I HAVE BEEN OBJECTIFIED AND DEHUMANIZED, TOO

As a former television news anchor and reporter, I have had access, privileges and status that most people will never have in their lifetime. And yet this never shielded me from racism, misogyny and the pernicious docility myth that remains a ubiquitous experience for Asian American Pacific Islander women.

While my heart breaks for all incidents of hate, the Atlanta area massacre tore open a Pandora’s box that I’m still trying to understand by laying out my intersectional experiences and sharing publicly for the first time.

Throughout my life, I have clashed with societal expectations on how women of color should behave. For Asian American women, we are to be quiet, subservient and obedient.

Perhaps that’s why my second-grade teacher taped my chatty mouth shut and put a dunce cap on my head. I was the only student of color in class.

I am comforted that her public shaming was in vain since I ended up talking for a living.

In fact, when I secured my first TV job as a graduating senior, my mother presciently declared, “Lee Ann, you are no longer my daughter. You are now the daughter of the Asian American community. When people see you, they don’t see your face, they see our face.”

How wise my mother was. In the early years, people would always ask me if I was Connie Chung, who was 25 years my senior. Mom was right, they didn’t see my face.

While working in Houston at a start-up 24-hour news station, an older White manager picked up a small block of wood that he found in the newsroom, walked by my desk and hit me on the head with it. I was so startled because this came out of nowhere.

“Why did you do that?” I asked. He shrugged and said, “You’re replaceable,” then walked away.

More overt racism continued at my next job in Springfield, Missouri, where two weeks after I started as weekend anchor, our station’s satellite dishes were vandalized with spray-painted swastikas, and the words “F--- you, N-----, N----- Go Home.”

Springfield at the time was 99 percent White, so