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Tuesday, January 9, 2018

Audra Lim — The Alt-Right's Asian Fetish - The New York Times

In reality, Asians are rarely considered white, and the model-minority myth obscures the vast differences among Asian-Americans. What’s more, the myth helped to strengthen America’s white liberal order, which claims to uphold diversity while also being anti-black. It legitimizes white America’s power to determine who is “good” and to offer basic dignity and equal rights.

(The New York Times) The white supremacists on the far right have “yellow fever” — an Asian woman fetish. It’s a confusing mix. Andrew Anglin, the founder of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, once posted a video of himself with a Filipina he called “my jailbait girlfriend,” the young couple flirting as they sauntered through a megamall in the Philippines. Richard Spencer, a white nationalist, has dated a series of Asian-American women, according to one of his ex-girlfriends. (Mr. Spencer insists that it was before he embraced white nationalism.)

The right-wing agitator Mike Cernovich, the writer John Derbyshire and an alt-right figure named Kyle Chapman (so notorious for swinging a lead-filled stick at Trump opponents at a protest in Berkeley, Calif., that he is now a meme) are all married to women of Asian descent. As a commenter wrote on an alt-right forum, “exclusively” dating Asian women is practically a “white-nationalist rite of passage.”

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/opinion/sunday/alt-right-asian-fetish.html