In this thinking, racial justice is a zero-sum game, and the increased focus on the Black experience has relegated Asian suffering to the bottom rung. Because that Asian American can go into those circles, they believe they are superior.” All of these terms are defined in the subreddit’s official glossary. The most common colloquialisms are Lu, referring to Asian women who “use their white/non-Asian partners to gain influence and put them in positions of power above other Asians,” and Chan, referring to Asian men who are “mentally colonized.” An anonymous r/aznidentity user whom I’ll call David, and who until recently was a moderator for the subreddit, explained the concept to me: “There are Asian Americans who can fit into white circles that other Asian Americans can’t. PAA, or “progressive Asian activist,” is a pejorative term similar to “social justice warrior” for Asians who ascribe to liberal, feminist values. Bananarang refers derisively to an Asian woman who’s previously dated white men but is currently seeking a relationship with an Asian man. The posts are dotted with contemptuous mentions of WMAF: white male–Asian female relationships.
Spend a little time on r/aznidentity, and you will quickly become immersed in the lingo of Men’s Rights Asians. “Eileen Huang has blood on her hands,” wrote another. “She seriously thinks some old lady deserves to get stomped in the face by some thug because once an old asian lady somewhere looked at a black person the wrong way,” one user wrote. Many began blaming her for the attacks, citing the joke out of context to suggest that she was earnestly promoting anti-Asian hate. When members of r/aznidentity discovered the tweet, the harassment against her escalated dramatically. She’d figured people would read the tweet, realize a young Asian woman had written it, and understand she wasn’t serious. “It was obviously tongue-in-cheek,” she says now. It was an attempt, she says, to jab at Asian Facebook users who were spreading anti-Black messages: “Maybe it’s good to normalize racism against Asians,” she’d written. The harassment persisted for months, escalating when her attackers found an old sarcastic joke she’d made on Twitter in late 2020, before the spike in anti-Asian violence, when her following was small and mostly consisted of friends. “Human brains are not programmed to receive that much violence over the internet.” “He posted about me every day to ensure that r/aznidentity would not forget about me,” she said, adding that some “scary people” discovered her through the site. One member of r/aznidentity even made an entire website and separate subreddit dedicated to keeping track of her activities. I was navigating it by myself and blocking people by myself, which meant I was forced to read a lot of the verbal abuse,” Huang said. “I’m not a celebrity with a PR team that can handle this. Others tried to get her fired from her internship, and she was kicked off Twitter after they mass-reported her.
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( Lu is an epithet often used on the subreddit to insult Asian women.) They schemed about how to “ cancel” her, encouraging one another to contact Yale in an attempt to get her expelled. “She’s just another white worshipping Lu we always have to take them down She wants white men to try to kick our asses, but slap her ass,” one user wrote. “I had to limit my comments on Instagram because people would comment, ‘Kill yourself,’ or ‘I’m going to rape you.’ ” Members of r/aznidentity began looking into her previous romantic relationships-including ones she’d had in high school-and denigrated her on the subreddit for having dated a white person.
“The focus started to be on me and my personal life,” she told me recently.
But it wasn’t until January, when Huang began posting on TikTok about anti-Black racism, that the real harassment began.Īfter Huang posted a video about Asian celebrities appropriating Black culture, she began receiving hundreds of sexist and violent messages through email and social media. First there were threads mocking Huang on r/aznidentity, a subreddit with more than 44,000 members that is the unofficial hub of Men’s Rights Asians.