Georgia Pride

This is what it was like to grow up Asian in Georgia:

Growing up in the South as an Asian American is no easy feat. I was relentlessly teased by my White classmates that I had “slits” for eyes, that my food smelled “like fart,” that my face was so flat it looked like it had been “run over by a car.” When my immigrant parents were finally able to buy their first house after almost a decade of moving the family from apartment to apartment, their celebration of their white-picket-fenced American Dream came to a sudden halt. We were one of the first Asian families to settle in a predominantly White neighborhood, and our neighbors saw to it that we were not welcome.

The expansive oak tree that spread its branches over our front lawn was repeatedly toilet-papered by the neighborhood kids, often before a rainstorm. Then the sodden toilet paper — too high to reach, too messy even to bother — would fester on the branches in moldy wet clumps until they disintegrated on their own. The shoes we’d take off outside our door were once discovered with baked beans poured into each one, rendering them unwearable. The final straw was when we were “ding-dong-ditched.” My mother had opened the front door to see a brown paper bag sitting on the front doorstep. Inside it, a lump of feces.
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Even after that incident, the hazing, the deliberate intimidation didn’t stop. A mother of one of the neighborhood kids drove her Ford Expedition down our street, stopped her car in front of our driveway and allowed four young girls cackling with excitement to jump out and scream, “Chinese fire drill! Chinese fire drill!” before taking off. I hid behind the window blinds, hoping they couldn’t see me. Our neighborhood had made it clear that it wasn’t okay to be me, so I tried my best to disappear.

Is there any doubt as to why the attitude of the Cherokee County Sheriff's Department of sympathy to a mass-murderer was so wounding to Asians? If you grow up being hated and despised, is it any surprise to you that the cops would be sympathetic to someone who killed people who looked like you?

Or the fact that the cops there seem to be so eager to take the killer's word for it that what he did wasn't a hate crime? "Sure, I'm a woman-hating murderous bastard, but at least I an't no racist?" That's the line that they're swallowing?

Frankly, I'm somewhat surprised that we're not hearing "hey, it's just a buncha dead whores, what's the problem" from the local constabulary and officals. Not all that long ago, they would have said as much, but with an ethnic slur in between the words "dead" and "whores". So I guess that's some degree of progress.