Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

by Cathy Park Hong

If there was a time machine, only whites would be able to go back in time in this country. Most everyone else would get enslaved, slain, maimed, or chased after by feral children.

In his essay “An Extravagance of Laughter,” Ralph Ellison writes that when whites heard black laughter, they were left with “the baffled general feeling that they had been lampooned without quite knowing how.”