No more gaslighting anti-Asian hate
Jerrine Tan, visiting lecturer in English at ŷAV, writes for Wired magazine about her 14 years of second-guessing the racism directed at her.
On March 16, 2021, a series of mass shootings occurred at three spas in Atlanta, Georgia. Eight people were killed, six of whom were Asian women, and one other person was wounded. This horrific spree comes after a year where anti-Asian hate crimes rose 150%, according to the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.
Jerrine Tan, visiting lecturer in English, wrote an essay for Wired magazine discussing the racism she’s endured. “After 14 years in the US, I have learned to be vigilantly hyper-aware of my skin,” she wrote. “Racism most of the time rubs more like a rash than a gash.”
“Until this week, I’d been struggling to give gravity to what I knew deeply were important issues concerning Asian women in particular, but I kept second-guessing myself, worried I was being irrelevant, missing the point, or diverting attention away from events at hand,” she wrote. “In my frustration, my writing devolved into ranting lists that ran the gamut of instances of microaggressions to harassment, to assault, to my own paranoia. I worried I sounded petty or dramatic—indulgent, for taking up space.”
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