I do not ask for much, but getting off the phone with my mom who was angry to the point of near tears because she didn't want to upset me by telling me about this and I didn't want to upset her...

Stop sharing those "restored" photos of S-21 prisoners from that VICE article

I'm Cambodian and Chinese on my mom's side, my mom's entire family went through all four years of the Khmer Rouge regime, my grandmother taught at Tuol Sleng when it was a high school before it became S-21

The violence of a white man "restoring" smiles onto the faces of prisoners, whitewashing their features for his sick "need" to what? Quell his curiosity? Restore "humanity" to those who had theirs stripped from them long before their photos were taken?

The sheer depravity

Khmer New Year is this week and April 17th is the 46th anniversary of the Fall of Phnom Penh...what sick timing

I'm only seeing white people share these photos so I'm going to say this once:

This is not "spreading awareness;" this is spreading perverse historical revisionism, a violent erasure of victims of genocide under a twisted sense of white "duty"

I cannot emphasize enough how much of this isn't an abstraction; all this happened in the late 1970s. My mom is only in her mid-50s and she went through this as a young teenager

My grandma taught there. She was a teacher in those exact halls

Almost every Khmer Canadian or Khmer American I know around my age is second-generation because our parents and grandparents were refugees. This happened in the 1970s. This is *recent* history

You may be removed from this but I'm not, my family isn't

*We* have to navigate decades of intergenerational trauma, violence, and racism. *You* don't

So what does sharing these photos do except reproduce perverse violence with plastered smiles because the reality of these images is too much for white people to bear?

You don't have to sit with the violence. My family and community do

So stop reproducing it

This thread does an excellent job of explaining the violence inherent in these "restorations" and the callousness of committing such harm against S-21 prisoners, their families, and our community: https://twitter.com/CheersBVS/status/1381034033912631302