u/BeerNinjaEsq

I had never heard about this case until I read the linked article from yesterday.

Yesterday, the NYTimes covered it: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/20/world/europe/french-civil-servant-accused-drugging-women.html

A senior French civil servant allegedly drugged women during job interviews, used their professional vulnerability against them, and perverted their humiliation for his own pleasure.

The Christian Nègre case should be far bigger news than it is.

Authorities uncovered this in 2018.

The case is horrifying not just because of what he is accused of doing, but because of how little most people heard about it. A case involving hundreds of potential victims should not feel obscure.

The silence around it must be viewed as systematic.

This is why Gisèle Pelicot’s courage and willingness to conduct her trial in public mattered so much. The linked ariticle discusses how the Pelicot case forced cases like this back into the public discourse. The Pelicot case, and cases like Christian Negre, have revealed something about French culture, Western culture, and the culture of men and media (controlled by men) around the world. Gisèle Pelicot should be a household name. Things like this must not be swept under the rug.

I often see the argument that a person cannot be considered fully or authentically Asian if they do not speak an Asian language.

I simply do not agree. Language may be one measure, even an important measure, but it is not a dispositive factor.

Even among people who are indisputably 100% genetically Asian, language fluency varies dramatically. Many other groups do not make language dispositive for their people. Jews do not. Italian Americans do not. And among U.S. Latinos, 24% of adults say they can carry on a conversation in Spanish only “a little” or “not at all” and 78% of U.S. Hispanics say speaking Spanish is not necessary to be considered Hispanic, including 87% of U.S.-born Latinos (Pew Research).

But I'm not saying we should do or not do something based on what other cultures do.

Rather, if language is dispositive, then we would have to say that many people with two Asian parents, Asian families, Asian communities, and Asian lived experiences are somehow not fully Asian.

That is an absurd result.

Among many millennial or younger Asian Americans, especially those born and raised in the West, there has been a noticeable move toward embracing a broader “Asian” identity rather than identifying only by specific nationality. That is because there is a common Asian American experience. Second-generation Chinese kids found commonalities with second-generation Korean kids, Vietnamese kids, Filipino kids, and others. That shared experience is a major reason the broader category matters in the West.

And so, there are many 2nd(+)-generation mixed Asian children who are 100% genetically Asian, but are a mix of two or more Asian cultures and do not speak either language. My nieces are like that: 3rd-generation Chinese and Vietnamese. They only speak English. There was an attempt when they were younger, but they have completely lost it now that they are college-aged. But all their friends are Asian. Their boyfriends are Asian. They are steeped in Asian American culture and pride.

I do not count them as not “fully Asian.” Or, more precisely, I certainly do not count them as not fully Asian American.

Hell, even my cousin, who was born in Vietnam but came to the United States at 2 years old, has forgotten how to speak Vietnamese. He can kind of understand it, but he does not really speak it anymore.

So I simply do not understand why we want to OTHER these people.

It does not strengthen us. It only lowers our numbers, narrows our coalition, and makes enemies of would-be allies. Communities obsessed with purity are often the easiest to weaken, because they spend more energy expelling people than building power.

I believe this is one big reason why the Asian American coalition is weak: too much hierarchy, competition, and purity-testing. For a set of cultures that often pride themselves on community over individualism, this kind of self-aggrandizement is nothing more than a veiled attempt to say some individuals are better, more authentic, or more legitimate than others.

Language is a marker of cultural access. One of many. It can deepen someone’s connection to a culture. It can preserve memory, humor, history, and intimacy that are hard to translate.

But it cannot be dispositive. Especially in the diaspora.