Stop AAPI Hate

Between March 20 and August 5 of 2020, Stop AAPI Hate  received 2,583 reports of incidents of violence against Asian Americans across the country. Recently, there’s been an uptick in this violence, directly specifically at seniors. An 84-year-old Thai American man was assaulted in the street in San Francisco, and died in the hospital a few days later. A 61-year-old Filipino American man was slashed across the face with a knife, on the New York subway. And until this week, there’s been very little media attention on any of these acts of hate and violence. 

But thanks to a handful of viral videos on social media—like Amanda Nguyen’s detailed video here, or David So’s video here,—and a flurry of attention around actors Daniel Dae Kim and Daniel Wu offering a reward for any info leading to the arrest of the person who assaulted three people in Oakland, that’s starting to change. It’s nice to see social media create positive change every once in a while.

In other social media news, I joined Clubhouse a few weeks ago. I don’t think you need me to tell you that  the audio-only app is blowing up right now. The latest bit of buzz comes after Elon Musk announced that he’ll be appearing on the app with Kanye West soon. Film industry stars—and especially Black creatives—like Ava DuVernay, Barry Jenkins, Tiffany Haddish, and our own BORDERLANDS star Kevin Hart, were among the early adopters of the platform, and have hosted conversations about their art and craft. The platform is still invite-only, but it’s added over 2M users since January—and now boasts a valuation of $1B—so I’m curious to see how conversations change as more entertainment industry peeps join in.

News of Mindy Kaling’s new Scooby Doo spin-off series VELMA released on Wednesday, and someone quote-tweeted the announcement with a gif of Michael Scott from The Office screaming “NOOO”. Mindy iconicly replied saying “I wrote the episode of The Office this gif is from,” which prompted the original Tweeter to delete his entire account. As Kelly Kapoor would say, “How dare you?!”. 

And as for my two favorite TikToks of the week, check out this video documenting high school gym class in the most accurate way, and this video, which depicts the beautiful moment in which a woman sang with her family for the last time. That second one is guaranteed to give you chills. 

—Darlene Kenney, Marketing Assistant