You’re 8 years old.
Your 3rd grade class orders chinese food & your father delivers it. You are so excited to see your pops in school. He’s your hero. But apparently other kids don’t think he’s so cool. They laugh at him and mimic his accent. You don’t want to be Chinese anymore.
Could it be that the reason the kids didn't think her dad was "cool" was that he delivered food for a living? Would it really be different if he was white and worked for Pizza Hut?
You’re 9 years old.
You attend ballet camp. Someone tells you that another girl *hates* you. She thinks your eyes are an “ugly shape.” You don’t have the vocabulary to describe why that’s hurtful. But now, you hate your distinctly Asian face. You don’t want to be Chinese anymore.
Kids can be mean. You don't think white kids ever get bullied because of physical attributes?
You’re 16 years old.
It’s Halloween & 2 students come to class dressed as “Asian tourists.” They’ve taped their eyes back, strapped cameras around their necks and chucked up peace signs. You feel uncomfortable. When a teacher asks if you find the costumes offensive, you say no.
That's being oversensitive. It's Halloween for fuck's sake, not PC-fest. She could have chosen a costume that was stereotypically white. Like a viking or something.
You don’t want people thinking you’re uptight. You laugh along with everyone else. You don’t want to be Chinese anymore.
Oh please! Especially since the tourist trope is Japanese, not Chinese.
Here's the thing. This woman met a lot of people who felt it was OK to treat her that way because of systemic racism.
No. It's not systemic racism. Most of them were kids being mean because kids are mean, not because of race. And oversensitivity to a Halloween costume.
This is the double standard I decry. You think a high schooler's Halloween costume is some sort of "systemic racism" but a journalist tweeting #CancelWhitePeople or comparing white people to dogs is just fine.
Let's compare apples to apples.
Racism isn't "someone said something mean and now I feel bad."
Except when it happens to a so-called POC with Halloween costumes.
Racism is "prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior" or "the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races." Which fits Jeong's statements. It does not fit wearing non-PC Halloween costumes.
It's about a series of assumptions that say one group's well-being and feelings matters more than everyone else's. That series of assumptions teaches black kids to hate their own black-ness and Chinese-American kids to hate their own Chinese-ness and me to hate my own Japanese qualities. When you say and do racist things, you reinforce that system of beliefs that abuse entire populations.
Bullshit. The most wide-spread form of this in contemorary culture is white kids being taught to hate their own white-ness. All the other races are taught they should be proud of being X, but white people are taught to be ashamed to be white and to experience white guilt.
I know. You think that you have it exactly as bad as any minority because being accused of racism is just as awful as inflicting it on others for hundreds of years. You are able to think that way because deep down you believe you are so superior that a minor inconvenience for you really is equivalent to the suppression and abuse of entire populations for centuries.
Bullshit. For one, nobody alive today has inflicted anything on anybody for 100s of years. You believe in collective punishment where white people should be punished for what people who kinds sorta looked like them did hundreds of years ago. Second, Jeong is Korean. What have white people done to Korea that was so horrible, especially compared to what Japanese inflicted on them in the 20th century? If you want to use history as justification for anti-white racism, it does not fly in the case of Korea.
Fuck you. You're not a special snowflake because you're white.
Fuck you too. You are not a special snowflake because you are part Japanese. You are not a special snowflake because you hate one half of your DNA.
And to insist that something like this is racist is absurd on the face of it.
What Jeong wrote is most certainly racist. Something racist does not cease to be racist just because it is directed at a race you dislike.
When people say and do racist things to Asians, they are reinforcing systemic racism we've been dealing with all our lives, and I know damn well that African-Americans deal with much worse than what we Asians put up with.
But saying and doing racist things to white people is ok because reasons?
All of this is just more snowflake bullshit from snowflake white supremacists.
You are the snowflake here because you want special protections because of who some of your ancestors have been.
Fucking fuck off. I'm tired of your snowflake bullshit,
Then stop being such a snowflake and discuss things rationally. Instead of becoming overly emotional because somebody wore a Halloween costume at 16.
and you are not special just because your parents fucked.
Neither are you. Neither is Jeong. And you two are also not special because of your eye shape. Skin color or eye shape should not give one licence to be racist.
