Using TikTok to counter anti-Asian hate — Assembly

Digital creator Eileen Huang discusses the power of social media for political education.

How often did you feel represented in your history textbooks? For Eileen Huang, it was almost never.

“There just never really was discussion of Asian American issues and history and the shape or the state of Asian America,” Eileen says of her early education. Growing up in a mostly White town, Eileen turned to poetry and connected with other artists of colour to help cultivate a sense of belonging. It wasn’t until college that she began taking Asian American studies and learning about events like the Chinese Exclusion Act and the internment of Japanese Americans. Still, she was frustrated by how inaccessible this history was to a majority of students. “A lot of this knowledge and historical context, it's buried in giant books and scholarship,” the Yale University student explains. “And I was like, ‘Why is there not a more engaging and accessible way for people [to learn about it?]’”

Enter TikTok. With over 107,000 followers on the video sharing app, Eileen is using her insight and lived experience to educate users on a diverse range of Asian American issues. From deconstructing racist tropes of Asian women to calling out bigotry in her own community, Eileen’s powerful analyses are equal parts engaging and informative. And during a time when anti-Asian hate crimes are reaching historic highs, her perspective is needed now more than ever.

I caught up with the digital creator to chat about online activism, the imperialist roots of anti-Asian racism and how social media can propagate — and prevent — misinformation.

Hannah Xue (HX): How did you first become interested in Asian American studies and what inspired you to start speaking out, particularly through TikTok?

Eileen Huang (EH): I grew up in a predominantly White town in one of the more conservative parts of New Jersey. It definitely opened my eyes to a lot of racism that my family and I received, like microaggressions or what Cathy Park Hong describes as “minor feelings,” this sort of unspoken animosity toward me because I am a person of color.

I downloaded TikTok at the beginning of the pandemic and I ended up getting some really interesting content on my For You page — discourse, political education. I grew up never learning about Asian American history and felt like had I learned about these historical precedents, I would feel less alone in my experiences and be better able to contextualize them. So I thought it'd be fun to just start shooting some small clips about my experience as a queer Asian woman and it kind of just expanded from there.

HX: A lot of people criticise digital activism as being largely performative. As someone who is really present on social media, how do you avoid doing this?

EH: People have this view of social media that’s a bit reductive and outdated. Like, “Oh, social media is so shallow. It's so performative.” But you can get a lot of information out to a lot of people. Knowledge is broad and open and circulating and accessible. I’ve had a lot of great conversations with people of color I've met doing similar social or political education on TikTok that I honestly feel like I diversified my knowledge more than I did in school. Social media becomes a really powerful way to bring awareness to these community issues and to help tangibly, like donating, boosting GoFundMe’s, boosting mutual aid. I think it's a really powerful, dismissed tool for activism and education for sure.

HX: I’d love to hear more about your perspectives on minority representation in media, where some of these tropes come from and why they're harmful.

EH: It’s really tempting to just bring up a stereotype, like Asian women are docile and submissive and weak and very passive. But if we just end the conversation, not stop stereotyping Asian women like that, it doesn't really address the root problem or the root cause of why the stereotype exists. That specific stereotype of Asian women as submissive and passive and feminine is very, very tied to imperialism and Western imperialism and how it views all of Asia and Asian people as or how it wants to portray Asian and Asian people as submissive, receptive to being conquered, to being colonized, just sort of being plundered in that way.

Stereotypes don't happen in a vacuum. I think they're usually used to justify interest. And this stereotype is used specifically to justify Western imperial interests in Asia. And it's especially violent because it's one that’s placed on Asian women who already experience the intersections of racism, White supremacy and misogyny and patriarchy.

It's important to extend the conversation beyond, “This is a bad stereotype, not all these women are like this.” That's obviously true, but also understand the history of this stereotype and what kind of violence it's enacting on Asian women's bodies in the present. It's still justifying imperialism, it's still justifying White supremacy and recognizing that is very critical to dismantling it.

“I’ve had a lot of great conversations with people of color I’ve met doing similar social or political education on TikTok that I honestly feel like I diversified my knowledge more than I did in school.”

— Eileen Huang

HX: Do you think more progressive representations of Asian people in the media are an effective tool for addressing these stereotypes?

EH: Asian America is so diverse that any kind of media representation is not going to encapsulate the diversity and the very differing lived experiences of our community. A lot of Asian representation discussions can also end up sort of reinforcing the model minority myth, which is this idea that a lot of the Asian community doesn't face systemic structural and violent racism. When the only representation we see is “Crazy Rich Asians” or “House of Ho” or “Bling Empire” that platforms Asian Americans who are very wealthy and very light-skinned and have a lot of class privilege, I think it really, really invisiblizes the experiences of a lot of the community that do not have that same kind of lived experience. What's critical to getting people to recognize the fact that Asians don't experience any kind of oppression or racism is an illusion is just extending your conversation beyond representation, talking about very real violence that our community faces.

HX: Can you speak on the concept of cultural appropriation? A lot of people think of the U.S. as a “melting pot” and don’t believe that it exists or that other people of colour can be complicit.

EH: It's not just an individual choice to take something from a culture. It's very much tied to racial capitalism, the idea that you can benefit and profit and make money from Black culture and Asian culture and making it trendy and making it consumable for people while not caring about Black issues, Asian issues or BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of colour) issues at all. And that is a very real kind of structural violence. It's a pattern that's part of these larger structures that commodify and exploit parts of culture for profit.

HX: Can you speak a bit about your work on the WeChat Project?

EH: WeChat is this platform that a lot of the Chinese diaspora uses. I published this letter on anti-Blackness within the Asian American community and it kind of went viral overnight on WeChat. My letter was talking about the importance of Black and Asian solidarity at this time, especially for the folks on WeChat who often don't address anti-Blackness. And so it got a lot of pushback from that.

At the same time I also got very encouraging responses from people. Because of that, I started the WeChat Project. We're a group of young Asian Americans, a lot of us are college students like myself, all volunteer-based, who write and publish articles on WeChat that specifically offer alternative narratives to a lot of right-wing content and misleading and harmful content that's being circulated on the platform right now.

HX: On TikTok you're usually the one doing the educating. But has the platform ever taught you something new or changed the way that you think?

EH: Oh, for sure. Whereas before my understanding of Asian American issues, for instance, might just end at representation, being on the platform and talking to a lot of other folks — Asian folks, AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) people — I realized, “OK, this community is very, very diverse.” I see a lot of Asian women talking about colorism, talking about the model minority myth, talking about Black radical feminism and how it influenced Asian American feminism. Connecting with people that offer new perspectives I hadn't considered before has definitely informed a lot of my own politics presently.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.