It is cruelly emblematic that PIKE leadership likens the negative reputation their fraternity has garnered in the assault of Thanh Hong to the slurs that accompanied it.

PIKE, racial slurs have done far more than to empower the drunken thug on your doorstep and to legitimize the complicity of his witnesses. They have historically implied, merely on the basis of our skin, that minorities warrant hatred, contempt, fists to our bloodied faces and worse.

And yet you will not at the very least acknowledge this: There is a disgusting incongruity between temporarily suspending the activities of a fraternity and the history of pain that profoundly wounds every Asian called a “gook” or “chink.”

Leaders and gentlemen of PIKE, I do not hate and despise these words because they are unfair, or because they “broadly condemn” or “generalize” me and my people. I hate them because they strip us of our human dignity. I hate them because they strip us of our right to walk past your front door without the threat of violent assault.