A history of hate
Iyko Day, associate professor of English at Mount Holyoke, comments on the marginalization of Chinese immigrants and the spa shooting that targeted Asians.
On the one-year anniversary of the Atlantic-area mass shooting that left six Asian women dead, Iyko Day, associate professor of English and critical social thought at Mount Holyoke, spoke in a Vanity Fair article about the crucial role that Chinese immigrants played in building the country.
The piece offers an in-depth look at the lives of those affected by the shooting and how the cultural marginalization of Asian immigrants in the United States is a foundational part of understanding the violence directed against them.
While Georgia’s infrastructure was largely built by Chinese laborers, their contributions go unseen. Day used the slur “coolies,” a reference to wage workers, to describe their historical dehumanization.