When Racists Love You More Than The Liberals.

The SPLC And Eliot Roger.

It's been a good few years since white/Asian mixed-race mass-murderer, Eliot Roger, went on a killing spree that resulted in the deaths of six people. Known as the Isla Vista killings, the tragedy exposed some of the deep-rooted schisms that have long divided Asian-Americans. Despite the fact that Roger had disdain for Asian men, the incident was co-opted by some Asian feminists who pushed the assertion of an implicit sickness with "Asian masculinity" as one of the causative factors for his actions

In the real world, Roger's primary role model for masculinity was his Caucasian father, and his thoughts on Asian masculinity were derisive. How these factors turned Roger into an example of Asian male misogyny is a mystery. 

What became clear in the aftermath of the case is that Roger's racist attitudes towards Asian men were downplayed by both the mainstream, and our own largely, useless, twitter/blogger Asian "activists". This is unsurprising as I have always maintained that Asian progressive activism seeks to stifle Asian progress, limit race dialogue to a black/white binary, and stigmatize Asian men as implicitly racist upholders of white supremacy. No wonder mainstream America is empowered to maintain its racist representations of Asian men since even our own activists obfuscate the facts to push an agenda.

It came as no surprise to me, then, when an article recently appeared in the journal of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) that defined Eliot Roger as the first "Alt-Right" killer whose actions were driven by an adherence to white nationalist ideology. The SPLC  is a legal organization, started in the early nineteen-seventies, that advocates for victims of racial prejudice. One of its tasks is the monitoring of hate groups and extremists. Despite its credentials as a bulwark against hate crimes, the SPLC's report on Roger's "Alt-Right" leanings is, ironically, itself an example how liberals and leftists incubate anti-Asian attitudes.

Of course, I did not personally know Eliot Roger. I never met him, and I have no idea what it feels like to have the kind of embarrassment and shame about being Asian that he apparently had. I have no comprehension of Roger's hatred for other Asian men, nor have I had difficulty interacting with the opposite sex as Roger is reported to have experienced. Despite all of this, I know Roger very well because I know what it is like to be an Asian man whose cultural identity is erased from the society you live in.

Roger would have grown up in an American cultural setting in which Asian men are depicted as pathetic losers who fail at romance due to our physical repulsiveness, and fail as men because of mental and physical weaknesses. Asian men almost always lose - because we are the bad guys - and if we win, it is mostly as peripheral characters in a team of much stronger white men. At every turn, Roger would have been met with negative portrayals of Asian men. Television, film, literature, news media and even children's books would have shown Asian men in extremely negative ways. If not as absurd caricatures, then as the subject of xenophobic white fantasies of brutal beatings or mass killings of Asian enemies.

Roger, like all Asian men, lived in a culture in which he was taught through casual media racism that being an Asian man made you worthy entirely of violent aggression or relentless mockery. It is, largely, the left-leaning liberal media that propagates this dehumanizing anti-Asian male racism, although some of these negative portrayals would have originated with other Asian-Americans whose creative output marginalizes Asian men or offhandedly demeans them.

The liberal SPLC's report takes none of this into account. In fact, it completely erases this experience by, literally, white-washing Roger so that his motivations can be neatly shoehorned into the umbrella of the black/white race dichotomy, and the left/right narrative. It says this about Roger...

But Atchison wasn’t the first to fit the profile of alt-right killer—that morbid milestone belongs to Elliot Rodger, the 22-year-old who in 2014 killed seven in Isla Vista, California, after uploading a sprawling manifesto filled with hatred of young women and interracial couples...Including Rodger’s murderous rampage there have been at least 13 alt-right related fatal episodes...

It goes on....

Rodger left behind a sprawling 107,000-word manifesto titled, “My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger,” which contained passages lamenting his inability to find a girlfriend, expressing extreme misogyny and various racist positions including disgust for interracial couples (despite the fact that he was multi-racial himself).....“How could an inferior, ugly black boy be able to get a white girl and not me? I am beautiful, and I am half white myself,” Rodger wrote. “I am descended from British aristocracy. He is descended from slaves.”

We should recall that Roger stabbed his three Asian male roommates to death and mutilated their bodies in an act of savage hatred, railed against "ugly" Asian men being with white girls, and saw himself as superior to full-blooded Asian men. Yet, the SPLC report saw fit to view Roger's racism solely from the perspective of his anti-black tirades. What the SPLC has done is to whitewash  the anti-Asian racism Roger would have been subject to, and blackwash his racism so that his actions can be neatly defined in terms of the black/white dichotomy. The experiences of anti-Asian media racism that may have informed Roger's alienation and fueled his hatred of Asian men have been erased by the SPLC.

In its zeal to paint Roger as just another killer driven by white nationalist fervour, the SPLC has absolved liberal racism of its culpability in creating the monster that Roger became. In fact, I would suggest that Roger found himself pushed to the fringes of society - and into the sphere of white nationalism - precisely because casual liberal media racism denies Asian men a positive American cultural identity. There was no celebrated and beloved cultural Asian-American figure that Roger could look to and say to himself, "that is the Asian-American who best represents my aspirations, inspiration, and character". Asian men don't fit into America's cultural narratives except, largely, in the most demeaning and dehumanizing ways. Perhaps the casual violence that the liberal media likes to depict being inflicted on Asian men fueled Roger's violent fantasies - his mutilation of his three Asian roommates merely mirrors pervasive film and television images of Asian men being brutally killed en masse by white heroes.

Roger's case raises some difficult questions about how media representation of Asian men affects our community. Some Asian-American anti-blackness reactivists chide their own community for over-inflating the issue of poor media representation. Yet, the Isla Vista killings raises the intriguing possibility of a line of causation between racist stereotypes of Asian men, and an act of violence in society. If media racism is creating a sociocultural environment in which Asian men are marginalized and alienated to the point of murderous nihilism, then that is surely a major social issue?

By ignoring Roger's hatred of Asians the SPLC renders it invisible, diminishes its significance, and, in the process, is complicit in the propagation of a dismissive attitude towards casual anti-Asian racism. Yet, the organization defines a hate group as follows....

The Southern Poverty Law Center defines a hate group as an organization that – based on its official statements or principles, the statements of its leaders, or its activities – has beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.

This definition describes the liberal media - particularly the liberal "creative"media - that routinely, and casually produces depictions of Asian men that dehumanize, and malign us for our supposed immutable characteristics. If Eliot Roger hated Asian men to the point of murder, it is because our society and culture fosters such attitudes. Roger shows that cultural emasculation of Asian men can have tragic real world consequences.

There is an important distinction that has to be made here. Roger's actions were not the product of his Asian-ness, they were the product of our racist culture's representations of his Asian-ness. His alienation and murderous rage should be viewed as the outcome of casual anti-Asian racism that has become the normative manner of conceptualizing Asian men. I would agree that participating in white nationalist ideology was a factor in Roger's actions, the question is, how and why did he end up there?

The SPLC suggests that he was merely seduced by white nationalism. Asian progressive activists and feminists suggest that he was the product of a toxic masculinity unique to Asian-American men. Both groups ignore the likelihood that gendered, Asian male targeted media racism alienated him to such a point that he grew to hate being part Asian and chose to adopt the most extreme white nationalist culture. There was simply no cultural narrative that he would have found sympathetic to his racial background, so he chose one that would. Ironically, he seemed to have found more acceptance for his Asian-ness amongst a bunch of racist losers that would have done from mainstream culture. That, to me, is indicative of a major social ill.

YouTube Creators for Change: Natalie Tran | White Male Asian Female

A Missed Opportunity.

There is a YouTube video by Australian YouTube star, Natalie Tran, that has been making the rounds in Asian cyberspace recently in which she exposed the cyber hate that she receives due to her being in a relationship with a white man.

Here's the video.....

 

Although Tran's documentary is certainly well-intentioned, and has received some considerable praise, I can't help but feel disappointed.

At the beginning of the documentary Tran shows us some examples of the abusive comments she receives, and declares that ...

...just to add salt to the wound, a lot of these comments come from fellow Asians.....these comments are pretty common. A lot of other Asian women who date Caucasian men, and have some kind of presence online, also receive a lot of these comments as well.....

Neither of these points sit well. The second point is problematic because the implication is that Asian women are somehow uniquely afflicted by this kind of cyber bullying. In fact, there is ample documented evidence that all but proves that any woman of any race with an online presence who dates interracially will be targeted because of it. Plus, because the internet can be anonymous, it is almost impossible to actually identify anyone who posts comments on any site, so we generally have no way of knowing if the people leaving hate comments are actually Asian.

Tran's first point is more intriguing.

According to Tran "a lot" - but not all - of these hate comments are from "fellow" Asians, which makes me wonder why she chose to focus only on seeking answers to why Asians would be attacking her in this way? Is Asian opposition to her personal dating choices somehow a greater crime than, let's say, white opposition? If so, why? Sure, she feels that it is "adding insult to injury" when Asians attack her in this way, but why she feels this isn't clear. If she is suggesting that Asian hate comments are more hurtful because they are a betrayal of some kind of solidarity amongst Asians, then this merely exposes a huge irony that I will expound upon a little later.

During Tran's interview of Asian-American dating coach, JT Tran, he stated that Asian men leave hate comments because of their life-experiences. Although, overall, JT did a great job of describing some of the issues faced by Asian men, I would argue that there is more nuance to the relationship between Asian men's experiences and online vitriol - which I will discuss later. For most Asian men, the racism we experience, and the anger it fosters, motivates us to strive for success and accomplishment in many different areas of life and in no way drives us to become cyber-bullies. The point was overly simplistic, and merely reinforced the the stereotype of loser Asian guys leaving bitter comments on Asian websites.

More significantly, juxtaposing Tran's dating issues with the racism Asian men face creates an implicit relegation of Asian men's experiences to a mere sub-context of Asian female dating choices. The gender-specific racism that Asian men experience deserves to be a significant part of Asian-American thought and dialogue in its own right and not as something that gets spoken about only when it negatively affects Asian women's dating choices. Sadly, we just don't see many investigative documentaries that focus solely on anti-Asian male racism in America. This is the irony of Tran's apparent sense of betrayal that Asians are leaving hate comments: our "community" is a mere apparition when it comes to Asian men's experiences that only appears as part of an apologetic for interracial dating.

There is another irony that is worth noting: Asian men's complaints about culturally induced difficulties in dating are routinely dismissed - mostly by Asian progressives - yet, when an Asian woman experiences opposition to her dating choices, we get a documentary about it. This, perhaps, is another example of how "community" is a poor choice of word.

Furthermore, there is an implicit (although, perhaps, unintentional) shifting of the burden of responsibility to explain the actions of a few Asian commenters onto the entire community of Asian men. It does not logically follow that Asian men would be able to explain the online anti-social behaviour of other Asian men just because they are Asian men. It is the job and expertise of psychologists and behaviourists to explain behaviour and psychological states - particularly when it comes to anti-social behaviour on the internet. It was certainly appropriate to ask Asian men to describe Asian men's anger and experiences, but not to explain the behaviour of online trolls.

There are a number of factors that researchers have discovered contribute to online trolling. These include, a sense of no accountability due to anonymity, desensitization due to a general toxic internet environment, and a lack of consequences. Interestingly, other studies suggest that the general tone of other comments on an issue contributes to trolling behaviour. The ramifications of this highlights the most glaring problem with Tran's investigation: there is a cycle of vicious online commentary between Asian men and women that mutually demeans each other that Tran did not address.

The nature of the sometimes vitriolic dialogue between Asian men and women could be driving hate comments and might not necessarily be the result of anti-Asian male racism Asian men experience in their daily lives. It is mere presumption that those who leave hate comments are actually responding from a place personal pain -  they could merely be responding to anti-Asian male comments left by Asian women on an existing or previous thread .

Instead of an un-nuanced assertion that Asian men's anger about their experiences leads to trolling, it would be more accurate for Tran to have noticed that the hate comments she receives are merely part of an ongoing online dialogue between some Asian men and women that is mutually hateful. In other words, based on research, Asian men who troll Tran, are likely to be embroiled in the cycle of hate comments to which some Asian women seem happy to contribute. This means that the hate directed at Tran is merely a by-product of an online situation created by both Asian men and Asian women. It would have been nice for Tran to have investigated this - significant - aspect of the story. I would have liked to have seen Tran cornering Asian women and asking them why other Asian women leave hate comments about Asian men that contribute to the toxic environment of mutual distrust that is a major causative factor in the hate comments Tran receives about her relationship.

To summarize, Tran's documentary missed the point by not addressing the online environment of mutual disdain and hostility that has been created by some Asian women and men. The hate comments she receives seem to me to be most likely a reflection of this environment than an outcome of how Asian men are likely to react to anti-Asian male racism. By failing to seek answers to why some Asian women post anti-Asian male tweets, write demeaning news articles about Asian men, or generally show disdain for Asian men's humanity, Tran's documentary shed scant light on the issue she was investigating. 

Exposing Posing.

The Road Less Travelled.

Well, it's been a few months since I last posted - life is keeping me busy! I hope to get back to regular blogging soon. Something caught my attention in recent weeks that I had to write about.

It seems that these days our cultural consciousness is driven by narratives - stories, and even myths that create, shape, and reinforce societal beliefs, opinions, and attitudes. Taken together, these narratives form the basis for our "commonly held beliefs" as a nation, society, or community, and often provide the framework through which policy is formed, actions are taken, and laws are made.

In America's race dialogue, narratives are a significant weapon in the arsenals of activists seeking justice for racial wrongdoings of both present and past. None are more verbally empowered by narratives than progressive Asian "activists" who have appropriated existing race narratives that define a racial dialogue almost exclusively along black/white lines with an occasional mention of Mexicans and Muslims thrown in for the sake of "diversity". Sadly, when it comes to an Asian-American narrative, Asian activism seems to be at a loss, particularly where Asian men are concerned.

The recent shooting of a 60-year-old grandfather, Jiangshen Chen, is a case in point. Chen was shot by a white security guard in the parking lot of an apartment complex, where his family owned a home, after he came under suspicion whilst playing Pokemon Go in his parked vehicle. According to reports, the white security guard fired through the window of Chen's vehicle, leaving the grandfather dead at the scene. Tragic, no doubt, yet, this incident lays bare the paucity of substance of Asian-American progressive activism.

If we cast our minds back several months to the shooting of Akai Gurley by Chinese-American police officer, Peter Liang, we might notice a radically different Asian activist reaction to that case than to the Chen shooting. Gurley's shooting was met with a prolonged effort of re-activism; in-depth social commentary that seemed to engage in long-distance, mass psychoanalysis of Liang and the immigrant Chinese community that supported him, condemning all as anti-black racists whose actions render them complicit in the preceding centuries of white supremacist racism that led to a killing that was supposedly anti-black in intent and scope. Every stage of the Gurley case seemed to be accompanied by Asian activism's commentary cheerleading for a guilty verdict of murder to be given to Liang.

For months, Asian commentary seemed to be dominated by the supposedly rampant (yet unsubstantiated) anti-blackness of Asia and its people that somehow (it was asserted) had a bearing on Liang's actions and the support he was receiving from his community. Liang was tried and convicted of guilt by Asian progressives who had no apparent first-hand information about the case, and whose knowledge of events came entirely from media reports - that is, the same media about whom we often complain is biased against Asian-Americans.

In short, Asian activists exhibited some of the most passionate, aggressive, and enduring acts of protest and commentary in their condemnation of Liang and his allegedly racist supporters. By comparison, Chen's shooting has been largely met with what seems like an awkwardly mute Asian liberal punditry. You will struggle to find significant commentary on Chen's shooting, and at best, you might find twitter rage. But that's about it with not a narrative in sight trying to explain the meaning of such a pointless killing.

In fact, I found one, and only one, in-depth blog commentary on the case over at the Reappropriate blog - a dispassionate piece in which one point stood out; the notion that Chen's killer may have been poorly trained, and that this had a bearing on the fatal outcome of the encounter. According to the piece, the security guard's poor training is a question being raised by those who are concerned about.

What piques my interest here is that in the Liang case, several NYPD officers testified that the firearms training that was given to Liang was extremely p the killingoor, implying that as a rookie cop with such poor training, he should not have been given the task of patrolling the notoriously crime-ridden and dangerous tower block where Gurley's killing took place. Strangely, but not surprisingly, this aspect of Liang's case was completely ignored by Asian progressive commentary.

As I wrote in previous posts, progressive  condemnation of Liang and his supporters was high on self-righteousness and had already convicted Liang of anti-black racism as the motive for his actions. Recall that Liang claims that, with pistol in hand, he entered the stairwell through a door that swung back and struck his hand as he became startled by a noise, setting off his firearm. The bullet from the firearm ricocheted of a wall and struck Gurley - who was standing in his doorway two stories above Liang and completely unsighted by him - in the heart. Liang did not even realize that he had killed someone with his "shot".

Simply, put, no progressive gave Liang the benefit of the doubt that Gurley's death was the result of an accidental, freakishly unfortunate shooting, all stemming from inexperience and poor training. By contrast, the only progressive who can be bothered to write in-depth about Chen's shooting, affords his killer the benefit of the possibility of "poor training" as an explanation for his actions. The problem is that Chen's killer fired multiple rounds into the driver's front and side windows in broad daylight and must have known exactly what he was doing. Liang fired one shot....that ricocheted off a wall.....that killed a man who was unsighted two stories above.....and this is racist intent? Surely, if Liang's intent was to kill, he, like Chen's killer, would have fired several rounds blindly into the dark stairwell above, instead of a solitary bullet?

The ease and aggressiveness with which Asian activism jumped on the bandwagon of condemnation of Liang in a campaign of misrepresentation all but convicting him of racially biased killing was disturbing to say the least. It is reasonable to expect that a primary purpose of Asian activism would be to provide nuance for all members of our community - in Liang's case, the opposite held true. Asian progressive activism merely asserted a racist motive for Liang and his supporters, and implied - against all reasonable evidence - that there was intent to kill Gurley....because he was black. Even worse, the only nuance that Asian progressive activism brings to the table in Chen's shooting actually favours his killer.

The Caucasian killer of  Jiangshen Chen has not come anywhere near to being vilified as a racist by Asian progressives in the same way they tried to convince us Liang was an anti-black one. Even the Reappropriate article merely "wonders" if there might have been a racist motive. It would be tragic if it wasn't so hilarious. The implication is that the racist narrative of wicked Asian men (like Liang) is readily adopted and propagated by Asian progressivism whilst the issue of culturally normalized violence towards Asian men is far from the agenda. This highlights the ambivalence that Asian progressives exhibit towards Asian men.

According to our "activists", Asian men are complicit in social injustices that disadvantage blacks, and are regularly the subject of scathing articles that condemn them and equate their career and educational choices with acts of white supremacy. Laughable as this is, this posture has become the prevailing Asian progressive narrative concerning Asian men; according to them, we are the problem, and sometimes, it seems, we are accorded a vicious condemnation that seems rarely aimed at the mainstream white establishment.

It's no surprise, then, that in two cases of unarmed, innocent men being shot, the Asian man who unintentionally and accidentally kills a black man receives more hate and condemnation than the white man who intentionally kills an elderly Asian man. The responses to the victims was even more disparate. For Gurley, a narrative kicked in that provided clueless Asian progressives with the means to grandstand on his behalf. For Chen..........we're still waiting. What is the progressive narrative for Asian men? 

Surprised? Not Me!

Reaping the Harvest of Progressive Racism.

As readers might have noticed, I have been somewhat less busy on my blog in recent weeks and months. There is a reason for this that I will talk about in future posts, but for today, I want to talk about Steve Harvey.

Harvey got into hot water a while back for making racially charged comments about Asian men, joking that no one finds Asian men attractive, and seguing his bigotry into a joke about Chinese food (of course). While discussing a book called "How to Date a White Woman: A Practical Guide for Asian Men", Harvey chose to use the book's existence as a reason to be racist, and said the following....

"That's one page too!....'Excuse me, do you like Asian men?' No. 'Thank you.' How to Date a Black Woman: A Practical Guide [for] Asian Men. Same thing. 'You like Asian men?' I don't even like Chinese food. It don't stay with you no time... I don't eat what I can't pronounce." 

Unsurprisingly, it turns out that Harvey votes liberal and endorsed Hilary Clinton in the election, and even went so far as to compromise journalistic integrity by providing Clinton with a "cheat sheet" of questions (which included "suggested responses) before a live interview with her, so that, one presumes, she wouldn't be faced with uncomfortable questions that she might have difficulty answering. As a racist liberal, he is in good company.

In his endorsement of  Clinton, he grovelled thusly....

"She has fought for social justice, equality and policies that expand civil rights and economic opportunity out there........And I'm endorsing you as my candidate for President of the United States and I just think that you're going to just do the right thing for the majority of the people in this country."

Is it just me, or does there seem to be a culture of anti-Asianism amongst liberal African-American celebs who spout rhetoric about racial justice and equality, whilst simultaneously spouting off the cuff, throw-away, casual anti-Asian racism?

I'm also reminded of last year's Oscar's ceremony when we were treated to another racist joke aimed at Asian men in the form of a penis joke by Sacha Baron Cohen. We're accustomed to demeaning sit-coms, tweets, and films that denigrate Asian men, but liberal, live-broadcast, hit-and-run racial harassment of Asian men is something unusual. The question is, why the sudden boldness?

Disturbingly, this unapologetic, casual anti-Asian male racism expressed by liberals so happens to correlate with the emergence of the mainstreaming of Asian progressive/feminist antagonism towards Asian men. It's too early to assert that there is a pattern emerging here, but the correlation between bold and brazen mainstream anti-Asian male racism and ever more shrill Asian progressive attacks on Asian men in recent years is too coincidental to ignore. 

I have pointed out in previous posts that Asian progressive rhetoric that has targeted other Asians (notably elderly Asians and Asian immigrants) seems to have been adopted by conservatives as a means to argue against white racism (laughably ironic!), but also by liberals like Bill Maher to explain away liberal racism in the film industry. Asian progressive rage has also targeted Asian men in the tech industry (who are accused of racism because they work in tech), but also Asian men (like John Cho and Eddie Huang) who have actually managed to get a fingernail hold in industries that have traditionally excluded or marginalized them.

You don't have to look too hard or too far to find racist, Asian progressive rhetoric that demonizes and dehumanizes Asian men. In December of last year, anti-anti-blackness hero, Anil Dash, said the following during a panel discussion on "diversity" in tech....

The biggest inhibitor to increasing the number of black and Latino creators, Dash said, is Asian-Americans, “who turned our backs” on black and Latino communities after those communities welcomed Asian-Americans into their neighborhoods.

That's right, according to Dash, Asian men are interlopers who took advantage of inner-city hospitality and are now shitting on blacks and Latinos by working in tech. It doesn't get much more inflammatory than that. Dash's assertions are far more racist than Steve Harvey's and Sacha Baron Cohen's, yet, his words reflect the standard rhetoric of Asian progressivism. There is a long list of such rhetoric that targets Asian men with unsubstantiated accusations of complicity in white supremacy or anti-blackness merely because of the career they have chosen.

Asian progressive rhetoric has become a significant source that informs anti-Asian racism amongst both mainstream conservatives and liberals. Worse still, progressive attacks on Asians has enabled anti-Asian racism and helped to make it acceptable - how can you logically argue against stereotyping, demonization, and dehumanization of Asians in general, and Asian men in particular, when the most widely disseminated views issuing from Asian-America are "progressive" ones that do these very things?