racism – Opinions

March 26, Leo Yu, clinical professor of legal writing, advocacy and research at the SMU Dallas Dedman School of Law, for a piece about TikTok that explores to what extent anti-Chinese bias has contributed to the platform’s negative reputation in Congress. Published in the South China Morning Post under the heading: TikTok is targeted in the US for being Chinese, not for what it has or has not done: https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3214395/tiktok-targeted-us-being-chinese-not-what-it-has-or-has-not-done
https://tinyurl.com/yc8k8pch

What is the problem with TikTok? The US Congress unequivocally answered this question through a five-hour grilling on Thursday: it is China.

Let’s face it, the national security concern about TikTok appears to be tenuous at best. At the hearing where TikTok CEO Chew Shou Zi was questioned by US lawmakers, the only incident raised that can remotely support this concern is one in which some employees at TikTok’s parent company, the Beijing-based ByteDance, inappropriately obtained the data of American TikTok users, including two reporters. ByteDance acknowledged the wrongdoing and swiftly fired the responsible employees.

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Dec. 21, Priscilla Lui, SMU psychology professor, for a piece acknowledging the existence of micro-aggressive behavior toward People of Color, its link to systemic rascism, and what can be done about it. Published in Diverse, Issues in Higher Education under the heading When We Understand Microaggressions in the Broader Context of Systemic Racism, We’ll Make Some Progress: http://bit.ly/37HNuiA

Many people have heard the word “microaggression,” but how many understand what it really means, or looks like?

Wrongfully assuming that an African American student must have been admitted to a prestigious university because of an athletic scholarship, rather than academic merits.
Asking a Latina business executive to bring coffee or help clean up an office, as if she was a custodial staff person.
Insisting that an Asian American person is a foreign immigrant, and then concluding the Asian American is “oversensitive” when they react negatively after such assumptions are made.

Such examples of microaggression are more than cultural and racial naïveté. They often are racism in disguise, weekly impacting 80% of Asian Americans, and likely other People of Color, according to psychological research.

Continue reading “When We Understand Microaggressions in the Broader Context of Systemic Racism, We’ll Make Some Progress”