I am a frequenter of the social news website Reddit, one of the largest sites that gets over eight million visitors a month. The site provides a list of articles and content that is entirely user-submitted; sometimes you'll find a link to a funny picture or comic, or to breaking news, or even a celebrity answering user's questions. Fair warning: do not visit Reddit if you need to get something done. It's a pretty damn addicting site.
In the past month, a popular thing to do was to post a link with the title simply reading “Difficulty: Asian”, even if the actual link has nothing to do with Asian people at all – the idea being Asian difficulty being the hardest difficulty of all. Last week, a woman posted a rant that got quite a few comments. She, an Asian woman, posted a comment “difficulty: black athlete” in response to a video of a dog back-flipping while catching a ball. Her comment was downvoted to the point where it was hidden. That is, enough people thought her comment was inappropriate or unoriginal that it was effectively hidden by the site.
See her rant and all the comments here.
Ok, maybe it was a lame comment, but her point is that other comments and submitted links with just “Difficulty: Asian” get lots of approval votes (as seen here). It actually generated quite a debate on selective racism and the model minority. First of all, why is it okay to highlight the peculiarities of Asians, but not blacks? Ok, I don't want to get too much into it since there is a whole class hierarchical thing going on that would take far too long to blog about and requires a few good days of classroom lecture to go over. But basically, since blacks are generally perceived as underprivileged and Asians are seen as a better off race, it's wrong to pick on the former but okay for the later. Personally, I think the reason her comment got downvoted was precisely this reason. Not all minorities are equal in this country.
And yes, different countries are racist in their own ways. It's our homogeneous ways that make it such a delicate subject.
For the second hot topic, Asians are perceived as being better off, but that's not a good thing. Saying Asians are good at math or dancing may seem like positive, but it can create unfair expectations for an individual or overlook other issues. For example, if everything comes easily to Asians, why do they have the highest suicide rates among teenage and young adult women? As noted in that article, the pressure that comes from being part of the “model minority” contributes to the problem.
Primarily, what I wanted to point out was I found it interesting that big issues in the general Asian American community made the front page of Reddit, even if just for a day. Reddit is primarily frequented by college aged white male liberals (at least, they're the loudest demographic on there), yet you can actually find some spirited discussion going on. In fact you can generate discussion in most forums given the right topic, whether it be Reddit or your Facebook profile.
We may not see another leader like Dr. King in this generation, as now the voice belongs to the people more than ever before. It is up to us to make noise with that voice and get others to use theirs, even if in front of the soft glow of a computer instead of the marching masses.
