She greets a receptionist and waves to a handful of lingering youths, and they all smile in return. It’s a mixture of stale cologne and perfume, comfortably lived-in upholstery, polished wood, settled dust. In the hive mind that is the Internet, sentimentality and cruelty are twin aspects of the same brand of self-indulgence, and whether you wind up on the receiving end of moist-eyed mercy or an endless stream of 140-character bile is mostly a matter of chance.Įvery church sanctuary in the United States smells the same, and the Presbyterian church outside Chicago where Suey Park goes to pray is no different. It has been cited as evidence of the censoriousness of “social justice warriors” (a pejorative term that nods to the superficiality of online social activism) as proof, in the words of one that “feminism poisons EVERYTHING” and as substantiation, according to another Twitter malcontent, of Park’s alleged racism against white people (“Count # times says ‘white liberals’ in this video & ask who has an agenda and who is racist”). A quick online search finds that the #CancelColbert hashtag still riles a certain kind of online misanthrope, even today. Trend it.Īlas, the Internet has not forgiven Suey Park. The Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals has decided to call for #CancelColbert. A few hours later, she unleashed a Twitter outrage cycle by replying: It was meant to push back against another tweet, this one from The Colbert Report Twitter account, which read: “I am willing to show #Asian community I care by introducing the Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever.” This was a sarcastic rejoinder to the creation of a charitable foundation by the Washington Redskins NFL franchise, designed to draw attention away from its objectionable team name. Then last year in March, Park produced her most significant, and-in terms of debt accrual on the great Internet shame-ledger-her most notorious hashtag.
She was young, savvy, and had a knack for creating hashtags that trended, most notably #NotYourAsianSidekick, a play on how Asian characters in popular culture are depicted as ancillary, if at all.
You may have taken a social justice course, but I’ve had years of white bullshit 101,” went another. “Please work on your twisted views of anti-racism. From our subordinated position we can just more clearly see your white gaze and bullshit,” went one representative example. (Suey is not Park’s real first name, but a sardonic play on “chop suey” and Asian American stereotypes.) Mostly she tweeted about race and gender, and none too gently. If you had heard of Suey Park in early 2014, it was likely because she was a Twitter brawler, someone ingrained in the hurly-burly of social media and rewarded for it with followers-23,000, a fair number for a 23-year-old living in Chicago.
SOOEY PARK SERIES
Her recent TED Talk, in which she referred to herself as “Patient Zero of losing a personal reputation on a global scale almost instantaneously,” met with widespread approval, and she has been the subject of a series of approving articles, in Salon, Forbes, The New Yorker, and the mother of all validating content, Upworthy. She seems confident and calm, transformed into something like the patron saint of the publicly shamed. Even Monica Lewinsky has emerged into the public view (yet again). ESPN reporter Britt McHenry didn’t suffer unduly, either, after being caught on camera insulting a towing company employee. Gawker picked up the story, with this weighty item: “ Professor Accidentally Sent ‘Interesting’ Anal Bead Porn to Her Students.” Unlike some of her colleagues in Internet blundering, McElroy escaped the media and social network scrutiny unscathed: She kept her job and, within a month, published an op-ed in The Washington Post detailing her time in the Twitter maw. Lisa McElroy, a law professor at Drexel University, made news online in late April when she accidentally sent her class email list a link to a porn video. And, like the biblically mandated jubilees of yore, we are making something of a celebration of it.
SOOEY PARK FREE
After many years of being what it is and doing what it does, the Web seems unexpectedly prepared to forgive its debts, free its captives, and start afresh with the mocked and exiled of yesteryear. We are living through a jubilee of internet forgiveness.
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