Earlier this week on “Love Island USA” ― Peacock’s popular dating reality show ― a bombshell was dropped, but you wouldn’t have known it by how it was announced: As the cast of 20-somethings lounged around the villa in swimsuits, Iain Stirling, the puckish Scottish narrator of the show, announced that one contestant ― Cierra Ortega ― had left the show for a “personal situation.”
Because no further details were provided, a casual viewer may have been confused by the narrated reveal: Had someone in Ortega’s family died? Did she have a particularly bad case of the stomach flu?
More invested fans of the reality show ― the ones who religiously track the subreddits and watch TikTok commentary ― knew the full story: For about a week prior, fans had heavily campaigned to get Ortega kicked off the show after posts resurfaced where the reality star appeared to use the word “chink” ― a racial slur against Chinese people and those of East Asian descent ― not once but twice.
In one Instagram story reportedly from February 2023, the 25-year-old content creator from Los Angeles explained her reasoning for getting Botox and let the word slip: “I can also be a little chinky when I laugh/smile so I love getting a mini brow lift to open up my eyes and get that snatched look,” she wrote in the story.
In a 2015 post from Instagram, a much younger Ortega smiles on a hill in a selfie with the caption: “Still chinkin’ even at the top.” Awkward.
It was the casualness of Ortega’s usage of the word that struck many, as if it were a neutral descriptor of her appearance. (Granted, one she didn’t like and was going to get Botox to fix.) The influencer used it with the same ease as someone describing their eyes as deep-set or calling a supermodel “doe-eyed.”
“What happened to Cierra was definitely a learning opportunity for me because I did not grow up knowing that 'ch*nky' was a slur.”
- a woman on X
Back in July 2020, rapper Cardi B caught similar heat for remarking that her toddler Kulture had “chinky eyes” like the little girl’s father, the rapper Offset, and Cardi’s sister, Hennessy.
In a tweet she quickly deleted, Cardi addressed the backlash, though rather ineffectually, “I don’t know fuckin’ everything. We don’t even use that as (an) insult and I don’t use it as (an) insult. I’m sick of the internet.”
In Ortega’s case, she started losing social media followers en masse. (The reality star was on the island up until recently and has yet to issue a formal response, but her family has said on Instagram that she and they have received “threats” and “attacks,” which obviously isn’t fair.)
What was most interesting about this scandal, though, was how others online came out and admitted they had no idea the word was so racially loaded.
“What happened to Cierra was definitely a learning opportunity for me because I did not grow up knowing that ‘ch*nky’ was a slur,” another woman wrote on X.
“Not to sound ignorant but am I the only one who didn’t know that word was a ‘racial slur?’” one woman wrote on Threads. (We’re not linking to protect their privacy.)
Some chalked their innocence up to how commonly the word is used in rap. It is used outright in “Get Right Witcha,” a 2017 song by Migos, whose members include the aforementioned Offset.
Inevitably, there were some bad-faith efforts to stoke animosity between Black and Asian Americans, with some claiming that C-word was nowhere near as offensive as the N-word ― a slur that got another contestant, Yulissa Escobar, kicked off the show earlier in the the season, after fans dug up a podcast appearance where she’d said the word.
Meanwhile, some Asian American viewers wondered why producers of the show were slow to address the Ortega mess while Escobar was summarily booted. (Both incidents beg the question: Does Peacock and its parent company NBCUniversal have a screening process when it comes to social media or not so much?)
But thinking about racial injury in such a comparative framework is never really helpful, said Julia H. Lee, a professor of Asian American studies at the University of California, Irvine. It just winds up pitting minority groups against each other, she said.
“For me, the important question isn’t ‘Why is anti-Asian racism downplayed compared to other groups’ but rather ’Why does anti-Asian racism take the form that it does and what does that say about how Asian Americans are perceived?” she said. “The pandemic was an acute reminder of the depths and particularities of this country’s long history of overlooked anti-Asian racism.”
The ugly history of the word
Most Asian Americans are all too familiar with the word, thanks to their personal experience with it. Most know its ugly history and its weird current-day uses online.
The term first gained traction as a pejorative in the late 1800s, as Chinese migrant workers arrived to the Pacific Coast of North America largely to work on building the Transcontinental Railroad. They weren’t particularly welcome. Asian immigrants were seen as “human oddities in the minds of whites,” communications professor Chiung Hwang Chen wrote in 1996, and xenophobic immigration laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 were passed. The word “chink” only further othered the newly arrived Asian Americans.
In recent years, young people ― not just Gen Z but millennials in their younger years, as BuzzFeed reported in 2016 ― have used the word to describe their eyes in selfies: “I look so chinky here!” ― that sort of thing.
“The use of ‘ch*nky eye’ like it’s a neutral descriptor shows how deeply anti-Asian racism has been normalized ― especially when it’s disguised as flattery,” said Joey S. Kim, an assistant professor of English at the University of Toledo in Ohio.
“Yes, Ortega used it in a clearly negative way, but even when people like Cardi B use it more neutrally or even affectionately, it’s still rooted in a long history of dehumanizing and exoticizing Asian features, separating the word from the people it harms.” she told HuffPost. (We’re reminded of the “fox eye trend” in 2020, where women were having non-surgical procedures or pulling the skin around their eyes back in photos to get a more exaggerated “slanted” look.)
Like many slurs, the C-words flatten East and Southeast Asians into a racial caricature associated with particularly “Asian” features such as black hair and smaller, almond-shaped and or upturned eye, the professor said.
“In essence, these racial slurs keep circulating under the guise of aesthetic language,” she said. “That’s how racial violence keeps circulating: through language that pretends to admire even as it dehumanizes.”
Why the racial slur is so easily dismissed
What’s been most upsetting to Asian American viewers of “Love Island USA” is how disregarded their experience with the word has been by other viewers. While some are taking it as a teachable moment, others are ranking the slur as one that’s “not that bad.”
“I have a theory that the people trying to justify Cierra saying a slur against Asian people that I’ve been called many times growing up, absolutely used it many times and are trying to make themselves feel better and seek assurance from others that it’s OK. It’s not and it’s disappointing,” wrote Korean beauty influencer Kim Horne on Threads.
Russell Jeung, a professor of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University, thinks some are comfortable using the term because they don’t know any Asian Americans. A study conducted by the Asian American Foundation this year found that 1 in 4 Americans report having no primary relationship with an Asian American, highlighting the invisibility of the community.
Jeung also thinks people may be more comfortable using racist language now that President Donald Trump has normalized mocking and deriding people of color and immigrants.
“Research has shown that his use of the term ‘Chinese virus’ exacerbated anti-Asian hate during the pandemic,” Jeung told HuffPost.
In spite of the ugliness the “Love Island USA” controversy exposed ― sending a reality TV star’s family death threats for a years-old Instagram post is beyond the pale ― Kim is glad people are at least talking about the wrongness of words like “chink.”
“As someone who grew up hearing these slurs without anyone acknowledging they were wrong, I find it significant that Ortega and Escobar are being held accountable,” she said. “The more we educate ourselves and one another, the better equipped we are to unlearn the racist language we’ve inherited.”
