability of life” at vox.com, and Tracy Jan, who reports on race and the economy for the Washington Post.

In 2010, Asian Americans were 4.8 percent of the U.S. population; Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islanders were 0.2 percent. In newspaper and online newsrooms, they were 4.25 percent, according to the 2016 diversity survey of the American Society of News Editors [PDF]. That newsroom percentage more closely matched that of their share of the general population than the figures for African Americans, Latinos or Native Americans.

An abridged, sometimes paraphrased report of the conversation:

Jan: The Asian American voice does get lost in the fray. A lot of the hate is targeted at Muslims, Latinos and black people, though brown Asians, too, have been threatened and killed.

Kang: There’s not much in the national conversation about Asian people. I don’t even know what Asian means . . . I just don’t think there’s an identity.

Guo: It’s not a term we invented. [Some trace it to Yuji Ichioka, a pioneering San Francisco-born historian, in the late 1960s.]

You’re not black and you’re not white.

If you’re the kind of person — upwardly mobile, East Asian, who went to college, it’s easier for you to assimilate into white culture. To pay attention to that kind of [racial] stuff doesn’t endear you to the people writing the paycheck.

Asian Americans have always been a part of the fabric of America; the Chinese helped build the transcontinental railroad. The story of Asian Americans is important because it is intricately tied with the story of race in America. Asians were used to define and constrict African Americans.

Kang: It’s a very, very bad time to write about race. Everything has become so standardized. Too much of the writing is about representation in Hollywood. There’s a lot of baked-in laziness. Some just don’t know how to write about race. [Kang also mentions an anti-black history among Asians.]

From left: Jay Caspian Kang; Jeff Guo; Tracy Jan and Iris Kuo. (Credit: Richard Prince)
From left: Jay Caspian Kang, Jeff Guo, Tracy Jan and Iris Kuo at the Asian American Journalists Association convention in Philadelphia on Thursday. (Credit: Richard Prince)

Jan: I see my work as, “if I weren’t there, it wouldn’t be told.”

Guo: We write, we speak English. I look at some of the foreign correspondents who write about China; they come out with these stories about China that are laughable. For example, recent stories about Chinese idolizing Ivanka Trump. It’s like they’re not seriously worshipping Ivanka Trump. It’s like a joke. Asian people are having fun.

Still, my parents are immigrants. I’m not equipped to write about Cambodian refugees. My parents came in a plane, not a boat.

I feel very conflicted. I do have a responsibility to tell these Asian stories, even if I don’t have (the background), because who else is going to write these stories?

Jan: A good story is a good story. I recall being the only Asian American on a fellowship to China last month.  There was so much negative coverage of the EB-5 visa program, [which grants green cards to foreigners who invest $500,000 in the United States. “The nearly three-decade-old program has come under new scrutiny in recent months, in part because of a sales pitch to Chinese investors by White House senior adviser Jared Kushner’s family real estate business,” Jan would write July 7 for the Post.] However, hardly anyone was writing about why the program was attractive to middle-class Chinese. So I did. We’re missing a bunch of different stories.

Guo: There is an assumption that there can be some neutral perspective. Isn’t the “neutral perspective” often the white perspective?

Kuo: I used to work in a foreign bureau in Hong Kong. A pet peeve of mine is how the stories were written as if to say, “Look at how weird these people are.” What frustrates you about race coverage?

Guo: That is also a pet peeve of mine; when people approach coverage strictly from a cultural perspective, not considering the historical and economic background — such as stories about Japanese growing square watermelons that don’t mention why.

Kang: It’s preoccupation with pop culture. I thought people would stop caring about how many Oscars were awarded.

Deportation stories. Every deportation is exactly the same. It’s like deportation porn. . . .

Jan: The sad white working class, with a photo of a sad white person looking out the window. What about poor black people? I’m not going to write about poor white people without writing about poor black people. It’s a trope.

Guo: There are sympathetic narratives. You are writing about situations that these people of color are embedded in, and at some point they’re not human any more.

Kuo: A question arises about whether Asians are “people of color.”

Kang: Asians have been granted “conditional whiteness.” I don’t think we are people of color if you ask the New York Times. When people talk about race and say “people of color,” they don’t mean Asians. . . . “people of color” have been black and Latino.

I’ve been going to Asian masculinity forums. These guys seem to be concerned about their lack of identity. They know about the alt-right touting the idea of Western civilization. If I were black, I would have certain cultural touchstones. They have nothing [comparable, they think], so they go back to the death march of Bataan in World War II.

[The white nationalist group] Storm Front actually recruits Asian people. For a lot of people it’s going to end up being very appealing. My story is coming out next week. I’m also doing a podcast.

Guo: For NPR, Sarah Goo wrote about letters from grandfather to her grandmother. They were love letters, but are also about America and family history. A lot of Americans today have a lot of immigrant roots, but the Asian story is not just an immigrant story.

Kuo: How can one’s Asian American background be used to advantage?

Kang: I was able to get into spaces the white reporters could not because I spoke a little Korean, but there are so few spots to use that advantage.

Jan: Just your understanding of being an outsider can help when interviewing other “outsiders,” such as evangelicals. There are certain ways you ask questions; the way you carry yourself. Everyone uses what they have as a reporter.

When I was at the Boston Globe, I think it helped being an Asian reporter in some black neighborhoods. I have had people explicitly tell me, “I wouldn’t talk to you if you were white.”

Guo: Being Asian, we experience a variegated privilege in America. It’s patchy.

In writing about race, there are so many things you can’t know. I don’t feel qualified to write about race. All I have is my very narrow personal experience.

And yet, it’s the first step to anything else. Until people are sick of seeing Asian doctors, they’re not going to see [Asians as] anyone else. Same with journalists. Until we have more Asian journalists, we’re all going to be [asked to write those stories].

The New York Times newsroom. (Credit: New York Times)
The New York Times newsroom. (Credit: New York Times)

Hundreds at N.Y. Times Train for ‘Unconscious Bias’

“Several hundred” employees at the New York Times Co. have taken training in “unconscious bias,” the Times says, resulting in “a huge cultural shift” in hiring and recruiting efforts.

Unconscious biases are defined as “social stereotypes about certain groups of people that individuals form outside their own conscious awareness,” according to the University of California, San Francisco. “. . . Unconscious bias is far more prevalent than conscious prejudice and often incompatible with one’s conscious values. . . . ”

Staffers at the American Society of News Editors and the Radio Television Digital News Association said they did not know of other media companies conducting such training, although Al Tompkins, senior faculty for broadcasting and online at the Poynter Institute, said some might use other terms for the concept in their diversity training.

“We usually come at it as challenging assumptions,” Tompkins said Friday by email. “We see it in who people interview and what images they use in stories.” Bill Church, senior vice president of news at GateHouse Media, which says it operates in 555 markets across 36 states, said by email that his company “hasn’t done diversity training with a focus on ‘unconscious bias,’ but it’s a smart approach.”

Carolyn Ryan, assistant editor of the Times, mentioned unconscious bias training Thursday during “Normalizing Diversity: How to Create a Culture of Hiring and Retaining Journalists of Color in Your Company,” a panel at the Asian American Journalists convention in Philadelphia. Ryan said afterward that the Times training took place in March and April.

Craig Robinson, executive vice president and chief diversity officer for NBCUniversal, and Sudeep Reddy, a managing editor at Politico, with Ryan at the session, said they favored diverse interviewing panels as a way to counter hiring bias toward people who “seem like me.”

They also said they were guarding against efforts by celebrities and/or well-connected executives to short-circuit the hiring process to the detriment of less well-connected people of color.

Ryan called one such tactic “side door hiring,” which “leads to people being part of the staff almost invisibly.”

“I’ve known people who’ve gotten jobs because they were at a dinner party,” Ryan said. The job was to last three months, but the person managed to join the staff permanently by entering through the “side door.” Robinson, meanwhile, said he was “keeping an eye” on “executive referrals.”

The unconscious bias training sessions were conducted by Paradigm, a Silicon Valley-based consulting group. “They were well attended by managers across the company,” Danielle Rhoades Ha, vice president, communications for the New York Times Co., said Friday by email.

“Later this summer we plan to offer a virtual version of the sessions for our offices and bureaus outside New York. . . . We have instituted various practices aimed at improving our recruiting methods and our inclusion efforts. Those include making sure that candidates meet with diverse interview panels and mandating more neutral language in job descriptions to attract a broad range of applicants.”

The Paradigm website includes a testimonial from Erin Grau, the Times’ vice president, operations. “We first chose Paradigm to design our unconscious bias training because their workshops are action-oriented and grounded in social science research. Their training received an overwhelmingly positive response (99% of employees understood the concept of unconscious bias, 97% intended to engage in behaviors to reduce bias, and 90% would recommend the workshop to a colleague) . . .

“With Paradigm’s help, we have seen a huge cultural shift, and data proves the programs, processes and frameworks we’re putting in place are moving the needle. Our biggest success story to date has been a double-digit increase in the share of women in technology. . . .”

DeWayne Walker, a plaintiff in the suit against CNN.
DeWayne Walker, a plaintiff in the suit against CNN.

Judge Throws Out Class Action Suit Against CNN

A federal judge has thrown out a racial discrimination class action suit filed by current and former black CNN employees against CNN, Turner Broadcasting and New York based parent company Time Warner,” Rodney Ho reported Wednesday for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

“ ‘This discrimination represents a company-wide pattern and practice,’ the lawsuit asserted back in December, 2016, ‘rather than a series of isolated incidents.’ Attorney Daniel Meachum at the time said the company has been discriminating against blacks for more than 20 years.

“Although only two people were named plaintiffs in the original case, he said he had found many more people who qualified for the class-action suit. In an interview today, he said he has now more than 190 people willing to attach their names to the lawsuit.

“U.S. District Court judge William Duffey Jr. didn’t buy the argument, saying it ‘is fraught with conclusory claims, unsupported by factual allegations sufficient to support the inferences claimed by Plaintiffs.’ . . . ”

“Meacham, the attorney for the plaintiffs, said he plans to address Duffey’s issues with the initial lawsuit and re-file sometime in the future. . . .”

Francisco Cortes started at Fox as an apprentice, then rose through the ranks to become Fox News Latino's first director.
Francisco Cortes started at Fox as an apprentice, then rose through the ranks to become Fox News Latino’s first director.

Cortes, Ex-Fox News VP, Sues His Former Company

Roger Ailes’ reign at Fox News engendered numerous discrimination and harassment claims upon 21st Century Fox, but on Tuesday, the Rupert Murdoch company got hit with a different kind of lawsuit,” Eriq Gardner reported for the Hollywood Reporter. “This one comes from a television executive accused of sexually assaulting an on-air contributor.

Francisco Cortes, a former vice president at Fox News Latino, states in a complaint filed in New York federal court that he ‘served as a useful “scapegoat” for Fox to demonstrate that it aggressively handles sexual harassment complaints, as part of a carefully orchestrated plan to permit the Murdochs to eliminate concerns in the U.K. regarding their $15.2 billion acquisition of Sky in the U.K., and to protect the identity and shelter the reputations of the two unknown persons who, it must be assumed, were, unlike Mr. Cortes, not Latino, and not financially insignificant to Fox.’

“In March, The New York Times’ Emily Steel reported that Fox had reached a $2.5 million settlement with Tamara Holder to resolve claims that Cortes had forced himself upon her. It was added that Cortes was close to Ailes.

“According to Cortes’ new $48 million lawsuit, Holder’s settlement in February included not only him but two other unnamed individuals. The deal is also said to have had a mutual non-disparagement provision.

” ‘Nevertheless, a mere two weeks later, Tamara Holder and Fox delivered a previously planned and carefully negotiated joint statement to The New York Times regarding the allegations, in violation of their obligations,’ continues the complaint.

“Cortes alleges that statements to The New York Times destroyed his reputation and irreparably damaged his career opportunities. . . .”

Pew-Muslim Americans

U.S. Muslims Perceive ‘a Lot’ of Discrimination

The early days of Donald Trump’s presidency have been an anxious time for many Muslim Americans,” the Pew Research Center said in announcing a new survey on Wednesday. “Overall, Muslims in the U.S. perceive a lot of discrimination against their religious group, are leery of  Trump and think their fellow Americans do not see Islam as part of mainstream U.S. society.

“At the same time, however, Muslim Americans express a persistent streak of optimism and positive feelings. Overwhelmingly, they say they are proud to be Americans, believe that hard work generally brings success in this country and are satisfied with the way things are going in their own lives — even if they are not satisfied with the direction of the country as a whole. . . .”

In February, the Asian American Journalists Association established a task force to aid journalists covering Muslim American communities. On Thursday at the AAJA convention in Philadelphia, the task force presented a panel on “Covering Muslim Communities & Islam” that was critical of American media coverage.

Some of the panelists’ points:

  • As reported in the Washington Post, “there were 89 attacks committed by different perpetrators in the United States” during a five-year period the Post examined. “Between 2011 and 2015 in the United States, Muslims perpetrated 12.4 percent of those attacks.” However, “Of the 89 attacks, 24 did not receive any media coverage from the sources we examined. The small proportion of attacks that were by Muslims — remember, only 12 percent — received 44 percent of the news coverage. In only 5 percent of all the terrorist attacks, the perpetrator was both Muslim and foreign-born — but those four attacks got 32 percent of all the media coverage. . . .”
  • There is little coverage of Muslims that does not justify the coverage by citing their religion. The website http://www.muslimsdoingnormalshit.com/ makes this point with humor.
  • The media decision to call President Trump’s ban on travel to certain Muslim countries a “travel ban” rather than a “Muslim ban” led to some misleading phrasing. The six countries have been called “Muslim majority” nations, when in reality most are 90 to 95 percent Muslim.
  • Few report the relationship of those countries to U.S. foreign policy toward them.
  • The Department of Homeland Security’s Countering Violent Extremism initiative is considered by some to be “a modern COINTELPRO,” the government domestic spying program of the 1970s.
  • Most of the stories quote non-Muslim judges, non-Muslim lawyers and a non-Muslim president of the United States, but not Muslims.
  • The ordinary often becomes exoticized. In 2015, as Emily DeRuy reported at the time for National Journal, some Muslim Americans posted pictures of their homes after media outlets combed through everyday items in the apartment of San Bernardino shooting suspect. The everyday items were shown on Twitter under the hashtag #MuslimApartment
  • On the website Muslimah Media Watch, Muslim women critique how their images appear in the media and popular culture.
  • Recommended reading and viewing includes: “Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World” by Edward W. Said, and the book and documentary, “Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People.” The film, coordinated by Sut Jhally and created by Media Education Foundation in 2006, is an augmentation of the book by Jack Shaheen.

Black Producers Defend ‘Confederate’ Show Idea

It may be the most explosive response ever to a TV show that hasn’t shot a frame, doesn’t have a script, or even a plot written yet,” Eric Deggans reported Thursday for NPR.

“All we know is HBO’s Confederate will be a TV show set in a modern America where the Confederacy never lost the Civil War and slavery still exists. After days at the center of the controversy, Executive Producer Nichelle Tramble Spellman says the experience has been like getting ‘a crash course in crazy.’ ” She and her husband, Malcolm Spellman, are black.

“That painful education began last week, after HBO issued a press release announcing Confederate as the next series under development by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the two executive producers of the cable channel’s hit series Game of Thrones. . . .”

Deggans also wrote:

” ‘First thing to tell everybody is what the project is not,’ says Malcolm Spellman. ‘The project is not antebellum imagery, it’s not whips, it’s not plantations, it’s not a celebration or pornography for slavery. And, most importantly, it’s not an entire nation of slaves.’

“Instead, the couple says, the series will likely feature an America divided, where the South has a system which looks like Apartheid-era South Africa. The goal, they say, is to show how today’s problems with racial issues — over-policing of black people, disenfranchisement through voter I.D. laws, lack of representation at the highest level of power — is rooted in the nation’s legacy of slavery. . . .”

Short Takes

A celebration of the Anderson Monarchs, past, present and future, was held at Anderson on June 10. Sportswriting legend, Claire Smith, 2nd from left, who broke barriers of race and gender in her career, threw out the honorary first pitch. Smith traveled with the Monarchs in 1997, while working for the New York Times. (Credit: Charles Fox/Philadelphia Inquirer)
A celebration of the Anderson Monarchs baseball club for underprivileged youth in South Philadelphia, past, present and future, was held on June 10. Sportswriting legend Claire Smith, second from left, threw out the honorary first pitch. Smith traveled with the Monarchs in 1997 while working for the New York Times. (Credit: Charles Fox/Philadelphia Inquirer)

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View previous columns (after Feb. 13, 2016).
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3 comments

richard July 30, 2017 at 2:51 pm

Comments from The Root:

MakeSomaliaGreatAgain

7/30/17 1:19pm
“Asians were used to define and constrict African Americans.”

I wish more “Asian” (it’s a giant continent for God’s sakes) folks would grasp this. In colonial Africa and the West Indies, East, West and South Asians were used as a buffer between the “native” Africans and the ruling colonial Europeans. As a result of this tactic, many black Africans felt, rightly or wrongly, a sense of anger and hatred towards Asians in their postcolonial states. In Tanzania, Congo (Zaire), and Kenya, this resulted in social restrictions and occasional purges of the Asian communities. In Uganda, this logic went even further with the expulsion of about 75-80,000 Ugandans of Indian extraction. There’s a lot of healing and introspection that should take place and hopefully allows us, as formerly colonized populations, to see each other’s humanity and perhaps move past the transgressions of the past in an effort to craft a world that is less hostile to all non-white/European peoples.

akuarian
MakeSomaliaGreatAgain
7/30/17 2:16pm
They were plantation overseers to some degree, as far as i know. Alot of South asians, still behave as such to this day(bar Madagascar coz they’re very much mixed and are busy with France). Now that I am all set into farming and “ethnobiology”, I still get into heated argument with farmers from Cameroon and the area, as well as big asian land owners about where okra, moringa, and many others crops come from. My understanding, is that the pattern is mostly from The americas to Africa and back, then to Asia. Most of African crops are indigenous, have a local equivalent, the rest are indigenous from The Americas which got acclimated in the continent. Moringa, which is my favorite white vegan people(not) crops, are mostly from East Africa from Egypt to Somalia,Kenya, up to the Highland of Rwanda and Angola. The landrace( which happen to be from India PMK1) are rooted into the Siddi people.

MakeSomaliaGreatAgain
akuarian
7/30/17 2:19pm
I have to admit, I know very little about agriculture and the bounty of Africa’s soil. You’re teaching me a lot here. In Somalia, the Italians used Arabs to create a buffer between themselves and us but since Indians were too “integrated” into the society, they didn’t feel they could trust them to be ruthless. Arabs, on the other hand, has no such compunction since they are culturally, like Europeans, very Afrophobic.

IniquityDenMother
Richard Prince
7/30/17 1:22pm
On the Asian-American story:

I went to the big Sci-Tech magnet high school in Northern Virginia. And for a long time, the education writer for the WaPo was one of the biggest critics of the school – he hated it. (His contention was that the county needed more arts magnet programs…except before this school was created, those had been the only type of magnet programs available, something he kept managing to ignore.) So in a fresh round of criticism, he tried a tactic where he wrote an article about the lack of minorities that attend the school – I think at the time, only about 2% of the student body was black or latino – combined.

Now I’m the first one to say it: the county does a tremendously shit job of getting black and latino/latina students in the application pipeline. There’s a mechanism in place where potential students are identified late in the K-6 years, and you can be damn sure that the powers involved don’t over-think it if the schools in the poorer parts of the county with larger black and latino populations don’t submit many names. (Students need to be identified as having the sci-tech aptitude, and also be steered into the proper math curriculum when they hit junior high so they’re ready for the core curriculum.)

I am a firm believer that science & math aptitude doesn’t only appear in privileged white male teens with parents who want their son to get into UVA or William & Mary, but is, in fact, everywhere. (See the experts of Outrageous Acts of Science, for a start.) *deletes rant on the total skewed unfairness of the entry exam procedure and how it impacts the selection criteria and takes a deep breath* Anyway…

The education writer totally fucking ignored the part where anywhere from 1/4 to 1/3 of the student body is Asian. Which I pointed out to him in comments of the story, and in a more detailed e-mail sent directly to him. Essentially, I pointed out that he doesn’t get to use the word “minorities” and skip a huge category of them, simply because he was writing yet another hit piece on the school. I also suggested that perhaps he needed to go back to high school himself to understand the definition of the word and how it applied to the population of our county.

Going forward with follow-up stories, he was careful to say the school sucked at getting black and latino students in, and he stopped using the word “minorities.” I don’t pretend my single comment made the change – I wasn’t the only person in the comments who noted the large Asian population – but I did always wonder how many Asian alumni and current students wrote in and said, “Hey: we’re minorities, too. WTF?”

Reply
richard July 31, 2017 at 5:28 am

More comments from The Root:

akuarian (in reaction to:
MakeSomaliaGreatAgain)
7/30/17 3:00pm
I can tell you a lot on the soil and crops department, if you are interested. Eastern, Coastal Western & Soudano-Sahelian area, Central Africa are very much the epicentre of so much in term of History and Agriculture. I am now learning Permaculture, which to me, is basically gentrified indigenous African,Asian,Polynesian and Americans agricultural technic. I am side eyeing it on the reg, with the bonus of having my family to confirm what I know. I suck it up coz, that’s how it is. But I know dam well that our lands are fertile, pristine, in spite of everything else. Our main adversaries are desertification and water stress(same but not really) even in the Guinean Gulf, some kids from Benin are using water hyacinth (a weed) to clean up oil spill. They have been giving it to whomever wants to listen(thank the gods a lot of local farmers). Soft power and Imperialism apart, why do you think errrbody is coming onto our land yet again? The whole thing gives me the shit tbh, I am blessed to have parents who valued land throughout generations. If you can afford it, get a few acres for yourself, that whole area was and still is a place of transit, if not for humans for animals and plants.

MakeSomaliaGreatAgain
akuarian
7/30/17 3:55pm
Soft power and Imperialism apart, why do you think errrbody is coming onto our land yet again?

Africa, even the barren Horn, is at the centre of humanity, the physical planet, and unlike the Indigenous of South and North America, the European hasn’t managed to wipe us out and or subdue us. China and India, as civilizations, have a long history of trading with Africa but due to Eurocentricity, are now applying the same ignorant views about Africans in their dealings with us. What they fail to understand is that Africa, especially black Africa, was a strong supporter of Communist-run China when she was an isolated and diminished power.

Also, environmental degradation is the biggest threat to African stability today so those young people are doing the Lord’s work.

slapd (in reaction to:
IniquityDenMother)
7/30/17 10:20pm
I hear you man. I went to Major magnet school in boston and its pretty much exactly the same.

On your point about getting black and latino kids into these programs. its so fucking true. I went to elementery school where the demographics were pretty much all chinese and black/latino with some white kids sprinkled in. At this stage, any kid can be groomed into being a good student and i saw that realized that none of those kids were given the time nor the effort that my asian and few white peers did.

And for the record, Boston minorities got fucked with the busing crisis in the 70s and is still suffering for it. Yes we have prestious magnet schools to make our school system somewhat respectable but fuck, the disparity between those schools and our normal publics is night and day.

slapd
7/30/17 7:42pm
Love the the content but on mobile, its a horrible idea to post stories with this much text scrolling and pics along with ads. #makekinjagreat(again)

slapd
7/30/17 8:13pm
On the Asian thing:

Its so fucking hard. Growing up asian in/around a metropolitan city can mean so different things for you. I grew up in Boston to immigrant asian parents and went to a elementary school that was primarily for chinese kids and other minorities living in the city (Yes, the results of the busing crisis that happend almost 3 decades ago which people of color are still suffering for). And with classes made up of 10+ chinese and 10+ black/hispanic and maybe one or two white people, i started to relate and empathize to people of color as i grew up.

I want to consider my self a person of color because i grew up with that identity but i realize that it isnt that easy. There are self hating asians kids that will absolutely jump on the maga bandwagon. Asia itself is fucking backwards in their western worship. There are even kids who grew up right next to me that had one bad interaction with a person of color, who absolutely despise them for life.

I dont know where im going with this so im gonna leave this here until i get more thoughts.

SessoMatto (Yes, I’m really fun at parties.)

7/30/17 2:32pm
I would love to read Jay Kang’s story when it comes out… it would be great to see it posted here!

JohnDoe
7/30/17 5:30pm

“It’s complicated”

Would you say the issue isn’t…. black and white?

Tomi Marchant
7/30/17 4:18pm
It’s quite simple, really. We need to do away with the concept of PoC vs. Non-Hispanic White People, as if PoC are all under the same bubble of treatment and privilege. It’s an absolute fallacy.

A better way to look at race relations and oppression is through a Colorist lens: The darker your skin, the worse you will be treated. The ‘enlargement of whiteness’ is always in motion. As more and more people have darker skin, white supremacy will accept more and more lighter skin tones into their enlargement, as resistance.

We need to do away with concepts of racism from the past, whether that be 100, 50, or even 10 years ago.

JohnDoe
7/30/17 5:30pm
It’s complicated
Would you say the issue isn’t…. black and white?

Tomi Marchant
Richard Prince
7/30/17 4:18pm
It’s quite simple, really. We need to do away with the concept of PoC vs. Non-Hispanic White People, as if PoC are all under the same bubble of treatment and privilege. It’s an absolute fallacy.

A better way to look at race relations and oppression is through a *Colorist* lens: The darker your skin, the worse you will be treated. The ‘enlargement of whiteness’ is always in motion. As more and more people have darker skin, white supremacy will accept more and more lighter skin tones into their enlargement, as resistance.

We need to do away with concepts of racism from the past, whether that be 100, 50, or even 10 years ago. *All that matters is how we are treated TODAY.* The result of insidious bias conditioning through media over the past century, only forms to cement and reproduce stereotypes. Coupled with globalization and the ubiquity of technology, worldwide, we have all been conditioned to be anti-black.

Black people shouldn’t even be grouped with other PoC. Anti-blackness is its own, much more denigrating form of hate. It is a hate all other non-black PoC subscribe to in order to assimilate up the white supremacist hierarchy. I am just about sick of non-black PoC trying to play both sides of the fence, and going along pretending that they have it as bad as black people. They don’t. They never will. Black people are the bottom, the welcome mat they have no problem stepping all over on their way to acceptance by white supremacy. Don’t even get me started on the rampant anti-blackness in the Asian community.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the damage has already been done. White people were at the right place, right time in history to oppress. Their oppressive tactics reincarnate and live on indefinitely through media, conditioning biases. Their wealth continues to compound as black people’s continues to dwindle. The difference ever-growing, as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The world will end before we are ever treated as equals, and white’s greed will ensure that end will come soon. The result of insidious bias conditioning through media over the past century, only forms to cement and reproduce stereotypes. Coupled with globalization and the ubiquity of technology, worldwide, *we have all been conditioned to be anti-black.*

Black people shouldn’t even be grouped with other PoC. Anti-blackness is its own, much more denigrating form of hate. It is a hate all other non-black PoC subscribe to in order to assimilate up the white supremacist hierarchy. I am just about sick of non-black PoC trying to play both sides of the fence, and going along pretending that they have it as bad as black people. They don’t. They never will. Black people are the bottom, the welcome mat they have no problem stepping all over on their way to acceptance by white supremacy. Don’t even get me started on the rampant anti-blackness in the Asian community.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the damage has already been done. *White people were at the right place, right time in history to oppress.* Their oppressive tactics reincarnate and live on indefinitely through media, conditioning biases. Their wealth continues to compound as black people’s continues to dwindle. The difference ever-growing, as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. *The world will end before we are ever treated as equals*, and white’s greed will ensure that end will come soon.

FockU
7/30/17 4:01pm
Kang: Asians have been granted “conditional whiteness.” I don’t think we are people of color if you ask the New York Times. When people talk about race and say “people of color,” they don’t mean Asians. . . . “people of color” have been black and Latino.

I feel like “people of color” is a word used to ally non-white people to strengthen their numbers against white people.

But that’s where the alliance ends.

T H I C C
FockU
7/30/17 7:13pm
Wow no shit, is that also a tacit admission that you’re, *gasp* anti-white? Or is more of an admission that the entirety of your politics grouped against white people.?

Say…what would you say the future is for whites in the Democrat party?

FockU
T H I C C
7/31/17 2:39am
Say…what would you say the future is for whites in the Democrat party?
Useful minions?

nasty woodland creature
7/31/17 1:18am
Storm Front actually recruits Asian people
Holy smokes! And do Asian people join? O.o !!!

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richard August 1, 2017 at 8:39 am

More comments from The Root:

(In reaction to IniquityDenMother)

Psychopomps: Sleep and Death
IniquityDenMother
8/01/17 12:15am
Being an affluent Asian in America is such a schizophrenic experience, partly because the terms“minority” and “person of color” (rightly) used often to connote some sense of disadvantage in addition to difference. I go the local Costco and it is crowded with affluent Indians, Asians, and Caucasians, with not a single black or Hispanic face in this sea. Light-skinned Asians of all ages socialize and form romantic relationships with white peers and acquaintances as if we are honorary whites. I was born in modest circumstances, but my family now manages to live in a place of economic privilege that some of my white coworkers can only dream of. And with this economic privilege, undeniably, comes some degree of social privilege as well.

But in the back of my mind is a lurking voice that reminds me that, even in a liberal bubble, I will always be seen as exotic, that my accomplishments and work ethic will always be written off as because of my race or my culture, and that someone always see me first as their “Asian friend”. I hate to say it, but my most harrowing racial experiences have been with black Americans, a very few of whom I have encountered throughout my life calling me Jackie Chan, mocking Asian accents and mannerisms to my face, and throwing rocks at me and my father yelling at us to “return to our country”. But they are incredibly illuminating in reminding me that even we so-called “model minorities”, who seem to be integrating successfully into the social, educational, and economic life of America, only do so at the pleasure of white people who are assured by our lighter skin, and that outside of the white upper/middle-class bubble where this narrative is generated, our story is no different than that of any other racial minority in America. Inside that bubble, predominantly white institutions will greet us approvingly in the name of multiculturalism, patting themselves on the back all the way, then treat us as minorities as soon as they can benefit from doing so.

Psychopomps: Sleep and Death
slapd
8/01/17 12:45am
Briefly in 2nd grade, just after I had moved to a new school, I was physically bullied by another Chinese boy one grade up and his group of white friends (there were no other Asians at that school in Milwaukee). It was puzzling to me at the time why someone who looked like me hated me so much. I think we both know why.

I also know a good, smart guy a year younger than me who went to high school and later college with me. He confided in me one evening his belief that white people were getting soft and weak living in a first world country and never having faced true hardship. I don’t know if he was just having a bad day or if this was a sign of something darker, and though I questioned him on why he felt this way I should have tried harder to dispel him of these notions.

The point is, I totally get what you’re saying about children of immigrants who feel scared of an Asian identity and grasp for something that will help them feel accepted by some sort of mainstream. But there are also those who cling to their Asian-ness so fiercely that I worry what experiences drove them to stake so much of their selves on this nebulous idea. I think both of us were lucky to understand that an Asian American identity (of which there are many) is a complicated one, based on both distinguishing ourselves as different and trying to assimilate into the ‘mainstream’, whatever it may be, and simultaneously being accepted as white-ish and rejected as a minority. We lose the norms and cultural ties of our parents to a specific mother country, and instead are drawn to this vague and self-contradicting pan-Asian identity when there are only so many people who look like ourselves.

Roo2u
7/31/17 8:45am
I’m not clear on what the Asian American section of this article is about. Is the interview in there just highlighting how Asians are conflicted about race in the US?

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