Stewart Chang

Which of your recent books or articles should we read?

I would still like folks to read a slightly older article of mine, Our National Psychosis: Guns, Terror, and Hegemonic Masculinity, 53 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 495 (2018). It has been two years since October 1, and it feels like our country has made no progress at all on the frequency and prevalence of mass shootings since that time. We keep circling back on the issues of mental health and gun control as areas of regulation and legislation, but still leave larger structural issues such as racism and misogyny largely unchecked, which has led to continued proliferation and weaponization of toxic white masculinity. The same principles I wrote about concerning the October 1, Charleston, Isla Vista, and Orlando shooters ring true of the Dayton and El Paso shooters.

What's the most important thing you are working on right now? What have you read, listened to, or watched recently that has influenced you or your work?

The recent publication of Chanel Miller’s memoir Know My Name, has got me thinking again about a series of cases that I’ve been wanting to write about for some time: the infamous Massie affair in Hawai’i during the 1930s. Thalia Massie, a white woman, accused five Hawai’ians of gang raping her, even though they were of various Asian Pacific ethnic identities. The rape case ended in a hung jury, and so the victim and her relatives resorted to vigilante murder of one of the defendants. The subsequent murder trial resulted in convictions, but the 10-year prison sentences for the white defendants were commuted to one-hour by the governor. A lot of recent scholarship has focused on Thalia Massie as the perpetrator and beneficiary of racial injustice. However, I want to uncover the ways in which critical scholarship often resorts to victim-shaming and perpetrator-praising tactics used not only in rape cases, but also in murder cases where the victims are minorities. In the same way that the Massie affair ultimately coalesced solidarity among the previously fractured Asian and native Hawai’ian groups on the island who were racially clustered together by the white oligarchy, I would like to suggest that current politics necessitate coalition building between various marginalized groups in society across race and gender by tying the lessons learned in the Massie cases to the present #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo movements.