Introduction

By Michael A. Longinow, Ph.D

Journalists must care. And that’s hard. (Not all journalism does.) But for those of us who pursue journalism from a stance of abandonment to Christ and His call to love, we can do no other.

The Jewish philosopher and theologian Elie Wiesel was fond of telling interviewers that the opposite of love is not hate. It is indifference. And we live in a time when indifference is easy because we’re tired. The numbers, the data, the charts showing deaths, infections, tracing of disease spread — it wears us out. The global pandemic shut us away in our rooms, put us behind masks, isolated us. At the printing of this book, it will have been more than a year since the dispersion began. Only now are we emerging into open spaces, and indoor spaces. And yet fear remains. In the middle of all that, perhaps because of the weariness and isolation, anger has erupted over injustices we have been silent about too long. In the summer of 2020, streets in downtown centers across the U.S. (and in cities across the world) filled with protesters chanting the names of Black women and men who had been killed by police. Less prominently, but no less tragically, there have been protests in the weeks before this book went to press about violence against people of Asian background. Some of those attacks, verbal and otherwise, have been against people who run restaurants serving Asian food.

This book is not about anger. Rather, it is about pursuit of understanding, of caring to know and explain. Most of the students who did this book’s reporting do not have Asian family heritage. And it is from that lack of personal expertise that they brought honest questions, curiosity, a willingness to learn, to set aside cultural expectation. This book’s in-depth reporting and visual storytelling come at a moment of significance for our nation and world. It is a time of renewed attention to conscience. Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, in The Elements of Journalism, tell us that journalists must be allowed to “exercise their personal conscience.” And we have done so. May the ideas in these pages begin, and continue, important conversations about cultural meaning, about hospitality across barriers, and about daring to love in ways that are delicious and meaningful.