iris chang on chinese as formerly portrayed in the media
"The lack of strong Chinese American role models in popular culture--or even of realistic images of Chinese Americans as diverse and multifaceted human beings--bothered me deeply. People tend to perform at a level society expects of them, not their actual potential, and I imagined there must have been many young Americans of Asian descent who suffered a crisis of confidence as a result of coming to see themselves as they thought others saw them. But worse , I also knew that, based on my knowledge of the literature on genocide, atrocities are more likely to occur if the perpetrators do not see their victims as real people. The first, essential, step toward getting a population to visit torture and mass murder on a group is to dehumanize the group, to reduce them to alien things. This is what those books, films, and television programs were doing they were far from depicting the kinds of fascinating, complex, accomplished people I knew."
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