Soapie

“Every time she tried to branch out to new projects, they kept insisting that Asian was her brand, was what her audience expected. They never let her talk about anything other than being an immigrant, other than the fact that half her family died in Cambodia, that her dad killed himself on the twentieth anniversary of Tiananmen. Racial trauma sells, right? They treated her like a museum”
― R.F. Kuang, Yellowface

“While a life like Frederick Douglas’s is remarkable, we must remember that not every person who lived through slavery was like Douglas. Most did not learn to read or write. Most did not engage in hand-to-hand combat with white slave brakers. Most did not live close enough to free states in the North to have any hope of escape. No one, enslaved or otherwise, was like Douglas. There were other brilliant, exceptional people who lived under slavery, and many resisted the institution in innumerable ways, but our country’s teachings about slavery, painfully limited, often focus singularly on heroic slave narratives, at the expense of millions of men and women whose stories might be less sensational but are no less worthy of being told.

“I thought of my primary and secondary education. I remembered feeling crippling guilt as I silently wondered why every enslaved person couldn’t simply escape like Douglas, Tubman, and Jacobs had. I found myself angered by the stories of those who did not escape. Had they not tried hard enough? Didn’t they care enough to do something? Did they choose to remain enslaved? This, I now realize, is part of the insidiousness of white supremacy. It illuminates the exceptional in order to implicitly blame those who cannot, despite the most brutal circumstances, attain super-human heights. It does this instead of blaming the system, the people who built it, and the people who maintained it.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“must look a mess, because the guy who’s supposed to help me with the questionnaire kinda recoils when I sit down across from him, but I just grin. Uncle Yas was right. I can’t stay here. I can’t be locked up with my anger like this. If I stay here, my anger’s gonna eat me up from the inside, like a white-hot fire, and if I don’t get it out somehow, I’m gonna turn on everyone who ever loved me. And I’ll die before I let that happen. “Sign me up,” I say. “I wanna fight.”
― Traci Chee, We Are Not Free

“It doesn’t matter how good we are, because they see only what they want to see, and when they look at us, all they see are Japs.”
― Traci Chee, We Are Not Free