“Well-intentioned racial humor doesn’t actually do anything to end racism or the Redskins mascot,” Park told me. Instead, she said, she saw the hashtag as a way to critique white liberals who use forms of racial humor to mock more blatant forms of racism. In our conversation, Park admitted that despite the hashtag’s command, she did not want “The Colbert Report” to be cancelled. Even when you want to be in on the joke-and you understand, intellectually, that you are not the one being ridiculed-it’s hard not to wonder why these jokes always come at the expense of those least likely to protest. The resulting discomfort has nothing to do with the intentions of the joke or the political views of the people laughing at it. If I were to predict which minority group the writers of a show like “The Colbert Report” would choose for an edgy, epithet-laden parody, I’d grimace and prepare myself for some joke about rice, karate, or broken English. But they should not therefore be immune to questions or criticism: If an activist hashtag becomes a trend, has a broad, important conversation taken place? It is no simple thing to determine whether Twitter outrage can itself expand the terms of discourse and challenge the status quo.ĬancelColbert could be seen as a similar attempt to carve out space for Asian-Americans to discuss something that has nothing to do with parody, Daniel Snyder, or the good intentions of “The Colbert Report.” There’s a long tradition in American comedy of dumping tasteless jokes at the feet of Asians and Asian-Americans that follows the perception that we will silently weather the ridicule. A new Twitter outrage seems to detonate every week, and, in many cases, the voices raised in these social-media movements belong to groups that do not have equal representation within the mainstream media. This might feel unseemly to those who value a more refined conversation, but there is no denying the viral power of hashtag activists who capitalize on the speed at which a single tweet can multiply into something that resembles a protest rally. The form’s inherent limitations-the hundred-and-forty-character limit and a fleeting shelflife-reward volume, frequency, and fervor rather than nuance, complexity, and persuasion. “It’s not like I enjoy missing ‘Scandal’ to tweet about ‘The Colbert Report,’” she said.Įvery debate on Twitter gets put through the platform’s peculiar distortion effect. Her degree of involvement in a hashtagged cause, she said, depends on how much “free time” she has at the moment, and whether a particular issue piques her interest. Despite her online profile-and the forceful, yet sometimes decidedly academic, tone of her advocacy-Park does not consider herself a “full-time” activist and claims that she does not particularly enjoy hustling along a hashtag. She said she saw the offending tweet while eating dinner Thursday night and decided to respond to it. I called Park on Friday to ask her about how #CancelColbert got started. (As Deadspin noted, it had also shifted the debate away from Daniel Snyder and the name of his football team.) By lunchtime on Friday, when Deadspin published a post by two Korean-American writers with the tongue-in-cheek headline “ Gooks Don’t Get Redskins Joke,” #CancelColbert had become another online feeding trough, attracting heated commentary from everyone who has ever thought anything about race in this country. In response, tens of thousands of people came to Colbert’s defense, many of them apparently outraged at the outrage. Trend it.”Īs #CancelColbert grew, Park acted as something of an online personal trainer, exhorting her followers to push the hashtag up the list of Twitter’s trending topics. Park, now a veteran of so-called “hashtag activism,” started the campaign with the following tweet: “The Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals has decided to call for #CancelColbert. For her efforts, she was named one of the Guardian’ s “ top 30 young people in digital media.” Park has gone on to start, or facilitate, several other successful hashtags, including #POC4CulturalEnrichment and #BlackPowerYellowPeril. The hashtag has generated tens of thousands of tweets, which in turn led to wide coverage from mainstream media organizations. CancelColbert started with Suey Park, a twenty-three-year-old writer and activist, who, in December of last year, came to Twitter prominence when she set up #NotYourAsianSidekick, an online conversation that encouraged Asian-American women to voice their frustrations with traditional feminism.
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