Andrew Yang thinks the way to eliminate racism against Asian Americans is for Asian Americans to be "more American." I've said it before, this man was the whitest candidate running https://twitter.com/andrewyang/status/1245454243613552646

This whole fucking op-ed is cursed. What a privilege to start being scared now. ICE has been terrorizing SE Asian immigrants. These stories about how the threat has returned in the past few weeks reek of an overall class divide among Asian Americans

This man and a lot of the Asians you follow on here have been insulated from this shit, because they take as much white proximity as is handed to them, and use it to create temporary safety rather than fighting the system they're conditionally welcomed into

Yang's buddy act with white supremacists was clearly not a campaign strategy but a life philosophy, and he hasn't done shit with his newfound platform other than appeal to whiteness

Putting the idea into millions of white heads that our own behavior should dictate how much racism we experience actually puts us in much more danger, which seems fairly fucking obvious but what do I know

Also important to note that Yang's conception of Asian Americans acting "more American" precludes active solidarity with other communities of color. The American project is anti-Black, anti-Native, this administration is doggedly anti-Latinx, anti-Muslim, etc

We can rebuke Yang's implicit call to whiteness by understanding that it does not exist in a vacuum separated from the active dehumanization of other communities of color, and by communicating and acting in solidarity instead