What Happened After I Tweeted “White Men Have It So Hard.”

By Kevin Nguyen

Eventually, I was able to break down the replies I was receiving into three categories: Asians are displacing white people in schools/jobs; “minorities” should be grateful to white people; that all Asians are gay. Every time I checked my phone, I was notified about dozens of new tweets like these directed at me. The nicer ones called me a hypocrite; the vicious ones called me a “racist chink.”

The harassment, most of which took place on Twitter, started at 11 p.m. on Thanksgiving and continued for nearly a week. The aggressors had been going after a friend of mine — a female sports writer — for criticizing the name of Washington’s professional football team. When she stopped engaging with them, the harassers moved onto anyone that she had replied to that day.

When the early trolls came, I handled them the same way I did for every one-off asshole I’d ever experienced on Twitter. I made a joke and I blocked the account. But this time they kept coming. I made another joke about white privilege, my friend replied to it…