Trigger Warning
When is a trigger warning necessary?
I wrote and produced an animated film called “The Greatest Poem’’ last year. This three minute film encapsulated the examination of American identity that I’ve been undertaking since the election of Donald Trump, when I started questioning what it means to be a good American. What it means to be American. What it means to be Asian American. In this search for belonging and identity, I discovered a few surprises that upended many of the things I understood about the world and about myself. I hate giving Trump credit for anything, but I credit this xenophobic misogynist with setting me on an unexpected path to finding confidence in my own voice and to answering one of life’s essential questions: who am I? The film captured the essence of that journey and I have been proud to share what I’ve learned with the world.
Many Americans of Asian descent have told me they appreciated seeing a person with an Asian face as the story’s hero who defies the one-dimensional stereotypes and caricatures that pervade our culture. Several film festivals focusing on Asian American stories screened the film, including the Vietnamese Film festival, the DC Asian Pacific American Film Festival, and the Mixed Asian Media Festival. However, the greatest affirmation came from a friend’s half-Asian 13-year-old daughter whose first reaction after watching it was, “Philippa Slay!” A teenage girl actually said this! I did not take her praise lightly.
Last summer, not long after the film was released, I was invited to give a short talk to a racially diverse group of female high school students on how to have difficult conversations. Having organized hundreds of creative opportunities for folks from across political, racial, and economic differences to have difficult conversations, I felt pretty well qualified to speak on this topic. Given the film’s central theme of American identity, I decided to show it to this civic-minded group of young women before launching into my Zoom presentation. The students asked questions, we had a lively conversation, and I logged off. Six months later, I learned that a non-Asian staff member at the host organization felt that I should have given a trigger warning before showing the film.
The idea of including a trigger warning to this film had not occurred to me.
The reason she gave for the suggested trigger warning? One scene depicted the time a boy shouted a slur at me when I was a little kid, a slur typically hurled at people who have Asian faces. My bafflement increased when I was told that no students or parents had complained about my presentation and that I had received high marks on the evaluations.
If the staff person had been trying to protect Asians from emotional harm, she need not have bothered. Every person of Asian descent in America has had this slur hurled at them at some point in their lives and most likely multiple points throughout their lives. Most Asian American kids reacted the same way I did. I pretended I hadn’t heard it and turned away so the perpetrator could not see how much they’d hurt me. Turning away from this harm protected me from immediate injury. The greater injury, though, was that the slur stole my voice for a long time.
The film wasn’t about the slur, though. The film chronicled a triumph over that slur. It was a sappy celebration of finding my voice again and using my voice to speak out for myself and anyone who has ever felt like they didn’t belong in our country. It celebrated the multitudes contained within every American, every human. A trigger warning would have diminished all of that by orienting the viewer toward the slur.
I chose to explicitly use the slur in the film because I wanted to depict the truth of being made to feel like I didn’t belong. I felt comfortable with this choice because the context of the film diminished that word’s power to harm. However, I intended for that word to cause discomfort. When we embrace discomfort, we learn and grow and become better equipped to create a flourishing world. Avoiding discomfort harms us by enclosing us in an insulated world in which we cannot see each other’s humanity, in which we cannot see that our fates are intertwined.
Though there is growing evidence that trigger warnings do not reduce harm and may even cause harm, such warnings may help some people feel better and can be used to avert explicit harm. Trigger warnings should not, however, be used to turn away from discomfort. Perhaps motivated by her own discomfort with the slur, the staff member’s well-meaning gesture infused the slur with more power than it deserved. A trigger warning would have caused harm as a form of erasure of my real life experience and the real life experiences of my friend’s 13-year-old half-Asian daughter and of the 15 young women of color artists who worked on this film who each shared some version of “that happened to me.”
When I made the film, I naively thought it would be viewed as an anachronism of bygone times. I hadn’t expected so many people so much younger than me to connect with my story. For as long as we are asked to turn away from discomfort, films like this will unfortunately resonate and continue to be necessary.
Misplaced trigger warnings also discourage necessary and uncomfortable conversations about race, which harms all of us. Our inability to talk about the most difficult topics contributes to the fraying of our social fabric, the deepening divides in our country, and the undermining of our democracy. Greater care should be used to distinguish between harm and discomfort. If everything is harmful, then nothing is harmful.
The slur held power over me for most of my life. “The Greatest Poem” is about how I broke its grip on me and found the courage to speak out for myself and for others. To paraphrase the great Madeleine Albright, “It took me quite a long time to develop a voice, and now that I have it, I am not going to be [silenced].”
