Thread by @JoshuaChunWahK

Hey friends! Finally going public on the racism & retaliation I faced working with @iiumich, @cseas, and its white director @laurarozek over three sustained months. There’s a petition linked for more details, or follow this long thread!

chng.it/VtYpJbLX

Msians, we're weathering a lot rn, so if bandwidth is limited, scroll on! BUT calling comrades in the west, @geo3550, my beloved union, and #AsianAsianists to highlight just what went down when a student worker tweeted condolences for Asian victims of white supremacy.

I was suspended from my virtual workplace @UMCSEAS as a social media assistant not 48 hours after tweeting a condolences+academic articles for the victims of the white supremacist shootings in Atlanta, March 16 that killed 6 Asian people.

https://twitter.com/UMCSEAS/status/1372064354015670278

@laurarozek justified this by citing "protocols" I wasn't given, & citing violence against Asians in Asia (Asian on Asian violence) as a reason to not post about white supremacy: condolence tweets she would later call "inflammatory" and "lacking good judgement."

I thought the escalation would stop. I was graduating. I'd been promised work till the end of July to support my fam in Malaysia. I'm starting a PhD program elsewhere soon. But over the next weeks, my timesheets for labor rendered were repeatedly questioned and scrutinized.

In an April “touch-base," an admin member informed me that my promise of summer employment had been rescinded. I’d have to leave by May’s end, not July, leaving me unemployed for 2 months in a pandemic.

They explained that @laurarozek had an “epiphany” to reopen the exact same position I had been trained for, to new applicants instead. I asked what happened to the promises made--promises staff claimed to have "misunderstood."

I pressed for a meeting with Laura for clarity (she had been "too busy" to meet with me for 5 months). In a final meeting with @laurarozek appeared, flanked by @iiumich and @umichLSA PR staff. She interrupted every POC in that room to rehash the details of the original tweets.

Dr. @laurarozek proceeded to narrate how difficult her morning had been (on a night of anti-Asian grievous violence when I had been up to the wee hours with weeping comrades on the phone), and the "triage" she had to perform after those tweets.

I finally asked her: “Why do you need to feel heard in a moment when my people are being slaughtered?”

Laura Rozek’s reply: “I’m not afraid to say what is obvious: if you feel like these are ‘your’ people, [Korean American staff member] was--um, um--I’m not even gonna bring [this person] into this...I direct the center,” she concluded instead.

My jaw hit the floor. @laurarozek, a white faculty member earning 134k a year to direct a @usedgov T6-funded center, had the audacity to question that an Asian Asianist with an MA in SEA studies would consider victims of Anti-Asian violence as “his people.”

I'm working in the am*rika as a pipsqueak academic worker and I feel privileged. But Western tenured #ColonialAcademia with minimal expertise in SEA earning $134k USD a year have no idea just how much wealth they profit from the study of our peoples.

She weaponized an Asian staff’s ethnic identity, suggesting only Korean diaspora communities had a right to grieve the shootings. I could bring up that not all the victims were Korean, but that’s besides the point. This director does not understand Asian solidarity or history.

This is a long thread. I’m not trying to cancel anyone. I’d just like my job back. If you’re going to profit off knowledge of my people, then please, sayang, please have *some* knowledge of my people.

Yawllah, federal funds from the imperial core are poured into the salaries of directors with limited expertise in the area who wish to lecture Asian Asianists who have not just studied this, but survived and embodied this study. Don't lecture #AsianAsianists on our homelands.

#AsianAsianists shouldn't be locked out of workplaces and muzzled. And we certainly do not need to have our pay questioned and months of income withdrawn for assuaging grieving campus communities.

So that's my piece, asking @iiumich, its director, @MaryGao, @umichLSA and its white-majority PR team, Dr @laurarozek, and @UMCSEAS why this blatant racism and retalition is happening, and what they intend to do. Petition below. Sign and share thx baii

chng.it/VtYpJbLX

Last addendum--my politics are pretty much what they've been for a while. I'm demanding remuneration as a worker and a student; this is not about *reform.* The Third World is the hope of any real, lasting change, but while I work in the core, I'm trying to support my family.

Errata: @UMCSEAS, not @ cseas I'm sure @ cseas is a fine human 😭😭😭