[stcredzero]

The US has a long and nasty history of racism.

Culture in the Americas was particularly afflicted by class becoming associated with race. There was rampant indentured servitude in Korea hundreds of years ago, basically slavery with different formalities. (I've been told that my surname makes it likely my family is descended from such people.) No one really cares about it any more, because we are fairly racially homogeneous. There is something particularly nasty about making an inborn trait a kind of "brand" of class status.

Racism is weirdly and deeply rooted in US culture. A friend of mine started a gay Asian men's group in Seattle in the last century. He then had to start a 2nd one with a by-law limiting attendance to Asians, because the 1st one had become a pick-up scene for middle-aged white men to find a "Rice Queen." My 20's and 30's were punctuated with the occasional weird transgression from older white men. Much of my youth and childhood were punctuated with rare but memorable occasions of racial/ethnic harassment. I went on a date with a fellow musician who was born in Thailand, and in conversation I realized that an uncomfortably large portion of her flirting history consisted of white men doing things like putting their hand on her thigh in public while talking about prostitutes.

There's something about US culture that seems to be enabling for a fairly extreme level of transgression by some small part of the populace towards Asians, which also results in ethnic self-hatred in American born Asians. My current China born girlfriend has a Ph. D. and an MBA, and she thinks the notion that Asian guys are somehow sexually inferior/unattractive/noncompetitive to be bizarre. Yet, I've had multiple discussions on reddit and Hacker News, where commenters promulgated such weird ideas of inherent Asian inferiority!

The reason why I particularly dislike intellectually bankrupt SJW ideology, is precisely because I know that it has a point! There are weird racial attitudes in various subcultures in the US. It is something that is very hard to pin down and discuss, yet needs to be explored. Representing such a thing badly is precisely the best way to ensure it never gets discussed usefully.