• Maggie Lam calls her roommate “Becky” a “white devil” and who “smelled like a skinny white girl.”
• She describes a sexual romp with a blue eyed white man, “dry humping” him until leaving him with “blue balls” because she doesn’t want a “Scott Pilgrim-esque romance.”
• She denounces “white, patriarchal rape culture.”
• She criticizes progressive white students as participating in a “white savior circle jerk.”
A student at the prestigious University of California at Berkeley is drawing fierce criticism for her rage-filled, sexually explicit columns in the student newspaper — in which she denounces white people as “the white devil” among other racially charged attacks.
In pieces for the Daily Californian titled “Speaking Out”, “Fucking White Boys,” and “Choosing Myself Over White People”, Maggie Lam says she’s seeking to “reclaim the “Asian-American narrative” surrounding the immigrant experience. Mostly, however, she describes what it’s like to be a member of an oppressed minority subject to the demands of white, patriarchal rape culture on the famously liberal UC Berkeley campus.
In one column, Ms. Lam accuses her room-mate, “Becky,” of exhibiting the symptoms of white privilege as she and Becky debate whether their dorm, which is transitioning to a “People of Color House,” should be allowed to exclude white residents.
Lam calls “Becky” — an already racially charged name — a “white devil,” and says she “smelled like a skinny white girl” and engages in “microaggressions.” She then denounces white hipsters’ role in oppressing cultures through gentrification — something she refers to as a “white savior circle jerk.”
Lam rounds out her observations by accusing campus white men of adopting a stereotype about “exotic” Asian women rooted in what she calls UC Berkeley’s “history of white, patriarchal rape culture.”
In another column, Ms. Lam charges her white peers with creating a culture where people of color give preference to their white acquaintances. In another, her most recent, she labels a white paramour named Sam a “fuck boy,” and bemoans the tendency of white men to view white women and women of color differently. She relates in explicit detail a story about how she initiated a sexually charged encounter with the blue-eyed Sam, seemingly against his will – something, had the gender roles been reversed, would have been an outrage on most campuses, including UC Berkeley’s.
The student-driven Daily Californian has a variety of regular columnists, most of whom adopt a liberal world view, but Lam’s columns tend to be the paper’s most incendiary.
Lam is entitled to her opinions, but the question remains as to whether UC Berkeley would allow a similar column from a white person. Heat Street reached out to UC Berkeley’s student publication for comment but did not receive a response.
