From Spy Balloons To TikTok: It's Everything Everywhere All At Once Again

Tuesday, April 04, 2023

We know I love pop and film and everything dreamy in-between, but you also know I hate a racist MF as much as I hate a racist MF and everyone's feeling it--from TikTok to Spy balloons, to the hangover of APIA Hate Crimes--people can win as many awards as they want, but some things just don't matter in other ways. It definitely helps and pushes a needle--but not always and sometimes never in some arenas.

A few good articles from the last month:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/26/tech/asian-americans-tiktok/index.html

Ever since the US government shot down a Chinese spy balloon last month, Min has withdrawn from her normal routine out of a concern she or her family may become targeted in one of the hundreds of anti-Asian hate crimes the FBI now says are occurring every year. The wave of anti-Asian hate that surged with the pandemic may only get worse, Min worries, as both political parties have amplified fears about China and the threat it poses to US economic and national security [...] After lawmakers repeatedly accused Chew, who is Singaporean, of working for the Chinese government and tried to associate him with the Chinese Communist Party, Vanessa Pappas, a top TikTok executive, condemned the hearing as “rooted in xenophobia.”

https://hbr.org/2023/03/research-how-anti-asian-racism-has-manifested-at-work-in-the-pandemic

To more fully understand how Covid-19 affected the racial dynamics experienced by Asian professionals in the workplace, in our recent study, we interviewed and gathered stories from 35 professionals working in a range of different industries, including finance, health care, technology, and higher education over the span of three months. Participants included a mix of Asian American and Asian Canadian professionals, and the findings applied to both groups.

https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/article272706790.html

“Many scholars and Asian and Pacific Island citizens, I among them, believe that some Americans regard Asians as ‘perpetual foreigners’ somehow attached to Asia no matter how long they have lived here in the U.S., even if they have been here for many generations,” said Gabriel Chin, professor of law at the University of California, Davis. A lot of people remember when the consequences of such suspicions were dire. “There is no relationship, none, zero between an American who happens to be of Asian descent and foreign governments. When we conflate those issues that’s how we get a Japanese-American internment,” said Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Los Angeles, citing the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.