Former Flint Newscaster Goes Viral for ‘Stop Asian Hate’ Message

Most will remember Jane Park for bringing us the news on Mid-Michigan Now/NBC25 from 2011-2014. Now, the former local broadcaster is making national news for her Tik Tok.

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Park, who now lives in Seattle, is proud mom to Bennett, 7 and Ruby, 5. and is a second generation Korean American. Her husband Ben Kang is also Korean American. Park, who has been using Tik Tok during the pandemic to document life with her kids, recently recorded a video that tackled an important subject.

The Tik Tok video showed how Park talked to her kids about the March 16 shooting in the Atlanta area, where eight people were killed. She starts her sight word lesson by saying, “There’s a message in this one, so I want you to think about it, OK,”  before holding up cards for her kids that read.  In the clip, Park shows her children the words, "Stop," "Asian" and "Hate." She then asked her kids about their feelings and reminded them how they can now raise awareness and put an end to hate.

After she shared what she thought was just another video documenting life with her kids, the clip went viral with over 1.4 million views so far and growing. Park said her children's reactions to the conversation were important, but she didn't know it would impact so many.

"My 7 year old son Bennett was seeing me reading and watching news and reacting, and that day he was asking me,'Mommy what's wrong?', and I just to explained to him in ways he could understand what had happened."

Park's son's response to racism being like a virus, saying it can "infect people", struck a chord with parents across the country. Park tells her kids, “We can speak out against it. We can talk about it. We can build awareness, right? Because not everyone might know what’s going on.”  Park stresses the importance of talking to your children about racism.

"I had been talking to my kids about racism really since last summer. What I really want to do is empower my kids to have the language to talk about and and have the language to address it", Park told us."

You can listen to our full interview with Jane Park below.