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Tone-deaf. White people-pleasing. Bumbling pineapple bun. These are just some of the choice epithets that have been hurled at Andrew Yang after he shared his thoughts about the Asian American experience in the age of coronavirus. Calling the growing reports of racist and xenophobic attacks against Asian Americans across the country a ‘heartbreaking phenomenon‘, Yang opened his op-ed with a soliloquy about a recent experience at a grocery store where, for the first time since growing up as one of the few children of East-Asian descent in a New York suburb, he felt the searing tinge of race-consciousness and anxiety about his place in America.
The spark that lit the tinderbox was Yang’s call to action where he asks Asian Americans to ‘embrace their American-ness’ and to ‘step up, help your neighbors, donate, volunteer, wear red white and blue and put an end to this crisis.’