Canwen Xu, a Columbia U senior, taking on Andrew Yang's OpEd...
Instead of calling out the recent hostility toward Asians for what it is — the reincarnation of historical misconceptions that Asians are dirty and uncivilized — he chose to be a people pleaser. Specifically, the white-people pleaser. He further entrenched the decades-old myth of the model minority: that Asian Americans are the obedient people of color, ...
the ones who are willing to uphold a system that is rigged against us by submissively working within.
We, as Asian Americans, should absolutely be part of the solution to coronavirus. We should certainly “do everything in our power to accelerate the end of this crisis.” But that’s not because our actions will demonstrate that we are American. They won’t. It is because we are obligated to as members of our communities and, most importantly, as human beings.