CBS5 reporter Betty Yu in San Francisco expressed gratitude for the outpouring of support that followed after a YouTube host described her as having an “aggressively Asian face.”
“I’m so heartened by all your support, thank you,” she wrote on Facebook Saturday night.
“Thank you all for standing by me. Hate must stop,” she said on Twitter. “No level or magnitude of racism is acceptable, and it will continue to be pervasive, whether overtly or closeted unless we all speak out against it.”
Steve Crowder made the racist and sexist comment on the first day he returned from a one-week suspension for hate speech against the trans community.
Yu explained to fellow CBS5 reporter Andrea Nakano why she’s decided not to remain silent.
“I thought it was really important to not be passive given the last 18 months or so you and I and the station have spent covering these attacks on Asians, particularly here in the Bay Area,” Yu said.
She called Crowder’s remarks “another example of how prevalent racism is in the United States?”
She has used her Twitter account to retweet messages of support from around the country and to let people know why this is important.
Everyone from the Asian American Journalists Association to the Northern California Academy of Television Arts and Sciences to individual journalists has come out to back Yu.
“What’s triggering about that is what gave this guy the authority to decide what’s Americanized? That’s triggering and that’s racist. When I look back, what is most shocking to me is the casualness of racism. This kind of unbridled hatred and mockery. All of it,” Yu said.
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