Whitr girl wasted meme11/21/2023 Last weekend, I called my friend and asked him, again, to explain the game to me. It doesn’t come exclusively from extreme, violent people. Racism doesn’t exist only in the extreme, violent stories we hear on the news. It is often the casual, seemingly non-violent acts of racism and sexism that permit and pave the way for the worst. Am I overreacting? Why dig this up after two years? It was a different time.īut it just feels impossible not to connect incidents like this with the 3,800 anti-Asian racist incidents of the past year or the Atlanta spa shooting. Over the next few days, questions raced through my mind: How could I have ever thought these were funny? What had I done to make others think this was okay? Should I do something about this now? Even as I write this, I’m second-guessing myself. And that was what inspired the content of the messages. But a grosser, scarier suspicion kept pushing into the forefront of my mind: The only thing they knew about me was that I was an Asian woman. That had to be what inspired the content of the messages. I supposed that the only thing they knew about me was my involvement in “The East Side,” and perhaps the only thing they knew about “The East Side” was that it was about Chinese food. They probably didn’t even remember what they had sent to me. I told myself again that it was just a joke. How could this have happened? I tried to picture the night from the point of view of someone in the organization, to explain these racialized, vulgar sexual text messages, sent by a crowd of people to someone they barely knew. The final message left me with a sick feeling in my stomach. By the time I was halfway through the messages, I was horrified. That night, sitting with a few close friends, I pulled out my phone and scrolled back to 2019. Two years later, when I happened to encounter that friend again, I was reminded of the text messages. I didn’t stop to consider the implications of the messages. After all, some people in that organization were Asian. No one wants to be that girl that can’t take a joke. I think a lot of us are trained to just laugh things off - it’s easier than getting offended. I was flattered, even - my friend saw me as someone with a sense of humor and a close enough friend to be involved in his group’s antics. Somehow, I think I found it funny at the time. Within a minute, I had received 11 text messages from 11 different unknown numbers. By producing the show, we hoped to celebrate Asian American identity and represent our stories on stage in a way that we had not yet seen.Īt 1:01 a.m., my phone started going off. The show was about a Chinese restaurant and was to be the inaugural production of Harvard’s Asian Student Arts Project, a club that we had just founded. That spring, I was spearheading “The East Side,” an original musical that I had co-written with two friends. On March 30, 2019, I was sitting in the Lowell House Junior Common Room. As many Harvard clubs release statements in support of #StopAsianHate and anti-racism, they must also reconsider their traditions and confront their potentially racist, sexist, or otherwise harmful histories. However, I also think that it is important that we, as Harvard students, become aware of certain parts of campus culture that can be very harmful. I think it is important for people to be able to learn from their mistakes without being defined by them. The purpose of this piece is not to call out or cancel anyone. To preface, I do not plan to reveal the name of the organization involved in this incident, nor will I reveal the identities of any individuals. Content warning: Sexual harassment, racism
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