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Beyond the #Hashtag: Movement Building Lessons from #CancelColbert

BY ESTHER WANG

If you’ve checked Facebook or Twitter since last Thursday, chances are you’ve seen something about the controversy that erupted over Stephen Colbert’s (neither successful nor funny) satire of Redskins’ owner Dan Snyder, and the rage that was unleashed upon him by online activist Suey Park and her Twitter followers.

For a good description of the #CancelColbert kerfuffle, go here. In short: The Colbert Report account tweeted a decidedly unfunny joke about Asians, smacking of out of context hipster racism. Suey Park leaped into action with the #CancelColbert hashtag. Michelle Malkin jumped on her bandwagon. Chaos ensued.… Read more “Beyond the #Hashtag: Movement Building Lessons from #CancelColbert”

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The Movement Will Not Be Twitterized

I haven’t had the heart, energy, or time to read through the #CancelColbert tweets. From the resulting hullabaloo, it seems that on the whole, Suey Park’s intentions were completely missed. Also importantly missed was, you know, the whole genocide/ disenfranchisement/ misrepresentation of Native peoples thing, AND Colbert’s original gross display of anti-Asian racism, not just the “offending” Comedy Central tweet.

That said, I had the same reaction to #CancelColbert as I did last winter when I scanned the #NotYourAsianSidekick tweets. Thousands of young APIA women and allies were connecting virtually. My ambivalence about hashtag activism is that, while it has … Read more “The Movement Will Not Be Twitterized”

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About This Twitter Thingamajig… #NotYourAsianSidekick

The recent explosion of online conversation addressing Asian American feminism has been at turns exhilarating, frustrating, challenging, and affirming. #NotYourAsianSidekick went globally viral at lightning speed, shining a bright light on the stunning lack of space for Asian American feminist public discourse challenging all aspects of white supremacy, and the intense hunger for it.

Many things were spinning in my head as I stared at my phone late last night desperately trying to catch up with what had happened, what was happening. My head itself was spinning at the speed at which the conversation had expanded. Dang, how do people Read more “About This Twitter Thingamajig… #NotYourAsianSidekick”

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Not Your Asian [Insert Word Here]: Thoughts on Movement and Liberation

In the U.S. and worldwide, a hashtag devised by @SueyPark, #NotYourAsianSidekick was trending* since Sunday, prompting the largest scale–and most visible–public conversation related to Asian American/Pacific Islander/Native Hawai’ian** feminism I’ve seen in my lifetime. With the sheer volume of tweets (over 45,000 in less than 24 hours) and no real analysis conducted yet, I’ve only seen what has appeared on my timeline, the BBC, CNN, Buzzfeed and Slate articles that have emerged, and I’ve checked in with some of the fiercest feminists I know and have been digesting all the Twitter furor as best I can.

#NotYourAsianSidekick prompted the … Read more “Not Your Asian [Insert Word Here]: Thoughts on Movement and Liberation”