. @AndrewYang's op-ed is an awful take that is probably going to harm other Asian Americans.

He's endorsing the same "model minority" strategy that the JACL adopted for Japanese Americans in WWII, with zero understanding of the harmful consequences that had for our community. 1/x https://twitter.com/AndrewYang/status/1245454243613552646

Yang urges us not to focus on speaking out against anti-Asian racism, but instead to embrace visible displays of patriotism in the hopes that it will make racists accept us.

He cites the Japanese Americans who volunteered for military duty from the WWII camps as an example. 2/

These Japanese American soldiers showed extraordinary bravery, suffering terrible losses yet continuing to fight on, when white commanders sent them on what they realized were suicide missions. 3/ https://www.huffpost.com/entry/442-regimental-combat-team_n_5a06209fe4b05673aa593f8f

But you know what they didn't accomplish? Winning the acceptance of racist white people.

My grandfather, Kuichi "Jim" Takei, was one of these soldiers. While he fought for the U.S. Army in Europe, his wife waited for him in a U.S. concentration camp. 4/ https://www.si.edu/object/posts_7bf4bb17ebbb1cbeabdb887524e8cfc44/

After the war, my grandparents returned to the U.S. to continued, virulent racism. In elementary school, my uncle Barry remembered the teacher who called him a "little Jap boy" because she blamed him for her husband's death in WWII, and made him stand in the back of the class. 5/

This is not a time to try and prove to racists that we're American. We already know, from the experiences of Japanese Americans, that this WON'T WORK. 6/

Instead, Asian Americans should build on the work that many of us are already doing: finding allies, and working in solidarity to build a more just society where nobody has to worry about appeasing racists. 7/

P.S. I just realized I fucked up my screenshots in tweet # 2 and didn't include the part where Yang specifically cites Japanese Americans volunteering for the Army in WWII. This is the offending language. 8/