Christopher Kwon’s Reviews > Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning > Status Update

why I was upset that the media conveniently scapegoated Korean merchants as the source of black rage despite the fact that those merchants were barely above destitution. Besides, friendships were made and cultures bridged: Korean store clerks hosted neighborhood barbecues, and loyal black customers came to the aid of Koreans, warning them that the looters were coming and they had to run, now

I belong to a group who have been given advantages over black and brown people. For instance, Asian Americans have not suffered the injustice of redlining to the extent that black people have, which is why Korean immigrants were able to get bank loans and open up small businesses in South Central in the first place

I am ashamed of the antiblackness in that Korean community, which is why I must constantly emphasize that Asians are both victims and perpetrators of racism. But even that description of victimization and incriminalization is overly simplistic.

Every family I grew up with struggled. Small businesses failed, families went bankrupt. Divorce, mental illness, and alcoholism afflicted almost everyone I knew. I was frustrated when Nicholas Kristof cheerily wrote an op-ed in 2015 about wholesome Asian family values that gave us an economic “Asian advantage,” because he was yet another white “authority” who gaslit my reality.

Minor feelings are also the emotions we are accused of having … when we decide to be honest. When … finally externalized, they are interpreted as hostile, ungrateful, jealous, depressing, and belligerent, affects ascribed to racialized behavior that whites consider out of line. Our feelings are overreactions because our lived experiences of structural inequity are not commensurate with their deluded reality.

Minor feelings occur when American optimism is enforced upon you, which contradicts your own racialized reality, thereby creating a static of cognitive dissonance

“minor feelings: the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed”

“writers of color must tell their stories of racial trauma, but for too long our stories have been shaped by the white imagination. Publishers expect authors to privatize their trauma: an exceptional family or historic tragedy tests the character before they arrive at a revelation of self-affirmation”

When I hear the phrase “Asians are next in line to be white,” I replace the word “white” with “disappear.” Asians are next in line to disappear. We are reputed to be so accomplished, and so law-abiding, we will disappear into this country’s amnesiac fog. We will not be the power but become absorbed by power, not share the power of whites but be stooges to a white ideology that exploited our ancestors

I thought of Asians throughout history being dragged against their will, driven or chased out of their native homes, out of their adopted homes, out of their native country, out of their adopted country: ejected, evicted, exiled