New York Times Editor Recounts Racist Encounter on Upper East Side in Front-Page Open Letter

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — An open letter recounting a racist encounter that occurred this weekend on the Upper East side appeared on the front page of Tuesday's edition of The New York Times.

The letter was written by Times editor Michael Luo, who was on the Upper East Side with family and friends when a random woman hurled racist epithets at them.

Luo first recounted the experience in a Tweet, which has over 2,000 retweets at the time of this writing:

Luo was born in the United States to two parents who fled China during the communist takeover, according to his letter. But even though he was born in this country and went to Harvard he wrote that he feels like an outsider in America.

"Maybe you don’t know this, but the insults you hurled at my family get to the heart of the Asian-American experience. It’s this persistent sense of otherness that a lot of us struggle with every day," Luo wrote in his letter.

In the letter Luo said that the encounter wasn't his first time dealing with hate speech but the nasty nature of the 2016 presidential election, and a racist segment that aired recently on the "The O'Reilly Factor" amplified the effect of the attack.

Read the full open letter in the New York Times here.

After Luo tweeted about the hateful encounter people took to Twitter to offer their support and recounted similar incidents from their own lives by using #thisis2016.

Even Mayor Bill de Blasio responded to Luo's story.

Photo: Photo of Tuesday's New York Times taken by Patch