After a week-long sabbatical, The Daily Californian‘s (UC Berkeley) resident social justice columnist, Maggie Lam, returns with another incendiary column — this time viciously taking her own immigrant parents to task for their “racism” and for enabling “white oppression.”
Lam, who has used the Daily Cal’s soapbox to rail against her “white devil” of a roommate and to chronicle her exploitative sexual encounters, had taken a week off, as Daily Cal editors published numerous responses to Lam’s “white devil” column instead.
Now, we know what she was doing in her week off: she was home in Virginia, among the suffocating suburban sprawl of her parents’ middle class community. Maggie, who is now worldly because she attends an institution of higher learning, is understandably dismayed at the suburban conformity. But it turns out the visit home affords her the opportunity to lecture her “racist,” Asian-immigrant parents on their complicity in “white supremacy.”
Her parents operated a take out Chinese restaurant in a bad neighborhood, we find out, and their impressions of other races are colored, it seems, by a series of armed robberies and break-ins at their establishment. Never one to take experience into consideration, Maggie confronts her father in the column and browbeats him into (ostensibly) supporting Black Lives Matter.
But when given the chance to overthrow “systemic inequality and racism” through a series of uncomfortable conversations with unsuspecting strangers, relatives and what Maggie terms “good white people,” her father balks — to Maggie’s great dismay.
And so, she returns to the safe haven of UC Berkeley, where everyone conforms to Maggie’s way of thinking rather than her parents’.
The comments on Maggie’s current column are much tamer than what followed her previous efforts; the Californian is still printing responses to one of Maggie’s earlier works, where she describes what appears to be a sexual assault on a classmate.
There’s no indication as to what Maggie’s parents think about her various extracurricular pastimes.
