Detroit's Stephanie Chang: "Racism is still very much alive"
Chang talks growing up Asian in Detroit and raising mixed children after gaveling down a gun-rights activist who used the n-word in a senate committee last month.
During a Michigan senate committee last month was the first time I’ve ever heard someone say “Sub-Saharan African niggers” to describe Black people.
The judiciary and public safety committee chair who ended the testimony as soon as the ridiculous phrase was used is state Sen. Stephanie Chang. She represents a senate district that stretches from Detroit’s Belle Isle to Clawson. Her and I have spoken frequently about issues facing residents since I began covering Detroit; gun violence, local housing issues and tenant rights.
But until the other day, Chang and I had never spoken about racism she experienced growing up Asian in Detroit, and her perspective dealing with it being the mother of mixed children — a perspective I try to understand more each day as the son of one of those moms.
Chang is Taiwanese-American; her husband is Black. They have two young daughters.
“Not a new thing”
Growing up as the daughter of parents who emigrated from Taiwan to work in the auto industry, “hearing racial slurs is not a new thing,” she told me during a 17-minute phone call last week. She mentioned the time she came home to a racist (and misspelled) slur graffitied across her family’s house as a kid.
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