War with Asians column explained, questioned

Harry Mok
February 27, 2008

Another set of Campus Press editors have a companion piece that explains their disagreement with the decision to publish Karson's column.

There's also a petition calling for changes at the paper.

The editors who published the piece wanted more edgy opinions in their paper, but the execution of Karson's column was obviously a total disaster. Apparently a companion piece to Karson's by Korean American Felix Im (I believe this is it) weren't linked to each other on the website. Even if they were, Karson's column still doesn't come across as the satire it was meant to be.

As I said before, the editors should have recognized that Karson's piece was not written well enough to come across as satire and make relevant social commentary about race.

The staff of The Campus Press is going to participate in cultural sensitivity training, which I suppose will help.

Within the journalism industry, there's been a decades long effort to diversify our ranks and diversify coverage. The Campus Press incident makes it clear how important this is.

Contributor: 

Harry Mok

Editor in chief

Editor in Chief Harry Mok wrote about growing up on a Chinese vegetable farm for the second issue of Hyphen and has been a volunteer editor since 2004. As a board member of the San Francisco and New York chapters of the Asian American Journalists Association, Harry has recruited and organized events for student members. He holds a master’s degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was also a graduate student instructor in the Asian American Studies Department.

Comments

Comments

lisalee wrote on Fri, 02/29/2008 - 10:33pm
you know it's funny - i got an email in my inbox from New Demographics on white diversity training doesn't work, and I quote the eblast I got here. It doesn't work because it's:"Training people to hide their racism.Yes, you read that correctly. Many diversity trainers don't push people to challenge their own racist beliefs. Instead, the seminars teach people to be more aware of the non-verbal cues (the fancy word is "microinequities") they send out that may tip others off to their racism. The philosophy is: hide your racism in order to create a more harmonious workplace.Celebrating diversity.It's much easier to engage in feel-good, uncritical celebrations of diversity and multiculturalism than it is to tackle the complex issues surrounding race and racism. But focusing on "celebrating diversity" only encourages people to turn a blind eye to racism, and promotes the myth that we live in a happy-go-lucky, color-blind world.Making people of color teach white people about racism.Let's face it: Most diversity trainers aim their messages at white people and treat the people of color in the room as teaching aides. There's an unspoken assumption that only white folks need to learn about race and racism, and that everyone else should share their stories and experiences in order to help their white colleagues achieve anti-racist nirvana. This approach alienates people of color and makes white people feel angry and resentful. Racism is not just a white problem -- we live in a racist society and all of us have absorbed these racist messages, whether we are conscious of them or not."just thought that was interesting. i feel like the letter from the other editors didn't really mean anything for me because it's sort of like pushing around the blame AFTER the event is over, after the backlash, as a press, and what good does that do except divide the press even more?i feel that as a press/publication, they should've feel united. or at least presented themselves that way.maybe the editor in chief should've wrote an apology saying that not everyone was included in the conversation, so don't blame them, but the fact that other editors came out and was like hey dude we didn't do this so don't look at us for an answer is irresponsible and childish.
lisalee wrote on Tue, 03/04/2008 - 12:06am
some follow up articles:max karson is suspended -http://www.dailycamera.com/news/2008/feb/28/paper-suspends-karson/sharon s. lee's analysis of these "satires" -http://insidehighered.com/views/2008/02/28/leeofficial statement from the campus press -http://media.www.thecampuspress.com/media/storage/paper1098/news/2008/02/27/News/Statement.From.The.Campus.Press-3238565.shtml