jenniferyang

[jenniferyang]

What is more human than the freedom to change your mind?

Following the reflection that I posted in March about the Atlanta shootings, I have had incredible conversations with family and friends who responded with kindness and a desire to understand. Thank you for reading so thoughtfully and challenging me to continue refining my thoughts.

It was through these conversations that I was able to find the meta-story of my experiences since my initial post. I gathered these thoughts into a new essay (my first published!) in which I re-frame this story with the help of two books that I love, To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman. The dynamic of Harper Lee’s two novels, having initially written the Watchman manuscript and then scrapping it to rewrite what would become Mockingbird, reveals the astonishing power of editing. In my own brushes with editing, I was reminded of our shared humanity and the freedom that comes with forgiveness.

What I Thought I Knew. Duke Magazine, Special Issue (2021)

Here’s to future edits.  

[jenniferyang]

About

Jennifer Yang is a first-generation Asian American living in Atlanta. She was born and raised in Georgia to parents who immigrated to the United States in the 1970s. Her family's origins trace back to Taiwan, where members of her family fled to escape persecution during the rise of Communism in their homeland China. Jennifer was a student in the Forsyth County Schools system from kindergarten through her senior year of high school. While the county has a well-documented history of bigotry against Black Americans, she recalls the lesser-known experience of being the only Asian student, in the vast majority of her school life, as transformative.

Jennifer graduated from Duke University with a Bachelor's degree in English and later returned to Duke at the Fuqua School of Business for an MBA. She enjoys storytelling as a means to connect people throughout the world. During her career in marketing, she has used storytelling to translate retail trends and consumer insights into compelling narratives for brands like Vita Coco, Tiffany & Co., Kraft Heinz, and GEICO. In recent years, Jennifer has used her voice for activism, lending her strengths to amplify social justice causes in her community. With a former employer, she worked to improve the company’s maternity leave policy, successfully advocating to increase the paid leave to be competitive with other leading companies in their industry. Now, with the rise in racial violence in her hometown and across the country, she shares her experiences to raise awareness, generate conversation, and create momentum for change.

[jenniferyang]

In Reply to Your Text Re: Hate Crimes

Thanks for reaching out. So many things keep happening that continue to knock the breath out of me. Weren’t we all still processing the Oprah interview last week?

I'll take this opportunity to share my thoughts and provide some context. Yes, it is indeed a dramatic increase in violence we are seeing, but there is also a history of violence against Asians and Asian Americans in this country. I too am shocked to learn from your text that you “never even knew that Asian Americans suffered from hate actions.” You being unaware is actually a reflection of the broader Asian American experience that is often thrust upon us, that of being silenced and expected to assimilate.

I see you coming from a place of concern and wanting to understand, which I appreciate; however, it is important for you to know that sometimes when people lay bare their privilege of never knowing these issues existed, it can be met with hostility. For minorities, people of color, women, these are facts of life. I am quite willing to have these conversations with you in hope that your awareness can drive the action that is so needed now.

I learned of the Atlanta and Acworth shootings on the morning after. As I watched the press conference with the Atlanta mayor and police, I already had a bad feeling about how this was going to play out. It began with the reluctance to acknowledge the racial aspect of these crimes, and a repeated emphasis that it was too early to tell if race was a motivator. It was only a matter of time… there, the mention of the suspect’s “addiction.” The police, the reporters, the person writing the headlines on CNN, they all missed the point. Hyper-sexualization is racism against Asian women.

What I see on my social media is baffling, two completely different conversations going on - one in which people are finding every reason to explain how this isn't related to Trump, and the other in which Asian Americans are constantly having to prove that their experiences are real. I've long taken the stance of not engaging with remote acquaintances or people for whom I only know their Internet name. But I've been amped about this, and I did make one reply. It was to a post by a former high school teacher of mine, who wrote that the killings had nothing to do with race. My response to one nonsense Facebook post, and the subsequent replies that doubled-down on explaining why my views were invalid, is an example itself of the difficulty Asians face when we choose to engage. When we find the words and momentum and opportunity to speak, so often we are reasoned away. How could this teacher, or anyone, have instead helped? Try, perhaps, talking with women, Asians, Asian women. In doing so he might have learned that racism, sexism, unwanted sexual advances, and violence are pervasive and deeply woven in our experiences. Instead of using his place as a public school teacher to espouse a narrow and hurtful point of view, he could have listened. He could have amplified an Asian American voice.

It hasn't all been negative. On the whole we are well, and vaccinated. And among my closest neighbors we did actually pull up chairs in driveways to have thoughtful conversations surrounding George Floyd, and we are talking about these latest Asian murders. My family and close friends have also been in touch. Still, how much can we hang our hopes on talk? As I traded stories with another Asian American friend, she recalled with frustration the feeling of being asked to absolve those who reached out to her, hearing repeatedly that they did not know these issues existed.

Last summer we reached a critical mass, and people of all types were shouting that black lives matter. We stand with our black and brown brothers and sisters, became the refrain for more and more people. I have always considered myself to be a person of color, but in these conversations from last summer, I didn’t always get the sense that I was viewed as such. The specific phrasing itself, person of color, can be uncomfortable for some. While I embrace it now, I can instantly bring myself back to times in my childhood and adolescence, feeling the hotness in my face as I preferred that yellow not be named in such roll calls, given my experience with schoolyard taunts. But I understood early in my life what it meant to be different, and so I identified with the minority experience in general. I did not need an invitation to the group, but this is not everyone's experience. Not all Asians or Asian Americans are alike, think alike, look alike (ha). Opinions run the gamut, sometimes following generational lines, sometimes not. Do we, Asians and Asian Americans, have skin in the game for George Floyd? Do black and brown brothers and sisters see us as part of the family? It will require a reckoning from all sides to free ourselves from the definitions of being this or that, one but not the other.

Including Asians in the conversation has far-reaching implications for racial justice. During my career in marketing, my work centered on understanding consumer behavior. I regularly met with dedicated client teams from leading providers of consumer point-of-sale data for consumer packaged goods (these are fancy words to say, in other words, I met with companies that helped me figure out how to get you to buy more boxes of cereal). These big companies draw from their big data to interpret trends among various segments of the population. The segments include basic demographics of age, sex, geography, race, and ethnicity; but they can also switch lenses to view the data more artfully, defining groups based on life-stage, attitudes, and aspirations. The resulting classifications often get alliterative labels that slip off the tongue, like Millennial Moms, or a favorite, Sinc’s and Dinc’s, referring to single-income childless homes and, you guessed it, double-income childless homes.

In one meeting, Big Data Company presented to my team a refresh on the latest health and wellness trends among such segments. When it came to their analysis of the data along race and ethnic lines, a colleague of mine noticed on the presentation slides that the charts showed a small group off to the side labeled “All Other.” Out of curiosity, he asked, what is included in All Other? This was one of those moments, looking back now, that could have unfolded differently. It could have launched a discussion on the semantics between race and ethnicity and why the verbiage "Non-Hispanic whites" exists. We could have debated a chicken versus egg situation on whether these groups were being defined based on meaningful separations in the data, or if they reflected a design flaw in the boxes available for survey participants to check. It was easier, though, just to move on. When probed about how Asians were categorized in the groupings, the client lead explained with noted apology, Asians are usually assumed to act similarly to whites, so they often get bucketed together. This, coming from a company touting deep, granular, and proprietary analytic capabilities.

Here we are again on the precipice of another wave of racial awakening, but the tide relies on enough people caring and asking. Enough people listening and believing. Enough people acting. Your text is only the start.