MOORHEAD, Minn. – A Minnesota State University, Moorhead, professor, who is of Korean extraction and who grew up adopted in the United States, shared an essay with fellow profs about anti-Asian experiences. Kim Park Nelson shared her story after the slaying of eight people un Atlanta, including six women of Asian descent, The essay:
“As an Asian American woman, I am very familiar with the dangers of walking around in my body, with my skin. I’ve been catcalled and harassed all over this state and subjected to countless racist remarks on campuses and in other professional settings. In Moorhead, I was once run off the road by a motorist while biking to campus to teach. But being Asian in America during COVID has been especially difficult. Last March, my doctor advised me to take the highest possible measures to protect myself from COVID-19 because of my underlying health conditions, precautions that eventually became all too familiar: mask up, wear gloves/ wash hands, avoid public outings, social distance in small groups only if absolutely necessary. But this was months before mask mandates became commonplace, and I told her I felt my risk of contracting COVID was less of a health threat than appearing in public as an Asian American woman wearing a facemask at a time when we were being blamed for the pandemic by the President of the United States and millions of other Americans who followed him. By September of last year, the death rate from COVID-19 for Asian Minnesotans was disproportionately high, similar in ratio to the heightened COVID death rate for Black Minnesotans. My point is, anti-Asian racism is a real problem at both the structural and individual levels, not just on the coasts, or in bigger cities, or somewhere over there, but right here, and it has been for decades.”
Nelson. An associate professor of American multicultural dtudies at Minnesota State University, Moorhead. She was born in Seoul, South Korea, and adopted as an infant and grew up in the United States.
Her book. Park Nelson wrote the book “Invisible Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences and Racial Exceptionalism,” published by Rutgers University Press in 2016. She is the equity and inclusion coordinator for the Inter-Faculty Organization, a statewide professors union.