Sunday, March 21, 2021

Worse Than Fair Weather Fans

There's no way to excerpt this, I'll post it in its entirety:

By K. Lee

I had a conversation with my brother in Oregon, last night. Besides the usual family matters, he brought up a call he received from a ‘friend.’ The friend wanted to check on my brother and the family amidst rising violence toward Asian Americans. While my brother appreciated the gesture, he told his friend that it wasn’t necessary. The friend said he had been concerned about all the anti-Asian violence ever since Trump and the “China” virus rhetoric.

The friend knows my brother is a staunch conservative, so my brother got irritated. He asked the dude, what’s Trump got to do with the Georgia shootings and where was his phone call last year? The friend said he didn’t get what my brother was getting at. My brother replied that there were over 3,800 incidents of anti-Asian violence last year, yet you didn’t check on us. The friend said he didn’t know. My brother said, of course not—because no one besides us Asians cared. But now that you see a perp is a white male from the South, you start to care. You have to make this about YOU making a political statement rather than really caring about us, the Asian Americans.

My brother is correct. How can we trust and believe your sentiments when you didn’t care last year when we pleaded for assistance? The district attorneys in the Bay area and NYC acted blind to our plight. The national mainstream media didn’t lend us their ear nor their voice because the narrative didn’t fit.

But, now, you care.

You use our victimhood, turning it into your political gains—whether to infringe on the 2A or keep portraying Trump as that boogeyman. You sided with the rich NBA players over the freedom fighters of Hong Kong. You sided with Disney and NIKE over the lives and the dignity of the Uighurs in western China. You praised Antifa while they harassed and doxxed a gay Asian journalist. You sided with the rioters and looters that stole, robbed, and burned down our shops and businesses all last summer.

Yesterday, we found out the killer in the Georgia shooting rampage is a disturbed young man who is an Asian fetishist. Not exactly the perp that my brother’s friend wished for. I find it twisted and sick that there are a lot of white folks who get a ‘hard on’ for minorities’ victimhood. It’s as reprehensible as someone who has an Asian sexual fetish. Which is confusing—because one moment we are categorized with the ‘Whites’ when we are applying for colleges and universities and we don’t get the same affirmative action benefits of other POC when applying for a job— yet we are marginalized victims again, to serve your political purpose.

So we are just pawns.

My brother told his ‘friend,’ or his ‘ally,’ to snap out of trying to be the white savior. It was clear to my brother that the phone call was about the dude’s self righteousness and it was more self-serving than a true concern for the welfare and well-being of our family or any other Asians. My apologies, if my brother and I and some of our fellow Asians respond with indignation.

You’ve written us off. You’ve ignored us. And you didn’t care for so long. But, now, you tell us you care? Don’t play us for fools. We see you for the hypocritical players that you are.

Remember, Asians are "white adjacent" when it comes to education--and "white adjacent" is not a term invented by people with my political beliefs. 

Update: Read about anti-Asian "hate crimes".

Update #2:  Let's not forget this:

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Its easy for SF to have a low hate crime number when the DA Chesa Boudin won't charge anything as a hate crime.

https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Chesa-Boudin-crime-video-Bayview-Asian-attack-DA-15099780.php

ObieJuan said...

Truthfully, after teaching mathematics for 40 years I have become an Asian supremacist.

Ellen K said...

Surprisingly enough, my Dallas suburb had a huge Korean and Vietnamese population. Many of the parents were professionals, but all the families had high expectations for their children. We hardly ever saw any of this group of parents at PTA yet their children by an large represented our most successful testing demographic overall. This is in a "good" school with generally middle.upper middle and upperclass homes. Most of these students get the same curriculum, faciliites and support at school. So why is it that our Korean and Vietnamese students tend to score higher overall? I think it has to do with two things-close knit extended families and the concept of preventing family shame. In cultures where these two things don't exist, you don't see the kind of overall achievement you do within the Asian communities by and large. These traits also show up with our Indian and Pakistani students as well as African students who began school outside of the US. So there is something within American minority culture that is fostering a belief that they don't have to try. This doesn't mean there aren't stellar examples of scholarship in these groups, but it's not a common. So when college applications come around and our Korean students are vying for scholarships only to see other groups getting admissions, grants and scholarships based on who they are over merit, it's got to bring up questions. And from my understanding those questions are about to be considered by SCOTUS.