Jeff Yang Profile picture
Jan 26 6 tweets 2 min read
This literally never happened. What “certain activist types” were doing was calling out racist language, rhetoric and slurs aimed at Chinese (and impacting other Asians) that was getting us harassed in public, spat and coughed on and quite quickly thereafter physically attacked.
The same Asian Americans who were telling people to stop with the racist Kung Flu and bat eating jokes were ALSO telling you to fucking wear masks and take this disease really seriously because with SARS and bird flu, we had seen this movie already and it sucked
The “defiance of coronavirus scare” language used here was about pushing back against redlining/targeting Chinese American communities because of what was happening in China. This was when there were 14 cases in the US, all linked to recent travel to Wuhan, none in Chinatown.
This article does a good job of clarifying the situation. People were avoiding Chinatown like the literal plague—but going about business elsewhere. But Chinatown residents damn well knew Covid was serious even in Feb 2020.

See this woman wearing a mask.
theguardian.com/world/2020/feb…
No one was minimizing the virus’s danger. Plenty of people were trying to avoid making Covid a uniquely targeted economic and social burden on the Asian American community, particularly immigrant enclaves. These two impulses can coexist.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Jeff Yang

Jeff Yang Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @originalspin

Jan 26
It’s really shocking that @nytimes not only ran this, but is showcasing it on multiple platforms, including flagship podcast The Daily. @DLeonhardt commissioned a public opinion poll about Covid and is using it to bothsides response to the pandemic. The results are egregious. 1/
Leonhardt says Democrats want expensive continuing protections against Covid, even though its risk may be diminishing. Meanwhile, Republicans broadly refuse to get vaccinated and want everything to reopen with no restrictions. His framing: both sides are equally misguided. 2/
But he ignores the fact that the reason why Democrats want protections like distancing and masking is quite literally BECAUSE Republicans refuse to get vaxxed and boosted. Dem response and Republican response aren’t independent variables. 3/
Read 6 tweets
Jan 24
This is the way ImageImage
Are you even Asian if you don’t make little hobbit tubes out of your 3/4 empty toothpastes and lotions
Lifehack: Cut tubes in half to access Secret Hidden Lotion, use bottom half as cap for top half
Read 4 tweets
Jan 9
In April, Chinese immigrant Yao Pan Ma was beaten into a coma, allegedly because he’d been mistaken for one of two men, “Korean and Japanese,” who the attacker said had robbed him.

The assault is now a murder. Mr. Ma died last week on New Year’s Eve.
nytimes.com/2022/01/08/nyr…
Another reminder, if Vincent Chin wasn’t enough, that “All Look Same” is a major part of anti-Asian violence.
No. The inability to distinguish between Asians is often just an excuse pointing to a broader climate of anti-Asian bias. It’s not that attackers *can’t* tell; it’s that they don’t bother, because any Asian serves the purpose of being a target for their resentment equally well.
Read 4 tweets
Jan 7
Kagan is right. The chart you posted shows death rate, not total deaths. And Covid has now killed more Americans than any pandemic in history.

Also: There was no vaccine for Spanish flu. If we didn’t have one for Covid, the numbers would be much higher.
statnews.com/2021/09/20/cov…
You realize that in 1918, more Americans also died from…literally everything, right?

Infant mortality in the year prior to the Spanish flu was 100/100,000. In 2018 it was 5.7/100,1000.

That’s a 17.5x rate of mortality for just “being born.”
Yes, the population is 3x greater. But background rate of death in this era is lower by many multiples of that. So it’s shocking to at deaths from Covid are greater than 1918 Spanish flu in our medically advanced world, where science and public health have massively progressed.
Read 5 tweets
Jan 3
@bchesky Not being snarky here: Please launch an initiative to help the immense number of people who’ve been unhoused due to market conditions that AirBnB helped create, and that Covid turned into a crisis.

I don’t know what it looks like. Funding shelter operations? Building tiny homes?
@bchesky A 2017 Zillow study showed that homelessness rises in cities where rents exceed a third of the average income, and each median rent increase of $100 increases homelessness by anywhere from 6% to 32%.
zillow.com/research/homel…
@bchesky Other studies have shown a 1% increase in AirBnB listings drives up rent by about 0.02% per month, or an average of $9. In LA, listings have soared over the past few years—LA is the fourth most profitable AirBnB territory in the nation, per your own data.
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
Read 7 tweets
Dec 31, 2021
Bandy Lee said Donald Trump and Alan Dershowitz showed signs of mental aberration. Dershowitz called her remarks unethical “distance diagnosis”—and Yale fired her. Lee’s peers see this as a dire attack on speech. So where are the anti-cancel culturistas?
nymag.com/intelligencer/…
Prominent anti-“cancel culture” advocate @Yascha_Mounk did chime in early on: He wrote a lengthy piece for Slate *criticizing* @BandyXLee1. Since Dershowitz’s email that led to her firing, I’ve seen nothing in his feed or public writings defending her academic right to speech. Image
I haven’t seen other Harper’s signers taking up @BandyXLee1’s case either. Not even when prominent voices like @WajahatAli pointed out that Lee is a real case of “cancellation”—a powerful, connected white male getting an immigrant woman of color fired for political speech.
Read 4 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

:(