CNN aired its Afraid: Fear in America’s Communities of Color special on Friday night, and it included stunning accounts from the network’s anchors and reporters about facing racism in their own lives.

Anderson Cooper opened the primetime special, noting the recent rise in hate crimes against Asian-Americans, especially in the wake the killing of the Atlanta spa shootings. After delivering his introduction, Cooper turned the floor over to Amara Walker, Victor Blackwell, and Ana Cabrera.

Walker started by describing the sadness and pain she witnessed among Asian-Americans while covering Atlanta after the shootings:

I know as a journalist, I’m supposed to be objective. I do my very best to be objective. But I’m also human, I’m Asian-American, and I’m an Asian-American woman and that is an asset. When I got to the scene, immediately I was in tune. I was keenly aware of the fear that this community, my community, has been facing for the past year.

Cabrera recalled a moment of “casual racism” she experienced years ago by describing an assignment where a man asked for her name, and he said “oh, you’re a beaner” when she told him she was of Mexican descent:

I don’t really remember how I reacted to him, but I remember thinking, ‘wow, the way he said it was so nonchalant.’ It was not with ill-intent, so it seemed. I didn’t feel threatened in any way. It was so casual that he used the term and felt that it was normal. And it taught me a lot of people are ignorant. And I thought it really showed that he was ignorant and perhaps people are ignorant because they haven’t had as much experience with diverse communities and people of color.

Blackwell followed up by recalling how he and Walker once spoke about “racist war stories of some of the things we’ve faced in our careers.”

After the killing of George Floyd and the country started to acknowledge some of the systemic racism and the disparities facing Black Americans, Black people were frustrated saying we have been telling you this for years. For decades.

He asked Walker if she feels that same kind of frustrations with respect to the hatred and discrimination Asian-Americans have faced.

“You’re right,” Walker responded. “How sad is it that it took a mass shooting, a massacre, to make Asians more visible and for us to have this conversation about the fact that racism does indeed exist against Asians.”

Later in the program, Lisa Ling appeared and spoke about the racism she experienced growing up and the “really ugly,” anti-Asian vitriol she received since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. She even told Cooper about one incident back when the two of them worked at Channel One News:

Rolling Stone magazine chose me one year as their ‘hot reporter.’ And it was such a moment of excitement and joy for me. It was such an honor. And one day, someone in our office had cut out that picture of me in the article, and wrote ‘yeah, right,’ over the ‘hot reporter,’ and drew slanted eyes over my eyes.

“Wow, I had no idea,” Cooper responded in shock. Ling went on to explain that she never told anyone about that “because I knew that once I walked out of my little office, anyone who I interacted with could have been that person who put that in my mailbox. So, I just, I compartmentalized it and did not tell anyone, I just kept it inside like a good Asian girl does.”

She talked more broadly about how minorities have been scapegoated for decades, concluding, “This is a kind of moment of reckoning for so many of us to recognize these trends that have happened throughout U.S. history.”

Watch above, via CNN.

The post ‘This Is a Moment of Reckoning’: CNN Anchors Get Personal Opening Up About Facing Hate and Racism first appeared on Mediaite.

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