ANONYMOUS - OUR VOICE

The inadequacy of the term “Asian American”

This article is part of the <a href="https://www.vox.com/e/22171879">Asian American identity series</a>.
Sarath Suong has often felt like the term “Asian American” doesn’t really serve him.
“I was told that I am Asian American when we came here,” says Suong, a Cambodian refugee who immigrated to the US as a child. “But I faced a lot of colorism, a lot of classism, and not a lot of understanding about who Southeast Asians are and how we fit into the Asian American context.”
Suong and his family were among tens of thousands of refugees who fled during the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, eventually settling in the Boston area. When he arrived in the US, he struggled to find where exactly he fit in a country where everyone from teachers to neighbors made him feel unwanted.
“Growing up for me, I felt so disempowered,” he told Vox. “I was always wondering why people in my community were getting harassed and being thrown in jail by the police.”
That experience, Suong says, seemed very different from the image of Asian Americans portrayed by the media, peers, and even some members of the community. While white writers pushed the idea of the “model minority myth” — a racist trope that suggests that all Asian Americans are successful and well-off — Suong feared for his friends’ deportations and violence at the hands of cops. And as he got older and began advocating for specific resources to address the disparities faced by Southeast Asians, he felt abandoned by other Asian Americans, too.
“Trying to enter spaces with predominantly wealthy, light-skinned East Asians, there was a dismissal of us,” he said.
All this has led Suong, now 40 and the head of the Southeast Asian Freedom Network, to be wary of Asian America — and how the category can exclude some of its most vulnerable members.
While Asian American was a term established by activists in the 1960s as a means to build political power, it’s also been criticized for obscuring the immense diversity among those it purports to cover, centering East Asians and preventing specific ethnic groups from getting the policy support they need. Asian Americans not only have the largest income gap of any racial group but also massive health care, education, and economic disparities that rarely get talked about. Cambodian refugees like Suong, and Southeast Asians in particular, are among those who’ve been overlooked: 19 percent of Cambodians live in poverty in the US, <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/chart/u-s-cambodian-population-living-in-poverty/">compared to 12 percent of Asian people</a> and 15 percent of all people.
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<figcaption>Rev. Deborah Lee prays before attending a deportation hearing of an immigrant from Cambodia in March 2018.</figcaption>
<cite>Christie Hemm Klok/The Washington Post/Getty Images</cite></figure>
In the 1980s and ’90s the classification was further broadened under the term Asian American and Pacific Islander, or AAPI, a decision that’s proven contentious in itself. (In 1997, the US government disaggregated Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders in its data, though the vestiges of this umbrella category remain. See: AAPI Heritage Month, the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, and Asian Pacific studies departments at numerous colleges.)
The term AAPI is meant to be inclusive, but its usage — in government data, in particular — has had the opposite effect.
“AAPI is incredibly ambitious. It contends to cover and speak for some of the largest regions in the world,” says Tavae Samuelu, the executive director of Empowering Pacific Islander Communities. “In some ways, marginalization and erasure feel inevitable.”
The terms Asian American and AAPI, in their most idealized versions, have at times historically served as a unifying banner for a wide range of communities to work together toward a common cause. They signify, too, a sense of shared experience tied to what it’s like to be an immigrant, or part of a family of immigrants, and the xenophobia that different groups have encountered, a connection that’s been especially apparent in the wake of recent attacks targeting Asian American people during the pandemic.
“The thing that these Asian American communities share is the experience of perhaps being viewed as outsiders,” says Indiana University’s Dina Okamoto. “Maybe you arrived 10 years ago, but maybe your family has also been in the US for generations. There are experiences of being othered these communities share.”
But this connection can be tenuous and this label so broad that recent calls for data disaggregation and more visible recognition of the roughly 50 ethnic groups that make up the Asian diaspora have surfaced. In conversations with more than 20 people who spoke about their Asian American identities, there was a huge focus on acknowledging the different needs that various groups may have.
“Are Asian Americans one or many?” asks UC Riverside political science professor Karthick Ramakrishnan. “The answer is both.”
The term Asian American was once a radical one.
First used by UC Berkeley student activists Emma Gee and Yuji Ichioka in 1968, “Asian American” was used to unite different communities of Asian descent in order to create a more formidable protest bloc, an approach inspired by the Black Power movement. Their strength in numbers proved more impactful than individual ethnic groups working alone, including working alongside Black and Latino students for an ethnic studies department at the college.
“There were so many Asians out there in the political demonstrations but we had no effectiveness,” Ichioka has said previously in an interview with UC San Diego ethnic studies professor Yến Lê Espiritu. “Everyone was lost in the larger rally. We figured that if we rallied behind our own banner, behind an Asian American banner, we would have an effect on the larger public.”
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<figcaption>Emma Gee and Yuji Ichioka, activists who coined the term “Asian American,” were honored in 1999 at the 30th anniversary celebration of the establishment of Asian American Studies Center at UCLA.</figcaption>
<cite>Courtesy of UCLA Asian American Studies Center</cite></figure>
The rise of the term also helped combat the use of more derogatory language that referred to people of Asian descent. Before “Asian American” was popularized, the word “Oriental,” a label that othered and exoticized those it described, was common parlance.
For many experts and organizers who spoke with Vox, that solidarity is as important now as it was back then.
“When it comes to having policy influence and exercising political power, it is absolutely essential to have an Asian American movement. Each of these groups is too small, and there are similarities,” says Ramakrishnan.
In the decades since it took off, the term is now mostly seen as a demographic marker. Today, it captures about 19 million people, up 81 percent since 2000, <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/09/asian-americans-are-the-fastest-growing-racial-or-ethnic-group-in-the-u-s/">according to a recent Pew report</a> — and a large immigrant population; 59 percent of all Asian Americans are immigrants, including 1.4 million of whom are undocumented. Asian Americans are the fastest-growing racial group in America, currently 5.6 percent of the county’s population but projected to be as much as 14 percent <a href="https://ncrc.org/racial-wealth-snapshot-asian-americans-and-the-racial-wealth-divide/">by 2065</a>.
Prior to becoming a more established category, though, issues of immigration — and, relatedly, xenophobia — have historically bound Asian Americans closely with one another, serving as a common thread for such an expansive group.
We are “grounded in our history of exclusion laws and immigration bans,” emphasizes Ramakrishnan. “What makes us Asian is a history of exclusion.”
That history goes as far back as <a href="https://asiasociety.org/education/asian-americans-then-and-now">1882</a> when Chinese immigrants were barred from becoming citizens because they were seen as competition for white workers; <a href="https://asiasociety.org/education/asian-americans-then-and-now">in 1917</a>, Indian people were similarly barred; <a href="https://asiasociety.org/education/asian-americans-then-and-now">and by 1924</a>, Japanese and Korean people were barred as well.
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<figcaption>An 1888 editorial cartoon, titled “The Only One Barred Out,” references the Chinese Exclusion Act.</figcaption>
<cite>Interim Archives/Getty Images</cite></figure>
In all three cases, groups immigrated to the US as laborers and were framed as the source of economic problems, and in some cases public health ones, too. Members of ethnic groups that have more recently come to the country as refugees — including Hmong, Burmese, and Laotian people — have also faced restrictive immigration policies <a href="https://www.ilcm.org/latest-news/alert-to-immigrants-from-burma-and-laos/">that have focused on deportation</a>.
“We share ... a continued history of being scapegoated for America’s ills — literally and figuratively — and never being accepted as full and equal members of society,” says Karen Umemoto, the director of the Asian American Studies Center at UCLA.
In recent decades, combating such “othering” has fueled solidarity.
One such instance was in 1982, when 27-year-old Vincent Chin was murdered by two white autoworkers who saw him as representing the increased competition the US was facing from Japanese manufacturers. Asian American-led protests erupted across the country and pushed the Justice Department to investigate the attack as a civil rights violation.
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<figcaption>Vincent Chin (left) died three days after being beaten with a baseball bat in Detroit, Michigan, in 1982. Ronald Ebens (pictured above) and his stepson Michael Nitz were accused of beating Chin. They pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of manslaughter.</figcaption>
<cite>Bettmann Archive via Getty Images</cite></figure>
Currently, in the wake of a surge in anti-Asian racism during the pandemic, attacks on older people, <a href="https://www.vox.com/22335666/asian-spa-shooting-atlanta">mass shootings in Atlanta</a> that killed six women of Asian descent, and a mass shooting in Indianapolis that <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/4/20/22392178/indianapolis-shooting-sikh-americans">killed four Sikh Americans</a>, there’s similarly been a renewed focus on pan-Asian solidarity and activism.
“It has always been anti-Asian violence that brings people together,” says Espiritu. In recent months, thousands of people across the country have gathered for #StopAsianHate rallies in cities including Oakland, New York, and Philadelphia, and worked to raise awareness for nonprofits tracking hate incidents and offering support to local communities.
Ramakrishnan hopes, too, that such efforts will be inclusive of different groups within the Asian diaspora moving forward. “Just as you have South Asian leaders who are showing up to denounce incidents predominantly affecting East Asians, you also need to have East Asians showing up for South Asians and Southeast Asians as well,” he says.
There are the historical circumstances that bind Asian Americans together, and then there are the everyday experiences they share — many often driven by the “forever foreigner” stereotype.
“No matter how much I wanted to be an American, other people wouldn’t see me as that,” says Daniel Shinhoo Kim, 26, a conservationist based in Tacoma, Washington. “Asian stereotypes, Asian anything, are just considered a joke. The most obvious is Asian men’s genitalia being smaller, people laugh at it.”
The idea that people of Asian descent didn’t belong to the US, or were inherently foreign to this country, has fueled tropes like the fetishization of women, the emasculation of men, and insults about people’s accents, food, and appearance.
“The hypersexualization that I faced, probably as young as [when] I was 6, changes how you consider sex and sexuality,” says Elim, 26, an organizer in Doraville, Georgia, who worked at her parents’ anime shop as a child and dealt with men constantly telling her how much they loved Asian women — and how exotic they found them. (Some full names have been omitted to protect people’s privacy.) “It made me question what it was like to be desired, and what it meant beyond being a sex object,” she says.
Elim and others spoke, too, of being made to feel undesirable because of their identity.
“There was often people mimicking the racist caricatures of Indian characters they see on TV or parroting comedy skits they see or the desirability or lack thereof of Indian American women, specifically,” says M., 22, a resident of Washington, DC.
Combating the idea of being “foreigners” has often meant dealing with — and pushing back on — the pressure to conform as well.
“In America, whiteness is your standardized identity. And that was amplified in the neighborhood I grew up in,” says Evan, 34, a government analyst in New York City. “It feels like you’re playing a role. You spend a lot of time thinking about how you come across to people. How are these white people going to judge me? In high school, I was always envious of people growing up in Asian enclaves in California or New York City. It just felt like an easier state of being.”
“I think the first word I think of is ‘invisible.’ Aside from stereotypes of Asian women being very quiet, which I’ve, in my whole life, intentionally fought against, I have been thinking a lot about social situations where I just don’t have any social capital,” says Annie, 26, a graphic designer in New York City. “I have to compensate for that by presenting myself in a very loud way through what I wear or the way I speak. I’ve tried to walk more aggressively.”
Such dynamics have led some Asian Americans to distance themselves from their identities when they were younger, and to embrace them more fully later in life.
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang">
<aside><q>“The hypersexualization that I faced, probably as young as [when] I was 6, changes how you consider sex and sexuality”</q></aside>
</div>
“To be completely candid, I’m more embracing of being Asian American now that I had been previously,” says Melina, 40, a massage therapist in Boston, who credits a trip to Myanmar, where her family emigrated from, as an experience that changed her outlook. “That feeling of being left out, of not belonging, is something that I internalized for a long time.”
It is through some of this shared pain — along with a recognition of the specific hardships that different groups have faced — that Asian Americans, too, can find solidarity with one another. Among second-generation Asian Americans, there’s also a broad sense of the sacrifice that family members have made to come to the US in the first place.
“Many of us had immigrant parents, and their focus was on surviving and making a life for themselves and their families,” says Jan Kang, 59, a tech executive, who spoke about how her father took a second job in the emergency room to pay for her college tuition.
“I felt like my parents sacrificed a lot,” says Kang.
In addition to grouping people of Asian descent under one racial category, the label expanded in the 1980s to include populations across the Pacific Ocean.
The term AAPI, which includes Pacific Islanders, took off prominently among academics and was used in the 1990 census as government officials weighed how to count the group, who had been categorized in individual boxes like “Hawaiian,” “Guamanian,” and “Samoan.”
“Pacific Islanders were too small of a group in the mind of key decision-makers to report separately,” says UCLA political science professor Paul Ong, who added that the presence of Asian Americans in Hawaii may have been one of the reasons the two were initially put together. Scholars also began using the term to refer to experiences with colonialism that both Asian countries and Pacific Islanders had had. The idea was to “combine forces, given we were less than 3 percent of the US population in those days,” says Umemoto, who helped form a coalition of Asian American and Pacific Islander student groups along the West Coast.
But many Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders argued this grouping erased their specific and current struggles. Although some Pacific Islanders are immigrants, many identify as Indigenous. <a href="https://www.csusm.edu/ccc/programs/diaspora.html">Pacific Islanders as a group include</a> Native Hawaiian, Samoan, Tokelauan, Tahitian, Tongan, Guamanian, Chamorro, Mariana Islander, Saipanese, Palauan, Yapese, Chuukese, Pohnpeian, Kosraean, Marshallese, I-Kiribati, Fijian, Papua New Guinean, Solomon Islander, and Ni-Vanuatu people.
“Our race is deeply shaped by continued colonization and militarization, and they aren’t necessarily key issues for the Asian American community,” says Samuelu. ”For many Pacific Islanders, America happened without our consent.”
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang">
<aside><q>“Pacific Islanders always ask, ‘Are you just using us in name, or do you cover us in a meaningful fashion?’”</q></aside>
</div>
The AAPI category also painted over inequities that existed, making it seem as though Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders were overrepresented at higher education institutions like other Asian Americans when the opposite was the case. When looking at degree attainment broken out by ethnicity, <a href="https://pnpi.org/asian-americans-and-pacific-islanders/">62 percent of AAPI adults 24 and older</a> have completed an associate’s degree or higher, compared to 28 percent of Native Hawaiians and Pacific islanders of the same age.
In 1997, the Office of Management and Budget — which determines the categories used by the census — officially disaggregated the group in its data collection practices, though the label is still used by the media, academics, advocacy organizations, and some government institutions. During the pandemic, for instance, <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/12/14/22168249/pacific-islanders-native-hawaiians-covid-19-pandemic">Pacific Islanders have pushed back against states’ decisions</a> to group them together with Asian Americans, a move that’s made it tough to discern when Pacific Islanders have had much higher rates of coronavirus cases and fatalities.
“Pacific Islanders always ask, ‘Are you just using us in name, or do you cover us in a meaningful fashion?’” says Ong.
Sela Panapasa, a researcher at the University of Michigan who identifies as a Pacific Islander of Rotuman, Tongan, and Tuvalu descent, says that Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders have long been invisible — something that lumping them into a larger category only exacerbated. “And who wants to be invisible, as a PI myself?” she says.
It’s increasingly apparent that sweeping labels have serious problems.
When it comes to the term “Asian American,” there’s a continual risk that it’s masking the differences within communities and fueling the myth that Asian Americans are a monolithic group. For some, there’s also the sense that East Asians, including groups that were part of some of the earlier waves of Asian immigrants such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Americans, <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01419870.2019.1671600?journalCode=rers20">are viewed as more synonymous with the term Asian than others</a>.
“It erases way too many people,” says Elim. “That’s bullshit. We’re not all the same.”
Asian Americans comprise roughly 50 ethnic groups, who speak upward of 100 languages including Indian Americans, Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, Vietnamese Americans, Korean Americans, Japanese Americans, Pakistani Americans, Cambodian Americans, Hmong Americans, Thai Americans, Laotian Americans, Bangladeshi Americans, Burmese Americans, Nepalese Americans, Indonesian Americans, Sri Lankan Americans, Malaysian Americans, Bhutanese Americans, and Mongolian Americans — and that’s just some of the diversity that exists.
There are also enormous generational, religious, class, and ideological differences among these groups, as well as huge economic disparities.
According to a <a href="https://ncrc.org/racial-wealth-snapshot-asian-americans-and-the-racial-wealth-divide/">report</a> from the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, the income gaps among different Asian American ethnic groups are the widest of any racial group, and they are still growing. While Indian Americans have the highest median income of $100,000, for example, Burmese Americans have the lowest, at $36,000. Similarly, there are significant disparities among Asian Americans in <a href="https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED577104.pdf">educational attainment</a> and health care outcomes: 94 percent of Japanese and Taiwanese Americans have graduated high school, compared to less than 66 percent of Laotian and Hmong Americans. And 22 percent of Nepalese Americans don’t have health insurance <a href="http://aapidata.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/aapidata_OMB_INS_asn.png">compared to 6 percent of Japanese Americans</a>.
“I think one of the biggest indicators is what did communities come to the US with. There is a big difference in the social, political, and literal capital that someone from China may have come from and refugees from Cambodia and Laos,” says Quyen Dinh, executive director of the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center.
When policymakers simply group all Asian Americans together, none of these inequities are visible, meaning help often doesn’t get to the groups that need it most.
“There has long been a problem of lumping all of the groups together, which makes Asian Americans look well-off by some measures when averaged out as a sociopolitical group,” says Umemoto. “But we’re a bifurcated community, with wide differences in well-being within and across ethnic groups.”
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<figcaption>Lamis J. Deek, a civil rights attorney for Muslims, South Asians, and Arab Americans, speaks at an anti-racism press conference on September 9, 2011, in front of Manhattan’s City Hall.</figcaption>
<cite>Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images</cite></figure>
The rise of the “model minority” stereotype, too, only added to the perception that all Asian Americans are broadly successful, camouflaging the struggles and diversity of many community members. And whether it’s representation in community organizations or the way the media talks about Asian Americans, many people don’t think the term is representative of the actual breadth of the Asian diaspora as a whole, either.
“Something I’ve encountered a lot growing up is the erasure of South Asians as Asian. From a young age, folks would tell me, ‘Well, you’re Indian, that’s different from being Asian!’” says M.
There’s a unique South Asian experience with “rising racism and Islamophobia” that should be acknowledged, M. says, referring to the surge in hate crimes and anti-Muslim sentiment in the wake of 9/11. “Bigotry toward our Muslim brothers and sisters translates to bigotry toward anyone brown.”
For others, identifying based on their ethnicity speaks more directly to their family ties and cultural heritage, compared to a more abstract marker like “Asian American.”
“My felt identity, the one that I carry around in my body, is that ... I’m a third-generation Japanese American,” says University of Colorado ethnic studies professor Daryl Maeda. “There are vanishingly few people who would say they’re Asian American as a felt identity. I think it’s a political identity rather than a cultural one or a familial one.”
This is further complicated by the fact that Asian American is an identity that’s often externally imposed because of how people are racialized in the US. When people of Asian descent have been targeted in America — both in recent attacks related to the coronavirus and historically — such racism is often directed at people of many Asian ethnicities.
“We are all put in this same label even though for thousands of years we’ve fought wars against each other,” says Shinwoo Kim, 26.
There’s a major need to recognize individual ethnic groups, and many advocates say this begins with data.
Data disaggregation as a concept sounds complex, but in practice, it’s very straightforward: In addition to gathering data about Asian Americans as a large group, the government can also gather data by ethnic group and direct other major institutions to do the same.
By doing so, policymakers would be able to better measure many of these disparities and appropriately target their responses. In the 2020 census, there is some disaggregation, though it’s not enough: The survey ultimately enables people to identify as Asian American and as other ethnic categories including Chinese, Filipino, Asian Indian, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, and “other.” Notably, a lot of groups are left out, including some who face the highest rates of poverty and unemployment among the Asian American diaspora, such as Cambodian, Hmong, and Bhutanese Americans. People of these backgrounds are still able to write in how they identify, which the census will report out as well.
“Our ideal solution is that all 50-plus communities have checkboxes,” says Dinh, of the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center.
The push for more disaggregation has extended to states, too. In Rhode Island, the All Students Count Act became law in 2017, requiring public schools to break out data on Asian American students by ethnicity — though activists are still fighting to make sure it’s fully implemented. In California, too, a 2016 law required the state’s public health department to disaggregate data, with the goal of providing better insurance coverage to groups that don’t have it, and to better understand how illnesses affect various groups differently. Disaggregated health data has played a role in revealing how diabetes disproportionately affects Filipino Americans and South Asian Americans, for instance.
For Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, data disaggregation has been critical during the coronavirus pandemic as well. “In the aggregate, it looks like AAPI has the lowest rates of infection, but when you pull out PI, you see we’re twice as, four times as, six times as likely to get the infection,” says Samuelu.
In the end, such disaggregation speaks to a larger issue about being seen.
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<figcaption>Approximately 3,000 activists, residents, and local politicians marched across the Brooklyn Bridge in a rally against anti-Asian hate on April 4.</figcaption>
<cite>Spencer Platt/Getty Images</cite></figure>
“As a young person who identifies as biracial — Khmer and Black — I always feel left out, particularly when filling out school forms, job applications, and internship opportunities,” Deijah Prak Preaster, an ARISE Youth Leader, <a href="https://www.searac.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/ihep_aapi_brief.pdf">said in a 2020 report</a>. “I am always forced to check off the ‘other’ box for the question on ethnicity. The feeling of not being counted or seen hurts; it makes me feel my identity does not matter.”
Currently, the #StopAsianHate movement has also been an inflection point for some Asian Americans to talk about their identity more openly and weigh such questions.
“I think it’s an opportunity to talk about the ways we’re leveraged against each other, the way that East Asians have been used as a wedge and this shining example,” says Elim. “None of these communities are monolithic, and we perpetuate a lot of violence toward each other.”
That effort is integral to attempts to strengthen Asian American solidarity, experts tell Vox.
“I identify as Tamil, I identify as South Asian, I identify as Indian American, I identify as Asian American. It’s not an either/or for me,” says Ramakrishnan.
“People are not just one thing,” echoes Espiritu. “I do identify as Asian American — it is a political identity — but I also identify as a Vietnamese refugee.”
There are a lot of experiences that Asian Americans have in common — including a fight to be visible in American society and a focus on combating the systems reinforced by white supremacy. But achieving true unity may only be possible if people within it are willing to acknowledge not only similarities but differences in need.
The label only works, Suong says, “if Asian Americans can look inward and say, ‘Look, let’s join together and support those who are most marginalized.’ If Asian America really took care of who’s vulnerable in Asian America, we’d have really strong solidarity.”
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/identities/22380197/asian-american-pacific-islander-aapi-heritage-anti-asian-hate-attacks">https://www.vox.com/identities/22380197/asian-american-pacific-islander-aapi-heritage-anti-asian-hate-attacks</a>

vox The inadequacy of the term “Asian American”

This article is part of the Asian American identity series . Sarath Suong has often felt like the term “Asian American” doesn’t really ser...

What does it mean to be Asian American?

The label “Asian American” is almost comically flattening.
It consists of people from more than 50 ethnic groups, all with different cultures, languages, religions, and their own sets of historic and contemporary international conflicts. It includes newly arrived migrants and Asians who have been on American soil for multiple generations. Depending on visa types, immigration status, and class, there are vast differences even among those from the same country. In fact, the income gaps between some Asian American groups are among the largest of any ethnic category in the nation. Yet these differences are rarely explored and discussed.
With the recent rise in anti-Asian attacks, however, Asian Americans have found themselves in a rare moment in the national spotlight. For many, it has led to a renewed sense of solidarity as well as confusion about what the Asian American label means or if there really is a unifying experience attached to it.
It also inspired Vox to post a survey asking Asian Americans to write in and tell us how they’re feeling right now. The rise in violence — especially the shootings at three spas in Atlanta that left eight people dead, including six women of Asian descent — haunted the responses. One major theme emerged: Why did it take such an extreme act of violence to get America to care about its Asian communities?
“It frustrates me that the anti-Asian sentiments popularized by Trump had to be escalated to media-worthy violence and mass shootings in order to be elevated to mainstream discourse,” one person wrote from California.
“We’re trending today, but I bet we’ll be forgotten by next week or month,” wrote another from Michigan.
Other persistent issues emerged from our survey, too. Many responded that they didn’t quite know how to talk about cultural identity or racism with their parents or their children. The experience of growing up in non-diverse areas versus immigrant- or minority-dense enclaves — and how different it felt when moving from one area to another — also kept coming up. People with roots in South and Southeast Asian cultures wondered how they fit into an ethnic category so commonly associated with East Asians. Many questioned what the label Asian American really means and what purpose it serves in the larger American conversation around race.
In a series of stories publishing throughout this month, we will explore some of these questions and shared experiences, in a time when many Asian Americans are experiencing a sense of alienation not only from the nation at large, but also from the label “Asian American” itself.
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<figure class="e-image"><picture class="c-picture" data-cid="site/picture_element-1620231042_336_966" data-cdata='{"asset_id":22489117,"ratio":"*"}'><source srcset="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/IFazwhkepAiAdwNlPo5BiGAj6Rw=/0x0:3000x1688/320x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x1688):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22489117/HANIFAFINAL.jpeg 320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/0BEX9AQ67sUHfTktEgoCrmVLma0=/0x0:3000x1688/520x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x1688):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22489117/HANIFAFINAL.jpeg 520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Af82H6lbfE5p3Ypw2hLdQ_5Qq3Q=/0x0:3000x1688/720x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x1688):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22489117/HANIFAFINAL.jpeg 720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/OhO1MsBCHQvcZKmlXajCDatspLQ=/0x0:3000x1688/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x1688):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22489117/HANIFAFINAL.jpeg 920w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/nGCaTSEY5kCzBrQZherf1Hbdwig=/0x0:3000x1688/1120x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x1688):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22489117/HANIFAFINAL.jpeg 1120w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/tgIt0YwBqROPNNVQRJ-EbpomFz0=/0x0:3000x1688/1320x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x1688):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22489117/HANIFAFINAL.jpeg 1320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Dl56FDkOBRbUoHXcTe1DJwfsxow=/0x0:3000x1688/1520x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x1688):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22489117/HANIFAFINAL.jpeg 1520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/qhgmi-78TrVG9cKh3hn2UykT5qQ=/0x0:3000x1688/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x1688):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22489117/HANIFAFINAL.jpeg 1720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/M8i_B6G0GJY9vxwK1ppd14BrvrI=/0x0:3000x1688/1920x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x1688):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22489117/HANIFAFINAL.jpeg 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 1221px) 846px, (min-width: 880px) calc(100vw - 334px), 100vw" type="image/webp" /> <img alt="A drawing of many Asian faces." data-upload-width="3000" sizes="(min-width: 1221px) 846px, (min-width: 880px) calc(100vw - 334px), 100vw" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/_AZOBBlf5-LsfF0Sdcr_Y7oQ-NA=/0x0:3000x1688/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x1688):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22489117/HANIFAFINAL.jpeg" srcset="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/YXRJcfSOQR15Va3aBuDjPbf-C5g=/0x0:3000x1688/320x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x1688):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22489117/HANIFAFINAL.jpeg 320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/TZrp6XE_zNwLyW8SglYr_ALhkDg=/0x0:3000x1688/520x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x1688):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22489117/HANIFAFINAL.jpeg 520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/HY5tjkIVreXDi9bXlsbOzJFT-y4=/0x0:3000x1688/720x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x1688):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22489117/HANIFAFINAL.jpeg 720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/FlOMN2B5fRpoBzvEfFq72Ti0h7Q=/0x0:3000x1688/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x1688):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22489117/HANIFAFINAL.jpeg 920w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/cu3fhOEfk7mbtWEvesA8b1rlTy0=/0x0:3000x1688/1120x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x1688):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22489117/HANIFAFINAL.jpeg 1120w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/tl_C-7QXlI0sY71cJoYL5ibVkPg=/0x0:3000x1688/1320x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x1688):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22489117/HANIFAFINAL.jpeg 1320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/mEgbNBgfYUeQ4WnNb3X2Ai8OkBo=/0x0:3000x1688/1520x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x1688):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22489117/HANIFAFINAL.jpeg 1520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/32X4qLZKY3SWFwimiyUwtgLRSjk=/0x0:3000x1688/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x1688):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22489117/HANIFAFINAL.jpeg 1720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/T40DRO7SPkvCvUWDxhNU0oUXY1s=/0x0:3000x1688/1920x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x1688):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22489117/HANIFAFINAL.jpeg 1920w" /></picture> <cite>Hanifa Abdul Hameed for Vox</cite></figure>
by Li Zhou
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by Karen Turner
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by Rachel Ramirez
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And more to come.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/identities/22407838/asian-american-pacific-islander-history-month">https://www.vox.com/identities/22407838/asian-american-pacific-islander-history-month</a>

vox What does it mean to be Asian American?

The label “Asian American” is almost comically flattening. It consists of people from more than 50 ethnic groups, all with different cultur...

How Jeff Bezos Trumped Tabloids: A Story of Money, Sex And Power

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For years, Bezos wove the story of his courtship and marriage to MacKenzie Bezos into his public persona.
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"Raise your hand if you think you've had a harder week than I've had."
It was Feb. 14, 2019, in the early afternoon, and for perhaps the first time in the 25-year history of Amazon.com Inc., Jeff Bezos was prepared to explain himself to his employees.
Bezos was a master compartmentalizer; his ability to keep the intricate threads of his personal and professional lives separate was unrivaled. This talent had allowed him to build Amazon while also running a space company, Blue Origin LLC, and reviving the  Washington Post-all while keeping his family life private. But those threads had gotten tangled. Bezos, a father of four, was the subject of tabloid stories in the  National Enquirer about his relationship with a married former television host.
Rather than doing what most billionaires do under such scrutiny-keep quiet and wait for the storm to pass-Bezos had gone public. He'd written a salacious blog post that included descriptions of photos the Enquirerclaimed it had acquired-among them: a "below the belt selfie." He'd suggested that the paper was doing this as political retribution for the Post's reporting on the Enquirer's connections to the Trump administration.
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Featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, May 10, 2021. Photographer: Alex Wong/Getty Images
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Now, facing Amazon's leadership group, the S-team, Bezos addressed the elephant in the room. "The story is completely wrong and out of order," he said. "MacKenzie and I have had good, healthy, adult conversations about it. She is fine. The kids are fine. The media is having a field day." Then he tried to refocus the conversation on the matter at hand: personnel projections for the current year. "All of this is very distracting, so thank you for being focused on the business," he said.
The affair came as a shock to most senior executives, though recently some had noticed changes in their boss's behavior. Meetings for Op1, Amazon's term for its annual late-summer planning cycle, had been delayed or postponed; longtime deputies were finding it difficult to get time on his calendar. There were also those helipads that Amazon had requested for its planned outposts in New York City and Arlington, Va. These had enraged local officials, already skeptical about giving billions of dollars in tax breaks to a company with a trillion-dollar market value, and had contributed to the scrapping of a planned second headquarters in Queens.
As some in the meeting were now well aware, the boss's new girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez, was a helicopter pilot. Bezos had taken flying lessons himself. And then there was the curious matter of the stock. On Jan. 9, Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos had announced their divorce via Twitter. But a few weeks before that, Amazon's legal and finance departments had begun asking the company's largest institutional shareholders whether they would support the creation of a new class of stock with reduced voting rights. Dual-class stock structures had been used at Facebook, Google, and Snap to concentrate voting power among company founders, giving them ultimate sway over matters of corporate governance. Amazon had gone public a decade before those structures were in vogue, so Bezos hadn't had such power. Now he apparently wanted it.
Amazon vigorously disputed that Bezos' personal life had anything to do with these moves. Public-relations representatives claimed that having helipads in New York City would have been "useful for certain events, like receiving dignitaries." The official story about the share classes was that Amazon was exploring ways to keep giving stock to fulfillment center workers and that it could use the second class of stock to pursue acquisitions. Those explanations had always seemed a little thin. But after Bezos tweeted news of his divorce, some who'd heard about the stock plan came to assume that it was all about Bezos remaining firmly in control of the company in the face of a costly divorce settlement that would end up reducing his stake from 18% to 12%.
It was the first time some senior executives could remember seeing Bezos cornered by adversaries, who now included, improbably, a Hollywood manager looking to peddle explicit selfies. On the other hand, the episode was the culmination of Bezos' decade-long transformation from a single-minded tech geek to the master of a trillion-dollar empire. His enemies now included Donald Trump, who despised the Post, and Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, who was embittered by the paper's coverage of the murder of dissident reporter Jamal Khashoggi and would later be implicated in a supposed plot to put spywareonto Bezos' smartphone. Bezos was navigating all of this as he always had: by thinking unconventionally and manipulating the levers of media. Somehow, his way usually worked.
Back at Amazon's headquarters complex in Seattle, on the sixth floor of Day 1 tower, the planning meeting stretched into the early evening. Harried finance executives scurried in and out of the room distributing spreadsheets. Bezos might not be able to control the scrum of tabloid press gleefully chronicling his sybaritic escapades with Sanchez, but he could control head count growth across all of Amazon's divisions.
As the sun set over the Olympic Mountains, casting a golden glow into the conference room, executives started furtively glancing at their phones and responding to texts from their significant others. Finally, at 7:30, Senior Vice President Jeff Blackburn spoke up and said what everyone else was thinking: "Hey Jeff, how long do you think this meeting is going to go? A lot of us have plans." It was, after all, Valentine's Day.
"Oh, that's right," said Bezos, laughing. "I forgot about that."
For years, Bezos wove the story of his courtship and marriage to MacKenzie Bezos (now MacKenzie Scott) into his public persona. In speeches, he joked about his bachelorhood quest to find a woman resourceful enough to "get me out of a Third World prison," as if the bookish MacKenzie, a novelist with an English degree from Princeton, might one day rappel down from the roof of some godforsaken jail with a lock pick in her teeth.
But while Bezos and his handlers crafted the image of a doting husband and family man, he and his wife developed diverging appetites for public attention. After Amazon opened a Hollywood outpost and began producing movies, Bezos attended the Golden Globes and Academy Awards, showed up at premieres, and hosted an annual gathering at a palatial property in Beverly Hills, high above the Sunset Strip. At one such party in December 2016, for Manchester by the Sea, Amazon Studios' first Oscar winner, he was photographed with Sanchez and her then-husband, Patrick Whitesell, the powerful chairman of the Endeavor talent agency.
MacKenzie accompanied her husband to some Hollywood events but, by her own admission, wasn't a social person. "Cocktail parties for me can be nerve-racking," she toldVogue. "The brevity of conversations, the number of them-it's not my sweet spot." Friends said both parents were committed to their four children and to keeping them as far away as possible from the corrosive impact of celebrity and garish wealth.
By 2018, Bezos was seeing Sanchez, legal documents later showed, while keeping up the appearance of an intact marriage. His new girlfriend, then 48, was ebullient and sociable and, in many ways, the opposite of his wife. Like Bezos, Sanchez had been born in Albuquerque, and though their families didn't know one another, the couple would later chart all the coincidental overlap among their relatives at places such as the Bank of New Mexico, where Bezos' parents, Jackie and Mike, first met, and where Sanchez's cousin had once worked. Sanchez's father, Ray, ran a local flight school, Golden Airways, and her mother, Eleanor, had a pilot's license and had survived a plane crash when Lauren was 9 years old.
In the late '90s, after starting a broadcast news career at a local TV station in Phoenix, Sanchez became a correspondent for the syndicated gossip program Extra and then a morning anchor on Fox's Good Day LA. She hosted the first season of the reality show So You Think You Can Dance and had some small movie roles-that's her playing a news reporter 91 minutes into Fight Club. She had a son with NFL Hall of Famer and broadcaster Tony Gonzalez before marrying Whitesell and having another son and a daughter.
By the beginning of 2018, her helicopter company, Black Ops Aviation, was filming documentary videos for Blue Origin and posting them on YouTube. A few weeks later, Sanchez told her older brother, Michael, that she wanted to introduce him to her new beau. In April they had dinner at the Hearth & Hound, a hip West Hollywood restaurant, accompanied by Michael's husband and two other friends. Michael sat across from Jeff, and the two hit it off. Later, Michael expressed alarm about how his sister and the Amazon chief executive officer openly expressed their affections, potentially within sight of the local paparazzi, while both were still married.
If anyone cautioned Bezos that an affair with a married minor celebrity might prompt an unpleasant public reaction, he ignored those warnings. He brought Sanchez to Seattle with her mother and brother, where they got a VIP tour of the Spheres, the three interlinked glass conservatories at Amazon headquarters, and to Washington, D.C., where he showed her the Post's printing presses. She attended a Blue Origin rocket launch that summer and helped produce an inspirational 2-minute video for Bezos' rocket company featuring aerial shots and a rare voice-over by the CEO himself, as Your Blue Room by U2 and Brian Eno played in the background. "The human need to explore is deep within all of us," Bezos intoned at the start of the video.
Like many modern couples, Bezos and Sanchez's relationship played out digitally as well. The richest man in the world was, to put it bluntly, sexting. Sanchez shared many of these texts and photographs with her brother, a talent manager who represented a variety of cable news pundits and reality-TV contestants. But all of that was happening well outside Bezos' line of sight. He was enthralled by the adventurous Sanchez, and by nature he wasn't predisposed to be paranoid or immediately skeptical of anyone-especially not the brother of his new paramour. His philosophy, according to a friend, was essentially: "It's better to assume trust and find out that you are wrong than to always assume people are trying to screw you over."
Over the summer of 2018, as the romance between Bezos and Sanchez intensified, the Enquirer was coming off a catastrophic few years. Newsstand sales were slipping, and the paper's publisher, David Pecker, had been accused of buying the rights to stories about his friend Donald Trump's marital infidelities and then declining to publish them, a practice known as "catch and kill." This had brought the Enquirer's parent company, American Media Inc., or AMI, to the attention of federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, who were investigating potential violations of campaign finance laws.
Pecker's top editor, Chief Content Officer Dylan Howard, was a short and stout 36-year-old Australian and an acid-penned chronicler of the hypocrisies and indiscretions of American celebrities. The journalistic force behind such tabloid supernovas as Mel Gibson's antisemitic rants and Arnold Schwarzenegger's love child, Howard was protective of his work and combative toward rivals. When the Post aggressively covered AMI's catch-and-kill problems, Howard told reporters to look into its wealthy owner's personal life.
One possible line of inquiry, according to an email that went out to AMI staff in late summer, was to examine Bezos' relationship with the family of his biological father, Ted Jorgensen, and why the CEO hadn't contacted them when Jorgensen was dying in 2015.
The next day, Monday, Sept. 10, Michael Sanchez wrote an email to Andrea Simpson, an L.A.-based reporter for AMI. Sanchez and Simpson were close friends. He regularly sent her news about his clients, and they had once gotten tattoos together on a whim. (His, on his forearm, read Je suis la tempete: "I am the storm.") In the email, Sanchez said he had a hot tip for Simpson. A friend, he wrote, worked for a "Bill Gates type" who was married and having an affair with "a B-list married actress." The friend, Sanchez wrote, had compromising photos of the couple but wanted a six-figure payout for the scoop. Sanchez claimed to be working as the middleman.
Simpson and her editors in New York could only guess at the identities of the mystery lovers, speculating in emails about such figures as Evan Spiegel and Mark Zuckerberg. For weeks, Sanchez kept them guessing and tried to bump up his asking price by hinting that the story could end up with a British tabloid. In early October, he met with Simpson and showed her text messages and photos with the faces obscured. "Just doing a look around and by the body, I think it may be Jeff Bezos," Simpson wrote to her bosses.
Finally, on Oct. 18, Sanchez called up Howard and revealed that the "Bill Gates type" was in fact Amazon's CEO. Sanchez and AMI then signed a contract, entitling him to a payout of about $200,000-among the most the Enquirer had ever spent on a story. The contract stipulated that the paper would make every effort to safeguard Sanchez's anonymity and withhold his identity as the source of the scoop.
Sanchez hadn't yet revealed the name of the "B-list married actress," but it didn't take long for Enquirer editors, who dispatched photographers to track Bezos' jet, to figure it out. Howard was at an entertainment industry trade show in Cannes, France, when he received photos of Amazon's CEO and Lauren disembarking from his Gulfstream G650ER.
On Oct. 23, Michael Sanchez flew to New York, dined with Howard and James Robertson, another Enquirer editor, and corroborated what they now knew. He also showed them a flash drive containing a collection of texts to his sister from Bezos, as well as a handful of personal photographs that the couple had exchanged, and he intimated that at a later date he could show them a more explicit photo that Bezos had sent of his manhood to Lauren.
There would later be an abundance of speculation about how the Enquirer got the Bezos-Sanchez story-including unproven allegations that Sanchez's ex-husband, Patrick Whitesell, was involved, as well as international intrigue involving Saudi Arabia. But Howard, Robertson, and Simpson would all later submit in federal court that Michael Sanchez was the sole source of all the information and compromising material they received during the investigation.
Inside AMI's drab offices at the southern tip of Manhattan, the Bezos story was met with both excitement and anxiety. The company had filed for bankruptcy protection in 2010 and was loaded with debt from acquiring magazines such as In Touch and Life & Style. An effort to secure an investment from Saudi Arabia to finance a bid to buy Time wasn't panning out, and Anthony Melchiorre, the seldom-photographed managing partner of the company's majority owner, New Jersey hedge fund Chatham Asset Management, was anxious about anything that might land AMI in fresh legal peril.
That September, AMI had signed a nonprosecution agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice over allegations that it had tried to bury negative stories about Trump. The deal required its executives to cooperate with the federal investigation of Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and to operate in the future with unimpeachable honesty. It ensured the company would remain under prosecutors' watchful eyes for years. Breaking the agreement could mean financial ruin for AMI.
Pecker, a temperamental boss who conducted much of his work from his cellphone while driving between his homes and offices in Connecticut and New York City, called one draft of the Bezos article "the best piece of journalism the Enquirer has ever done" and bragged in an email to editors that "each page of a story should be another death blow for Bezos," according to a person with knowledge of the criminal investigations. But Pecker was also terrified of getting sued by the man with the deepest pockets in the world. He demanded the story be "100% bulletproof" and vacillated about when, and even whether, they should publish.
For the rest of that fall, the Enquirer worked on the story with Michael Sanchez's help. He emailed the paper more photographs and text messages and tipped off editors to the couple's travel plans. When he had dinner with Bezos and his sister at the Felix Trattoria restaurant in Venice, Calif., on Nov. 30, two reporters were stationed at tables nearby as photographers clicked away surreptitiously. On the promised explicit selfie, though, Sanchez seemed to equivocate. He arranged to share it with Howard in L.A. in early November, then canceled the meeting. A few weeks later, on Nov. 21, after Enquirer editors kept hounding him, he finally agreed to show it to Simpson while Howard and Robertson watched via FaceTime from New York.
None of this, Sanchez claims, was a betrayal of his sister. She and Bezos were conducting their relationship out in the open, and it was only a matter of time before their families and the larger world discovered it. "Everything I did protected Jeff, Lauren, and my family," Sanchez later said in an email. "I would never sell out anyone." He also believed, naively, that his source agreement with AMI precluded the media company from using the most embarrassing material he had provided them.
On one issue, at least, it appears that Sanchez didn't betray his sister. He later told FBI investigators that he never actually had an explicit photograph of Bezos in his possession. In the FaceTime meeting on Nov. 21, Sanchez didn't show a picture of Bezos at all. It was a random photograph of male genitalia that he'd captured from an escort website called Rent.Men.
On Jan. 7, 2019, Enquirer editors sent texts to Bezos and Lauren that started with a single, incendiary sentence: "I write to request an interview with you about your love affair." The couple moved swiftly in response. Lauren turned to the person closest to her who best knew the brazen byways of the tabloid industry: her brother. Michael innocently offered to exploit his relationships with Enquirer editors to find out what they had. After signing a $25,000-a-month contract with his sister, he called Howard to announce that he was acting as her representative and suggested that he come to New York to review the paper's reporting (which, of course, he had provided). Confident in the promise of confidentiality from AMI, Michael was now playing both sides.
Bezos, meanwhile, involved his longtime security consultant, Gavin de Becker, as well as de Becker's L.A.-based entertainment attorney, Marty Singer. And, early on Jan. 9, he instructed Amazon's PR department to release the news of his marital breakup from his official Twitter account. "We want to make people aware of a development in our lives," the statement began. "After a long period of loving exploration and trial separation, we have decided to divorce and continue our shared lives as friends."
The Enquirer published on Mondays, but Howard, reacting quickly, persuaded Pecker to authorize a special 11-page print run and posted the paper's first story online that evening, a Wednesday. "Married Amazon Boss Jeff Bezos Getting Divorced Over Fling With Movie Mogul's Wife," screamed the headline. During the next five days, the Enquirerpublished additional stories with more details about Bezos and Sanchez and their private text exchanges.
A few days later, Michael brokered a temporary cease-fire: AMI would stop publishing articles in exchange for exclusive paparazzi access to Lauren while she walked with two friends at the Santa Monica airport. The article ran on Jan. 14 in AMI's Us Weekly, along with canned quotes and the gentle headline, "First Photos Show Jeff Bezos' Girlfriend Lauren Sanchez Carefree After Scandal."
After the story ran, Michael texted Howard to thank him. "The level of cooperation that you and I have built in 14 days will be written about in textbooks," he wrote. The next week, Howard emailed Michael and reassured him that his anonymity as the original leaker was secure. "The untold story-if you will-has not been told," he wrote. "I'm saving it for my tombstone."
But Bezos wasn't satisfied. He wondered if the Enquirer's story had been political retribution for articles published by the Washington Postand gave de Becker "whatever budget he needed to pursue the facts" of how the paper obtained his private messages. De Becker had served on two presidential advisory boards, written four books about the psychology of violence, and consulted for a litany of high-profile political and entertainment figures. Bezos had selected his 1997 book, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence, as one of the first topics of discussion for the S-team reading club and had personally ensured that it was featured in the Amazon Books stores.
After a series of phone calls and text messages with Michael, de Becker sensed something was amiss. To publicize his suspicions, de Becker turned to Daily Beast Co., the media company run by Barry Diller, a friend of Bezos'. In an article on Jan. 31, the Daily Beast revealed that de Becker had identified Michael as a possible culprit. But he also floated an alternative scenario-one that cast Bezos as a patron of truth-telling journalism and the adversary to the fact-challenged U.S. president. He claimed the Enquirer's investigation was tied to Trump's campaign against the Post, opining in the article that "strong leads point to political motives."
There was no evidence behind this insinuation, but it shifted the advantage to Bezos. AMI's boss, Pecker, fretted that even a rumor about the paper's involvement in a political plot against a renowned billionaire might undermine its nonprosecution agreement. He implored Howard to settle the feud with Bezos' camp and to secure an acknowledgment that the investigation wasn't politically motivated and that the Enquirerhadn't used illegal means in scoring the story.
Over the first week in February, Howard asked Singer, de Becker's attorney, to get Bezos and de Becker to accept that the Enquirer articles weren't a political hit job and promised that he would cease publication of damaging stories. Singer wanted to know exactly what unpublished text messages and photos the paper possessed. Howard was uncertain; he suspected the lawyer was hunting for confirmation of the identity of his anonymous source. And he was nervous about an upcoming story in the Post that threatened to again assign political motives to the Enquirer's investigation.
In an email he sent to Singer on the afternoon of Feb. 5, AMI's chief content officer wrote, "with the Washington Post poised to publish unsubstantiated rumors of the National Enquirer's initial report, I wanted to describe to you the photos obtained during our newsgathering." Howard then listed the nine personal photos that Bezos and Lauren had exchanged. These were the pictures she'd shared with her brother and which her brother had passed to the Enquirer.
With an abundance of misplaced swagger, Howard also referenced the "below-the-belt selfie" that he'd captured via FaceTime from the meeting between Michael and Simpson. Unbeknownst to Howard, he was bragging about the anonymous image that Michael had lifted from Rent.Men. "It would give no editor pleasure to send this email," Howard concluded. "I hope common sense can prevail-and quickly."
But Bezos' team instead pressed their advantage. In a Washington Post articlepublished that night, de Becker once again identified Michael as a possible culprit and charged that the leak was "politically motivated." After the article was published, Pecker called Howard to say that Melchiorre, the hedge fund manager, was "ballistic" and again pressured Howard to stop the madness. Howard then started negotiating directly over the phone with de Becker. Suspicious and wary, both recorded the phone calls.
In the call transcripts, Howard appears to try to avoid making explicit threats but continues to reserve the paper's rights to publish the materials. "This is not in any way to be construed as some form of blackmail or anything like that!" he tells the veteran investigator at one point. "It's in both parties' interest to come to terms, given the specter of legal claims that are flying around."
Howard and de Becker appeared to make progress. On Feb. 6, AMI's deputy general counsel sent the proposed terms of an agreement via email to Bezos' team. AMI would agree not to publish or share any of the unpublished photos or texts if Bezos and his reps joined the company in publicly rejecting the notion that the Enquirer's reporting was politically motivated.
Bezos viewed the email as blatantly extortive. On Feb. 7 he told his advisers that he knew exactly what he was going to do. He wrote a 1,000-word-plus essay titled "No Thank You, Mr. Pecker" and handed it off to Amazon's senior vice president of global corporate affairs, Jay Carney, whose brow furrowed in surprise as he read it for the first time while on a videoconference with colleagues. Then Bezos had it uploaded to the publishing site Medium.
The post was stunning. In it, Bezos included the emails from AMI's attorney and top editor in their humiliating entirety. But, however embarrassing it was to have his sexts described in detail, Bezos knew they were also damning for AMI. "Something unusual happened to me yesterday," he wrote in the swaggering tone of someone supremely confident in his position. "I was made an offer I couldn't refuse. Or at least that's what the top people at the National Enquirer thought. I'm glad they thought that, because it emboldened them to put it all in writing." He neglected to mention that they had only done so after being pressed by a lawyer working on his behalf. Bezos, it seemed, had manipulated his adversaries into creating an incriminating paper trail.
Bezos then made explicit what de Becker had only implied: He suggested AMI was attacking him on behalf of the Trump administration and the government of Saudi Arabia. His ownership of the Washington Post, Bezos wrote, "is a complexifier for me. It's unavoidable that certain powerful people who experience Washington Post news coverage will wrongly conclude I am their enemy." He also added that he didn't regret owning the paper. It was, he wrote, "something I will be most proud of when I'm 90 and reviewing my life, if I'm lucky enough to live that long."
This noble sentiment, of course, had little to do with his extramarital relationship, or the scheming of his girlfriend's brother, or the desperate attempts of AMI to escape a cloud of political suspicion. It was, in other words, a public-relations masterstroke. Bezos cast himself as a sympathetic defender of the press and an opponent of "AMI's long-earned reputation for weaponizing journalistic privileges, hiding behind important protections, and ignoring the tenets and purpose of true journalism."
To interested readers, Bezos was taking a brave stand against the devious tactics of Trump's allies while vulnerably offering his own embarrassing photographs as collateral. "Bezos Exposes Pecker," declared the New York Post memorably, as public sympathies shifted to his side.
De Becker followed up those assertions in March by writing an article for the Daily Beast. He pointed to AMI's frantic attempts to defend itself from the charge of engaging in a political conspiracy and suggested that there must be another layer of hidden truth in the whole ordeal. "Our investigators and several experts concluded with high confidence that the Saudis had access to Bezos' phone and gained private information," he wrote. "As of today, it is unclear to what degree, if any, AMI was aware of the details." AMI denied the allegation, disclosing that Michael Sanchez, not any kind of international or cyber espionage, had been its source.
But none of that helped AMI. An unfavorable media narrative crystallized almost immediately in which Mohammed bin Salman's regime had learned of Bezos' relationship with Lauren and alerted the Enquirer or even supplemented the information it received from her brother. Considering Pecker's unsuccessful courtship of the Saudi kingdom for financing, that possibility might make certain logical sense if you squinted hard enough. But there was no hard evidence to support the hypothesis-only a fog of overlapping events, weak ties among disparate figures, and more strange coincidences.
Once again, Bezos had come out on top. His navigation of the crisis had been typical of his idiosyncratic approach to building Amazon. He'd bypassed a largely skeptical media to appeal directly to regular people, only slightly bruising the facts in the process. Just as he'd outmaneuvered countless rivals, he intuitively sensed what AMI's vulnerabilities were-and surgically attacked them. The entrepreneur who'd already commandeered the business of selling books, then much of retail, plus cloud computing, Hollywood, home speakers, and so on now asserted dominance over that unlikeliest of sectors-the celebrity media game.
Pecker blamed Howard for the disaster and removed him from his editorial role at AMI; Howard left the company in April 2020 when his contract expired. In two separate defamation lawsuits in L.A. district court, Michael sued AMI as well as Bezos and de Becker. He lost almost every subsequent legal decision as the facts dribbled out. And in the Southern District of New York, federal prosecutors investigated Bezos' allegation, leveled in the Medium essay, that he was extorted by AMI after it published the Enquirer article. The evidence must have been lacking, though, because prosecutors quietly dropped the matter without ever bringing a case.
Undeterred, Bezos and Lauren started appearing together in public. Before the pandemic, they attended the Allen & Co. investor conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, mingling with Warren Buffett, Tim Cook, and Mark Zuckerberg. A few days later, they watched the Wimbledon men's finals from the royal box, three rows behind Prince William and Kate Middleton. In August 2019, they were on David Geffen's superyacht. And in October, Bezos turned up outside the former Saudi consulate in Istanbul to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the murder of Khashoggi. De Becker handled the intricate security arrangements. Bezos sat next to Hatice Cengiz, Khashoggi's fiancee, and embraced her during the ceremony.
As such dramatic gestures replaced the scandal in the collective memory, Amazon employees could only watch and wonder: Did their CEO still belong to them or to some alternate dimension of wealth, glamour, and intrigue? Bezos seemed to show up just as frequently in the press as in the office, buying historic works of art and snapping up Geffen's 9-acre Beverly Hills estate for $165 million, a California record. Bezos now had personal and professional ambitions beyond Amazon. That turning point became evident in February, when the company announced that its founder would become executive chairman and hand over the CEO reins to Andy Jassy, a longtime deputy who'd overseen the profitable rise of Amazon Web Services. Before the transition, Bezos recorded yet another triumph, over the union trying to organize workers at an Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer, Ala.
Employees now had even more reasons to wonder. What did the future hold for their founder? At least part of the answer to that could be found in the shipyards of the Dutch custom yacht builder Oceanco. There, outside Rotterdam, a new creation was secretly taking shape: a 127-meter-long, three-mast schooner about which practically nothing was known, even in the whispering confines of luxury boat builders-except that upon completion, it will be one of the finest sailing yachts in existence. Oceanco was also building Bezos an accompanying support yacht, which had been expressly commissioned and designed to include-you guessed it-a helipad.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
 
 
source <a href="https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/how-jeff-bezos-trumped-tabloids-a-story-of-money-sex-and-power-2428608">https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/how-jeff-bezos-trumped-tabloids-a-story-of-money-sex-and-power-2428608</a>

news world How Jeff Bezos Trumped Tabloids: A Story of Money, Sex And Power

For years, Bezos wove the story of his courtship and marriage to MacKenzie Bezos into his public persona. "Raise your hand if you t...

French Journalist Kidnapped By Jihadists In Mali Appears In Video

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<div class="ins_instory_dv_cont"><img alt="French Journalist Kidnapped By Jihadists In Mali Appears In Video" src="https://c.ndtvimg.com/2021-05/c3jal4s4_french-journalist-kidnapped-mali_625x300_05_May_21.jpg" title="French Journalist Kidnapped By Jihadists In Mali Appears In Video" /></div>
Olivier Dubois worked for several media, including France 24 and Liberation daily.
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Bamako, Mali:
A French journalist, in a video circulating on social media Wednesday, said he had been kidnapped in Mali in early April by a jihadist group with links to Al-Qaeda.
The brief video could not be independently verified, although an official at the French foreign ministry confirmed that Olivier Dubois, who worked for several media, including the international TV channel France 24 and Liberation daily, was missing.
In the video, which lasts about 20 seconds, Dubois said he was abducted on April 8 in the central region of Gao by the Group to Support Islam and Muslims (GSIM), the biggest jihadist alliance in the Sahel.
He is seen seated on the ground, on a green sheet that could be a tent, dressed in a light pink traditional gown, with his beard trimmed.
The foreign ministry official said, "We are in contact with his family and the Malian authorities. We are carrying out the usual technical verifications" of the video.
Liberation, for which Dubois had been writing regularly since April last year, declined to make any immediate comment.
Mali has been struggling to contain an Islamist insurgency which first broke out in the north of the country in 2012 before spreading to the centre and neighbouring Burkina Faso and Niger.
Thousands of people have been killed and hundreds of thousands have fled their homes, while the economic impact on one of the world's poorest countries has been devastating.
Abductions have been frequent, both of Malians and foreigners.
The last French hostage was Sophie Petronin, a 75-year-old aid worker, who was freed in October last year along with Malian politician Soumaila Cisse, who has since died, and Italians Nicola Chiacchio and Pier Luigi Maccalli.
There has been consistent speculation that a ransom was paid for the four hostages, something that has never been confirmed by the Malian government, along with the release of 200 prisoners, some of whom were jihadists.
In October, Switzerland was informed that the GSIM had killed an evangelical missionary who had been kidnapped in Timbuktu in January 2016.
In March, the Swiss foreign ministry said the woman's body had been recovered and formally identified.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
 
 
source <a href="https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/french-journalist-olivier-dubois-kidnapped-by-jihadists-in-mali-appears-in-video-2428560">https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/french-journalist-olivier-dubois-kidnapped-by-jihadists-in-mali-appears-in-video-2428560</a>

news world French Journalist Kidnapped By Jihadists In Mali Appears In Video

Olivier Dubois worked for several media, including France 24 and Liberation daily. Bamako, Mali: A French journalist, in a video circul...

New Zealand Prime Minister Plans Summer Wedding: Report

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<div class="ins_instory_dv_cont"><img alt="New Zealand Prime Minister Plans Summer Wedding: Report" src="https://c.ndtvimg.com/2020-10/7dreccq_-jacinda-ardern-650_625x300_05_October_20.jpg" title="New Zealand Prime Minister Plans Summer Wedding: Report" /></div>
Jacinda Ardern, got engaged to Clarke Gayford, during the Easter holidays in 2019 . (File)
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Sydney:
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern plans to get married during summer but did not disclose the date, local media reported on Wednesday.
Ardern told Coast Radio that she and her partner television host Clarke Gayford have "finally got a date" for the wedding, New Zealand Herald said in a report.
"That doesn't mean we've told anyone yet, so I feel like we should probably put some invites out," Ardern was quoted as saying by the report.
Ardern, 40, got engaged to Gayford, 44, during the Easter holidays in 2019 and they have a two-year-old daughter.
The wedding being planned in summer, which runs from December to February in the southern hemisphere, might not be celebrated in the traditional way as Ardern admitted she "feels a bit too old to have a bridal party", media reports quoted her as saying.
There is "nothing further to add over what has been reported this morning", a spokesman in the prime minister's office told Reuters.
Ardern became New Zealand's youngest prime minister when she took office in 2017 and is one of the few elected leaders to hold office while pregnant.
She returned to power last October delivering the biggest election victory for her centre-left Labour Party in half a century largely due to her government's decisive response to contain the COVID-19 outbreak.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
 
 
source <a href="https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/new-zealand-prime-minister-jacinda-ardern-plans-summer-wedding-report-2428519">https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/new-zealand-prime-minister-jacinda-ardern-plans-summer-wedding-report-2428519</a>

news world New Zealand Prime Minister Plans Summer Wedding: Report

Jacinda Ardern, got engaged to Clarke Gayford, during the Easter holidays in 2019 . (File) Sydney: New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda A...