Major Feelings

Buckle up: This is going to be a long article. There’s really only one thing to talk about (and I’ll get to that in a bit), but there are several other threads I want to tie in first because it feels like this week was a kind of convergence of various conversations that have occurred in the past weeks and months and years. This post will be much longer than others, so bear with me. There’s a lot on my mind, and I’m fucking angry.

I’m going to separate each mini section of this essay with a quote by Cathy Park Hong from her brilliant book Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. It was one of my favorite books from last year, and one where I underlined many, many passages. It was all too easy to flip back through the book today and find quotes from the pages I dog-eared that related to each section. Minor Feelings isn’t a perfect book, and I think it starts off stronger than it ends, but there’s no question that if you’re one of those white people looking for a book to read right now to make sense of a senseless situation, then Minor Feelings is as good a place to start as any.

So here we go. Let’s jump in.

Pity the Asian accent. It is such a degraded accent, one of the last accents acceptable to mock… I have a theory that Seamless was invented so Americans don’t have to hassle with immigrant accents.

I’ve written before about the stupid “game” I came up with when I lived in the small college town of Harrisonburg, VA. Although James Madison University is a liberal oasis, the surrounding town is not, so any time I went off campus by myself to get groceries or food, I’d play this game where I’d wait as long as I could to speak. I did this so that I could watch how the other person (usually a cashier, always white) would react. Let’s say I was going to a fast food place. When I’d approach the counter, I’d see if the person would lean in and tilt their head to the side so that their ear pointed in my direction, their body language indicating something along the lines of “I’m going to have to listen really hard here.” Then, when I finally gave my order, the way their face changed indicated they were surprised that I spoke without an accent. Here’s how I described it before: “There was an assumption they’d made about me in their head, and when they heard me speak English like a ‘normal’ American, it didn't jive with their preconception of me.”

My dad never taught me and my sister Korean. He didn’t want us to have an accent. This was back in the ‘80s, and I’m sure my dad experienced his fair share of racist encounters and microaggressions, especially considering we were living in Georgia at the time. So his way of sparing us that prejudice was to make sure our English was as perfect as possible. His thinking was probably along the lines of: The more American they sound, the more they'll be treated like Americans. Although his intentions were good, I really wish I were like my cousins who grew up learning Korean — all of whom were born in the United States like me, and none of whom have accents. Because the thing is, our voice only goes so far. And all too often — as my stupid college game illustrates — what people recognize about me first isn’t my accent-less English but my non-whiteness.

All that said, I get what my dad was thinking. Not having an accent is a form of cultural cachet that gives me more privilege. The thing is, though, I’ve internalized this to such an extreme degree that I’m now hypercritical of my grammar and syntax. Let me give you an example from just this week. My work recently partnered with a new IT provider, and this meant that I had to schedule an appointment with the new IT company so that they could install their antivirus software on my laptop and uninstall the previous IT provider’s software. The guy who called me to walk me through this process was named Julien. He was super nice and efficient. As we were waiting for one of the pieces of software to install, Julien made small talk: Had I seen the movie Death to 2020? “No,” I said, “but that’s a great name. Er, title.” There was hardly any pause between “name” and “title,” but I realized as I was saying it that people and places have names, while books and movies have titles. At the same time, I also knew that Julien wouldn’t care about the difference — he wasn’t judging me — but I didn’t want it to seem like I was bad at English, or that I didn’t know how words work. This is a single example of something that happens all the time. Even if I’m just hanging out with Kaitlin and I say something incorrectly I feel weird — that’s how deeply I’ve internalized this feeling.

Here’s Cathy Park Hong again:

There’s a ton of literature on the self-hating Jew and the self-hating African American, but not enough has been said about the self-hating Asian. Racial self-hatred is seeing yourself the way the whites see you, which turns you into your own worst enemy.

I could probably write a whole book about growing up hating the Korean half of my identity. I’ve written about it before, but there’s so much more to add. For now, I want to focus on one facet of that Asian self-loathing that feels particularly appropriate given this week’s events, namely: my attraction to white women. My thinking was something along the lines of: If I could date or be with a white person, then it would give me a pass into the white world. No longer would I have to worry about being part Asian — now I could be fully white. I think what I wanted more than anything at that time was for my East Asian half to disappear, and being with a white woman would accomplish that goal.

But here’s an important corollary to the above: Throughout high school, college, and even beyond that, I wasn’t ever attracted to East Asian women, because being with another Asian American would only exaggerate that part of my identity. Thus, I never had romantic feelings for any of my Asian friends or classmates, I never had an Asian celebrity crush, and for the short time I used dating apps, I didn’t try to connect with anyone Asian. That’s how deeply I had internalized this shit.

Here’s another quote by Cathy Park Hong, in which she discusses the invisibility of East Asian girls until they reach puberty: “From invisible girlhood, the Asian American woman will blossom into a fetish object. When she is at last visible — at last desired — she realizes much to her chagrin that this desire for her is treated like a perversion.” 

If I was on one end of the attracted-to-Asians spectrum, then I knew several guys who were on the opposite end. One of my closest friends in college had a high school friend who came to visit us in Harrisonburg every once in a while. I always liked this guy, but I never warmed up to him. He was similar to my college friend — I could see why they got along so well — in that they could both be a little meanly blunt sometimes.

Anyway, let’s call this guy Todd. Todd was white, and I remember on a few occasions when he talked about how much he wanted to date an Asian woman. I seem to remember him watching a lot of anime, and I think he had this image in his mind that East Asian women were all rail thin, big breasted, submissive objects. I didn’t have the vocabulary for it at the time, but he was very much fetishizing these women simply because of their race. If I didn’t find Asian women attractive because of their Asianness, then Todd was attracted to them for that exact reason. Neither of our mentalities were healthy or good or respectful or right, and largely for the same reason: because we used race to completely gloss over individuality. I would like to think that my behavior was slightly better than Todd’s, if only because I wasn’t secretly lusting after these women, but there’s no question that what I did was also wrong.

Back to Cathy Park Hong:

In the popular imagination, Asian Americans inhibit a vague purgatorial status: not white enough nor black enough; distrusted by African Americans, ignored by whites, unless we’re being used by whites to keep the black man down.

Time to bring things up to the present. Last week I saw this headline from the Guardian about Teen Vogue employees sending a letter to their parent company, Condé Nast, objecting to their newly appointed editor-in-chief’s anti-Asian tweets from ten years ago. Alexi McCammond was 17 or 18 when she wrote these tweets:

McCammond, who is Black, faced a lot of backlash. Then, after this week’s events, Condé Nast announced on Thursday that they were parting ways with McCammond. The timing here is not lost on me. If a horrific series of shootings targeting East Asian women hadn’t happened within a week of this controversy, would McCammond still have a job? It’s the same kind of unanswerable question as: Would Joe Biden still have won the election if the pandemic never happened? I have no idea, and there’s no way to know.

Now, I’m not saying I believe McCammond should have lost her job over these tweets. Nor am I saying this is “cancel culture” run amok. I’m honestly not sure what the best solution was, because it’s a complex problem. Should people be held accountable for comments they made as teenagers? Probably not. Should teenagers know better than to make comments like hers? I would hope so. Are her comments racist? Yes, because young people can be racist, too.

Personally, I’m torn about this news. I’m sad that tweets from almost ten years ago and which were written by a teenager have forced a young Black woman to resign from a prestigious job. On the other hand, I’m glad that the workers who raised objections had a voice, and that the higher-ups listened to that voice. So I don’t know. I will say, though, that even as a teenager I never used the N word, nor did I dress up in offensive Halloween costumes, and I don’t remember my friends doing this, either. The point being — and this hardly seems like it’s worth stating — is that not all young people say or tweet racist things. If anything, what McCammond’s old tweets illustrate is just how deeply anti-Asian bias runs in our society. I mean, “googling how to not wake up with swollen, asian eyes”? Fuck.

Even if I still haven’t fully processed where I stand on this, Malcolm Gladwell sure has. On Friday he WENT OFF on Twitter, railing against Condé Nast:

I don’t think these points land quite as well as some of his others, but they help to illustrate the tone of his tweetstorm. His first two tweets on this topic really strike a chord with me, though:

I think he’s spot on that Black adolescents aren’t given the same privilege to make mistakes as white adolescents are. Usually this is manifested in detention after school or the incarceration of Black juveniles. What’s interesting here is the delay between the offense and its punishment — almost ten years. Isn’t there a difference between criminalizing the behavior of Black adolescents when they’re adolescents versus when they’re adults? To me, the most confounding thing about this whole situation is that McCammond (note that Gladwell calls her “McCommand” instead of “McCammond”) never went back and deleted her old tweets! Even before she was named editor-in-chief at Teen Vogue, I can’t believe that she didn’t spend the time combing through tweets she wrote as a teenager. That alone indicates something, to me — either that she felt like what she said in the past wasn’t somehow wrong or offensive, or that no one would notice.

For me, the biggest and hardest question to answer is whether (and how) we can gauge just how much McCammond — or anyone in a situation similar to hers — has changed. How do we know that 27-year-old Alexi is fundamentally a different person from 17- or 18-year-old Alexi and that she no longer believes or would say those things? Well, I mean, for one, there’s the obvious response, which is that we all grow and change between our late teens and our late 20s. Still, the question is: to what degree does that change occur and, more importantly, how can we measure it? The only person who can really assess that change is the person at the center of the controversy.

I think this is why situations like these ultimately become an all-or-nothing proposition. Either the person keeps their job or they don’t, and either way a different set of people are going to be mad. It seems like people on the right are willing to accept apologies like McCammond’s at face value, but people on the left want a little more evidence of growth or development. For me personally, years and years and years of politicians (mostly on the right, but also on the left) straight-up lying have left me numb and desensitized. I’m skeptical of just about anyone when they make a public apology, or claim they’re not that person anymore. It feels like lip service to survive the news cycle until something else comes along to focus our attention elsewhere.

The unfortunate thing for McCammond was the timing: what came next in the news cycle was the killing of six East Asian women.

Returning to Cathy Park Hong:

The indignity of being Asian in this country has been underreported. We have been cowed by the lie that we have it good. We keep our heads down and work hard, believing that our diligence will reward us with our dignity, but our diligence will only make us disappear.

Wednesday was a shit day all around. I woke up to the news about eight people who were killed in the Atlanta area, six of whom were East Asian women, and four of whom were Korean. Two of the crime scenes were about a half hour away from where I was born. My sister and her boyfriend are currently living in Georgia. There was a lot about the news that hit close to home.

From there, I had the most punishing day at work in a long while. Decisions that were made without consulting or informing me had a major effect on my workflow, leading to an incredibly stressful moment around noon when something like 200 emails came swarming into my inbox. Most of these I was ultimately able to delete, but weeding through them so as not to delete a real email — while more and more of these emails continued to stream in — was very stressful.

Both the news and work that day (and the following two days) illustrated how I have no control over certain situations. With work, as with the news, I only had one real option: to accept it and power through. Sure, I did get (some) help from my supervisor, but the expectation was that I was the one person who should be doing this work, so it fell to me and me alone to complete.

All of this culminated in feelings of frustration and anger and resentment. What I hate about being Asian American is that we’re given very little choice. We don’t have a choice in how we look. We don’t have a choice in how people perceive us. We don’t have a choice in where or how (or if!) we get attacked and harassed. Whereas the young white man in Georgia DID have a choice: He chose to take out his feelings of sexual inadequacies by murdering eight people, he chose to have a beard and haircut that scream white supremacist, and he even chose the motive for his actions — it wasn’t based on race, he was simply trying to stop his temptations. Bullshit. If you end eight people’s lives and six of them are Asian women, then guess what, that’s a racially-motivated attack, you fuck. And if anyone was left wondering why it is that East Asian women work at the kind of spas where these attacks occurred, look no further than Todd and his fetishization of East Asian women.

Cathy Park Hong:

Suddenly Americans feel self-conscious of their white identity, and this self-consciousness misleads them into thinking their identity is under threat. In feeling wrong, they feel wronged. In being asked to be made aware of racial oppression, they feel oppressed. While we laugh at white tears, white tears can turn dangerous.

I only follow one person on Twitter who is conservative. I assume he’s probably a good person, although I don't know him very well. He followed me, and I followed him back, at first because I felt like it was important to keep tabs on what the other side was saying and thinking. It felt like a way for me to step out of the echo chamber I had built for myself. But these days, reading the tweets he likes just makes me angry. I don’t know how important or necessary it is to escape an echo chamber if all that’s on the outside is even more noise. I think I’m going to have to unfollow him. There’s no dialogue, it’s just dismissiveness and hate that riles me up for no good reason other than that’s what it’s intended to do.

What really triggered this guy was the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. As a white man himself, I think he somehow took the whole thing personally. Now he likes tweets like these:

Gotta love it when white guys claim there’s no such thing as white supremacy. It’s like when tobacco companies said their products didn’t cause cancer — not only is it a lie, but it’s a self-serving lie that has harmful consequences. (Chad Felix Greene is particularly interesting, as he’s trans. A good reminder that just because someone might be part of an oppressed community, their whiteness can still blind them to others’ inequity.)

I’m not entirely sure what Chad and Kurt mean when they dismiss white supremacy so flippantly. My best guess is that, to them, white supremacy means total and complete domination, and since we no longer have slave owners then somehow we don’t have white supremacy (hence the “dustbin of history” line?). Of course, one could argue that the systemic bias and discrimination we have in this country (i.e. unequal access to job opportunities, wealth, healthcare, etc) is analogous to just such an enslaved person/slave owner dynamic. The fact is, white supremacy isn’t that explicit in the 21st century. But just because it’s less visible doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

I think we need new terminology. If racists and Klan supporters can rebrand themselves with the gentle “alt-right” moniker, then we need to find a new way to phrase “white supremacy” that better fits today’s world. Here are a couple suggestions: “white advantage” “or “white options.” I keep circling back to the idea of options and choice because, at the root of it, that’s what white privilege is: having an option to be seen as an individual instead of a representation of a race, or having the option to get pulled over and not worry for your life. Of course, the funny thing is that the bad white people are beginning to realize that they’re not given as many choices or options — they’re being reduced to their skin color and what it represents. That hurts, it’s not nice, and they’re understandably upset about it. They don’t want to lose power because those who have the power have the control. I think so much of the anxiety, the frustration, the anger that young white men feel stems from that vulnerability.

Here’s Cathy Park Hong one last time:

The problem with silence is that it can’t speak up and say why it’s silent. And so silence collects, becomes amplified, takes on a life outside our intentions, in that silence can get misread as indifference, or avoidance, or even shame, and eventually this silence passes over into forgetting.

This article has been my way of not being silent, of not letting this week be forgotten. Which is why it’s time for me to admit something I maybe should’ve mentioned earlier. I very purposefully said at the beginning of this article that it was going to be a long one because I wanted you to be aware of its length. This article is exactly 3,795 words — the same number of hate incidents reported to the Stop AAPI Hate database from March 19, 2020 to February 28, 2021. Thus, every word in this post represents a single incident — a single verbal harassment, a single physical assault, a single civil rights violation, a single online harassment. This is a fucking long article — way longer than my usual posts, which average 1,500 words — because that’s a lot of fucking incidents. The thing is, though, this is only a fraction of the harassment and abuse Asian Americans have endured the past year, because who knows how many events went unreported. What the Stop AAPI Hate report does show — and this is in their own words — is “how vulnerable Asian Americans are to discrimination, and the types of discrimination they face.”

I’ve now spent almost 4,000 words trying to prove to a few assholes on Twitter that the aggression Asian Americans face is real. It’s not just the words themselves that are harmful, it’s the actions those words then incite or condone. Language is incredibly powerful. It’s why certain white people get so riled up when a cisgender BIPOC says “white people” or “cisgender” or “BIPOC.” The camp that continually derides liberals as a bunch of sensitive snowflakes sure does get angry when it comes to certain words. Language is a tool, and I’m hopeful when I see more and more people of color take it up and use it so effectively to chip away at white supremacy. In this effort, there’s really no action too small, no words too little. So speak up.