Saturday Night Live‘s Bowen Yang had some things to say about anti-Asian hate and how people are finding ways to help on the latest Weekend Update. After being introduced by co-host Colin Jost as the show’s “Asian cast member” — a trap, Yang dryly informs him — the segment launches into an intentionally over-the-top rundown of not-entirely-helpful and funny-in-an-upsetting-way strategies that the people of social media have employed to show support for the Asian-American community.
The Weekend Update moment is a direct response in some ways to the recent shooting in Atlanta that left eight dead, with six of them being Asian women. Of course, the incident that many have dubbed a hate crime for its targeting of Asian-owned businesses is just a single moment in a much longer history of hate, spurred on over the past year in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic by disgraced former President Donald Trump.
Yang doesn’t leave us with any new answers, and that’s pretty much the point. What do you say in the midst of this current outpouring of sympathy and support when the prejudice and bigotry that lead to things like what happened in Atlanta has been part of the American DNA for more than a century? What the SNL cast member does do, however, is hold up a mirror — an admittedly hilarious one — in a way that hopefully gets people thinking more about root causes and a longer history.