This article was originally published on Waging Nonviolence. Since the summer of 2022, the city of Philadelphia has seen a fierce battle over the home of their professional basketball team, the 76ers. Currently located at Wells Fargo Center on Philly’s south side, economic power players have been shopping around a proposal for a new 18,000 seat arena called 76 Place, which would move NBA games to…
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In Bliss Montage, Ling Ma seeks to re-enchant a world whose catastrophes have grown monotonously real.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
Vincent Chin was beaten to death in Detroit in June 1982, by two white auto workers who reportedly said it was because of him that they had lost their jobs. At the time, listeners may recall, Japan was being widely blamed for the collapse of the Detroit auto industry. Chin was Chinese-American.
Elite media, as reflected by the New York Times, didn’t seem to come around to the story until April 1983, with reporting on the protests emanating from Detroit’s Asian-American community about the dismissive legal response to the murder.
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Amid the surge in anti-Asian violence over the past year and a half, more persistent scrutiny has emerged surrounding issues of whitewashing in Hollywood, and the lack of representation of Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) both in front of and behind the camera. For me, this scrutiny is something that has turned viewing TV shows and films into a constant cultural critique of the representations, stereotypes and discourses that center certain voices, diminish or exclude others, and affirm or deny a cultural sense of identity and belonging.
As an incoming tenure-track assistant professor of English literature, I was pleasantly surprised when I heard news about the new Netflix show, “The Chair,” starring one of my favorite actors, Sandra Oh. Oh herself is Korean Canadian, and her career has been a marvel to behold as a Korean American woman myself. In the show, Oh plays Ji-Yoon Kim, the first woman to chair the English department at the fictitious Pembroke University. Ji-Yoon is a Korean American woman taking the helm at a failing department where there are few staff members of color. Like Ji-Yoon tells her college’s dean, the faculty at Pembroke is “87 percent white.”
I started my first tenure-track position in an English department this fall, so the specificity with which the show is able to depict both Ji-Yoon’s personal and public lives in terms of ethnic Korean identity and the ins and outs of straddling multiple cultures at once made it easy at first to feel connected to Ji-Yoon. Watching Ji-Yoon’s father (played by Ji-Yong Lee) speak Korean and break through the “1-inch-tall barrier of subtitles” brought multiple moments of Korean and Korean American identity affirmation.
Rather than reviewing the show’s plot points and divulging too many spoilers, however, I want to focus on the symbolism that the show conveys in terms of larger questions of the representational politics of academia and the role of professors in an increasingly corporatized higher-education world. I write from the honest perspective of a Korean American woman in the professoriate, and the situations that I have navigated on the way to this coveted and increasingly rare tenure-track position.
There’s a moment in the show when Ji-Yoon notes, “When I started, it was like, ‘Why’s some Asian lady teaching Emily Dickinson?’” It reminded me of the student evaluations I have gotten over the years questioning my suitedness and ability to teach not only Dickinson, who I teach with enthusiasm, but my ability to teach literature at all.
Like many women of color in academia and beyond, Ji-Yoon’s embodiment does not match the longstanding, persistent stereotypes of who gets to not only teach but lead departments. What Ji-Yoon experiences isn’t new to me or many women of color, because like many of us, she is working in a system that sets expectations for her that don’t match the reality of what it takes to get the job done.
As the only other faculty of color in the department, Yasmin “Yaz” McKay (Nana Mensah), tells Ji-Yoon, “You act like you owe them something. Like you’re here because they let you be here, not because you deserve it. I mean, what are they without us at this point?” The department of English is in a moment of transition and luckily has a star tenure-track professor in Yaz who teaches classes like “Sex and the Novel” rather than other classes of outdated interests and struggling enrollment numbers. Ji-Yoon tells Yaz that she is “going to be the first tenured Black woman in this department,” but the chair of Yaz’s tenure committee, Elliot Rentz, becomes a roadblock to Yaz’s journey.
Both the university and college which houses Ji-Yoon’s department are going through a budget crisis and need increased enrollment. Many of their students are frustrated with the lack of faculty diversity on campus and the dearth of critical race and ethnic studies approaches in their classes. These are questions that colleges and universities around the country are facing, and through the parodic lens of the show, they do become relevant to a broader audience.
One of the show’s clearest shortcomings, however, is the absence of adjuncts — the actual professors keeping higher-education teaching afloat. Some 73 percent of all faculty positions are not tenure track, so their seeming absence at the fictional Pembroke reinforces a glaring lack of awareness about what keeps colleges and universities running. This lack of representation reifies the “ivory tower of academia” ideal and erases one of the most urgent problems higher education must tackle: how to turn the profession of teaching into a livable and fair wage job for everyone. The current status quo of grim adjunct life and its necessity for keeping, among other things, higher education budgets, course catalogs and enrollment numbers afloat, may not be camera-ready, but it is more relevant than ever to the world “The Chair” is trying to represent.
In one key scene, Ji-Yoon tells Yaz, “I don’t feel like I inherited an English department; I feel like someone handed me a ticking time bomb because they wanted to make sure a woman was holding it when it exploded.” As Nancy Wang Yuen notes, “This is a documented phenomenon called ‘the glass cliff,’ in which institutions elevate women and BIPOC to positions of power during crises that puts them at risk of ‘falling off’ and failing.” As we see, Ji-Yoon is ultimately disempowered by this system, which is truthful of what happens to many of us. By the show’s end, the cyclical nature of the “model-minority” trope is clear: No matter how hard we work or how much we go “running around playing nice,” as Yaz reminds Ji-Yoon, the entrenched systems of white privilege which we enter continue to function and, in fact, function better with us “model minorities” firmly in place as proof that meritocracy works.
Critiques and disappointments notwithstanding, watching Ji-Yoon walk into her brand-new office as the incoming chair of English at Pembroke in the first episode, I not only felt represented, but also a type of wonder. Art can do that, I guess. The next scene finds her sitting down in the chair at her desk and having it break beneath her. Was this a reality check for the truth of her situation and the long-established practices that she is soon forced to navigate? My English degree has made me turn everything into a symbol, but whatever it was, I laughed out loud and deeply understood the feeling.
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Atrocities targeting people and bodies we identify as our own tend to incite powerful feelings of exception. A shared sense of singular vulnerability and violation circulates virally, and the epidemiology of toxic intimacy with violence is simultaneously social and personal. The sheer quantity of casualties matters less than the bare fact of unexpected cruelty. Singularity and exception yield to righteous outrage, communal mobilization, and militant demand on surrounding authorities. Something must be done now. A famous few may issue bounties for individual culprits, with no regard for the collateral consequences of such grandstanding. A larger narrative quickly forms, condensing in precious keywords: hate, hate crime, justice, ignorance, safety, policing, prosecution, inclusion, education, criminal.
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This past year of the pandemic has seen a horrifying uptick in anti-Asian violence and hate crimes in the U.S., many targeting the elderly. From Vicha Ratanapakdee, an 84-year old Thai man who was knocked to the ground, to Noel Quintana, a 61-year old Filipino man who was slashed in the face, many Asian elders have been assaulted and attacked since the pandemic’s onset. Asian people, especially Chinese folks have been subjected to verbal and physical violence—much of which has been fueled by Trump’s anti-Asian rhetoric pertaining to COVID-19’s origins. Racial epithets such as “kung flu” and “Chinese virus” have only exacerbated the situation. While some people have donated or raised awareness, others have expressed their grief by calling on more policing as a means for justice.
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Over the past weeks the US has seen a growing number of attacks on Asian-Americans. Those who perpetrate them should learn a little about history and a lot about our democracy. Continue reading
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On the show this week, Chris Hedges discusses with journalist and writer May Jeong the deep American roots of the Atlanta shootings.
May Jeong’s op-ed, ‘The Deep American Roots of the Atlanta Shootings – The Victims Lived at the Nexus of Race, Gender and Class’, was published in the New York Times on March 19, 2021.
Jeong is a writer at Vanity Fair and an Alicia Patterson fellow. She is working on a book about sex work.
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Ever since a white Georgia man killed six Asian women and two others in Atlanta, the corporate media have jumped onto the “stop Asian hate” bandwagon as if they are innocent bystanders. It is easy to point fingers at a murdering local redneck and leave unexamined the media role in spreading hatred based on race and nationality.
Sinophobia in particular has been quite overt, with the corporate media following the dictates of U.S. foreign policy. When Donald Trump was president they repeated his every lie and insult, and supported every decision intended to thwart China.
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Since coronavirus shutdowns began last March, thousands of Asian Americans have faced racist verbal and physical attacks or have been shunned by others, according to a study released Tuesday.
The report by Stop AAPI Hate documents 3,795 racially motivated attacks against Asian Americans from March to February, noting that the number is likely a fraction of the attacks that occurred, because many were not reported to the group.
On Tuesday, eight people, including six Asian women, were shot to death at massage parlors in the Atlanta area.
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The ANSWER Coalition stands in solidarity with the Asian community in the midst of the horrific, racist and misogynist massacre that took place in Atlanta on March 16th. Six Asian women were among the eight shot to death at point blank range.
The alarming rise in hate crimes over the past year correlates to an increasingly hostile U.S. foreign policy towards China. The opportunistic scapegoating of China during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with the intensity by which China is deemed the enemy and adversary of the United States, has driven a widespread Sinophobic sentiment nationally.
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On March 16, eight people were killed at three different spas in North Georgia including six Asian women. We are heartbroken by these murders, which come at a time when Asian American communities are already grappling with the traumatic violence against Asian Americans nationwide, fueled by the United States’ long history of white supremacy, systemic racism, and gender-based violence.
As we collectively grieve and respond to this tragedy, we must lead with the needs of those most directly impacted at the center: the victims and their families.
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Stop AAPI Hate, a national coalition formed to address anti-Asian violence during the pandemic, reported that Asians and Asian Americans reported approximately 3,800 racist incidents, including threats and physical attacks, this past year. More than two-thirds of those reports were about violence against Asian women.
Reported anti-Asian violence has soared since Donald Trump initially blamed the coronavirus on China, calling it “the China virus” and “kung flu” from his bully pulpit as president. Even after his ouster from the White House, his remarks linking the coronavirus with China continues to spark harassment, threats and violence against Asians and Asian Americans across the U.S.
On March 16, this violence caught national attention after suspected gunman Robert Aaron Long, a white 21-year-old, opened fire on three Atlanta-area massage parlors, killing eight, six of whom were Asian and Asian American women. Long’s arrest did not deter others from engaging in random violence against Asians, particularly those seen as vulnerable. The following day in San Francisco, a 39-year-old white man reportedly attacked first an 83-year-old Vietnamese man, and then attacked 75-year-old Xiao Zhen Xie, who picked up a stick and fought back, sending her assailant to the hospital handcuffed to a gurney. Xie, who was also taken to the hospital for treatment, suffered two black eyes, one of which is still swollen and cannot open, as well as severe post-traumatic stress disorder from the unprovoked attack. In New York City, five attacks were reported over the weekend.
Politicians in cities with large Asian populations have condemned these assaults, calling for increased policing. Police departments have announced they will increase policing in Asian communities. These announcements have been denounced by many Asian and Asian American advocacy organizations, which have noted that law enforcement, including police and immigration authorities, have not kept their communities or residents safe, and instead act as perpetrators of racialized and xenophobic violence.
Calls for policing ignore community-based safety efforts, both those created over the past year as well as more long-standing efforts. They also ignore the long history of systemic violence against Asians and Asian Americans. In the week that followed the shootings, marches, protests and mass demonstrations were held across the U.S.; in many, attendees called for an end to anti-Asian violence while also rejecting calls for more policing.
On March 18, two days after the shooting, more than 200 racial justice, sex worker, and a wide variety of advocacy organizations co-signed a statement by Red Canary Song, a New York City-based collective of Asian sex workers, massage workers and allies, highlighting the stigma against sex work, as well as the racialized and gendered nature of the Atlanta attack, and refuting the claim that police provide safety.
“Policing has never been an effective response to violence because the police are agents of white supremacy,” the statement read. “Policing has never kept sex workers or massage workers or immigrants safe.”
Red Canary Song was created in response to police violence against sex workers and massage workers. In November 2017, police raided a massage parlor in Flushing, New York. Yang Song, a 38-year-old massage worker, fell to her death from a fourth-floor apartment when police attempted to arrest her for allegedly engaging in sex work. Song had previously been sexually assaulted by a person claiming to be a police officer and arrested on sex work allegations two months before.
Red Canary Song initially formed to provide legal support for Song’s family and assist with funeral expenses. The group then expanded to offer support for other massage workers, connecting them with legal help and medical resources. Organizers also worked with other groups to monitor the city’s human trafficking courts and joined Decrim New York, a coalition demanding that New York decriminalize sex work.
By the time COVID hit the U.S., Red Canary Song had built relationships through two years of door-knocking, assistance and advocacy. Learning that many of their contacts had lost income, the collective shifted to mutual aid efforts — providing groceries and cash assistance to out-of-work massage workers on a bimonthly basis.
Yves Nguyen, a Red Canary Song organizer, told Truthout that the organization typically plans to provide groceries and cash to 50 people, but at times, more people show up than anticipated, forcing volunteers to recalculate both funds and food on the fly.
“Our big dream is community support,” Nguyen said, adding that Red Canary Song would like to see “more community-designated resources, not just our small collective handing out groceries and giving out cash aid.” This dream goes hand in hand with decriminalization, which would prevent police from exploiting and assaulting people who engage in massage work, regardless of whether they are also engaging in sex work.
Meanwhile, “mutual aid is keeping people safe [by] meeting people’s needs in the immediate that are not being met by the systems that are in place,” Nguyen said, noting that these same systems criminalize Asian migrants, including massage workers, assuming that they are all engaged in criminalized activity. “We’re meeting people’s needs by giving them money, food, supplies, etc., so that they can survive and build and transform the world.”
In February 2021, after a video of a young Black man violently shoving a 91-year-old Asian man went viral, actors Daniel Dae Kim and Daniel Wu offered a $25,000 reward for information about the assailant(s). Their offer drew criticism from Asian and Asian American organizers, who compared it to a bounty at the expense of Black people upholding the white supremacist policing system that systematically targets and kills Black people.
Cayden Mak, executive director of 18 Million Rising, a national digital advocacy organization for Asian Americans, noted that the actors’ offer “completely takes agency away from the community. Asian American community orgs have been working on police alternatives here for ages.”
18 Million Rising began in 2012, the same year that Florida teenager Trayvon Martin was murdered. His death immediately set the stage for the group to challenge members to think about safety beyond policing. At the same time, organizers partnered with groups supporting people in prison and immigrant detention, writing letters to incarcerated and detained people and participating in anti-deportation campaigns.
“White supremacy is invested in pitting us against each other,” Mak told Truthout. In 2020, 18 Million Rising put out “Call On Me, Not The Cops.” It was an abolitionist tool for Asians and Asian Americans to use when talking with family members about safety, policing and police violence against Black people. It also served as a way to talk about the racial divides encouraged by decades of government policies restricting resources, sensationalist media stories pitting Black and Asian communities against one another, and fears about street violence.
The letter, which is available in 12 languages, notes the desire for safety — and that that desire should not come at the expense of Black lives. “We want the world to be safer, and that means changing what we do,” it states, urging family members to call each other, a friend or a neighbor when they are scared or need help. “Calling someone else instead of the police is a safer option for you and everyone involved. I want you to know I love and care for you and we can make a safety plan together that doesn’t involve the police.”
Mak also points to ongoing efforts in Oakland to ensure community safety — efforts that would have benefited greatly from Kim’s and Wu’s $25,000 offer. This includes the Community Ambassador Program, originally established by Asian Health Services and the Asian Prisoner Support Committee, to allow formerly incarcerated people to rebuild their relationships with the community. Now, members, who are not always formerly incarcerated, act as volunteer patrols to both deter random street violence and help residents, including acting as escorts to elders and others on their daily errands around the neighborhood.
There is a rich (and often underreported) history of cross-racial solidarity in the United States. Some of the newer safety efforts continue that legacy.
In Oakland, Jacob Azevedo, a 26-year-old Latino, put out a call to provide an escort to anyone in Chinatown who felt unsafe on the streets. Four others immediately responded to his call and in February 2021, Compassion in Oakland was created. The group now has hundreds of volunteers who work in pods to escort seniors and other vulnerable people on their daily errands, as well as provide translation services and help those with limited English or computer skills.
In New York, what started as a safety initiative to prevent assaults against women quickly expanded to encompass safety for Chinatown residents. Peter Kerre, a Black Brooklyn resident and founder of Street Riders NYC, saw photos of several women who had been badly beaten at the Morgan Avenue subway station in Brooklyn. Kerre put out a call on social media for volunteers to escort residents who felt unsafe. Hundreds responded. Now, people who need an escort can send a message in English, Chinese or Spanish through SafeWalks NYC’s webpage or Instagram and be walked home by a pair of escorts sporting bright yellow and orange safety vests.
In February, SafeWalks expanded to Manhattan’s Chinatown, where volunteers spread the word through fliers and word-of-mouth. “We’re here for our community and ready to go into the fire, not to fight but to just show up for our neighbors,” Kerre told Bushwick Daily. “It’s about compassion.”
The Massage Parlor Outreach Project (MPOP) began in 2018 to support massage workers in Seattle’s Chinatown/International District. Organizers took inspiration from labor organizers in Hong Kong and China, who utilized hot pot and shared meals to cultivate space for worker resistance.
In 2019, the Seattle Police Department raided nearly a dozen massage parlors on the pretext of rescuing trafficking victims. But, said MPOP organizer Shuxuan, the people arrested were charged not with trafficking, but with money laundering and promoting prostitution. Those not arrested were displaced, leaving them more vulnerable to economic exploitation and violence.
The raids pushed MPOP organizers to organize around safety in spite of policing and raids. But doing so, Shuxuan told Truthout, meant building relationships, a process that takes time. “If we don’t have trust, then no matter what happens, they won’t look [to us] for support. We need to build relationships before another raid or deportation happens.”
MPOP visited massage workers each month, bringing care packages containing candy, fruits and feminine hygiene supplies. Each package also contained a zine in Chinese with information about Seattle labor laws and health care, including places that did not ask about immigration status.
When COVID hit, MPOP continued visiting on a bimonthly basis. The group included information in Chinese about COVID, including prevention, testing and now vaccinations, as well as local politics, such as the Black Lives Matter/Defund the Police protests that were either underreported or demonized in Chinese-language media. Shuxuan said that many of the workers saw their incomes drop by half or even two-thirds; some began asking for MPOP’s assistance in navigating unemployment insurance or for assistance applying for small-business grants.
The day after the Atlanta shootings, Shuxuan and other MPOP organizers visited the dozen massage parlors that remain in the International District. Half of the workers they spoke to had not heard about the shootings, which had yet to be covered in the Chinese-language media. Those who had felt unsafe. COVID had already decreased the number of workers in some parlors; in one instance, a woman was attacked by a man who noticed that she often appeared to be the only person working in the parlor. They discussed safety strategies — leaving for work earlier, walking with their boyfriends, and being more cautious when opening the door to an unknown client. Some suggested that community-based patrols and self-defense classes would help. None said they wanted more policing.
At 9:30 am on Monday, March 22, approximately 200 people gathered at Seattle’s Hing Hay Park for a vigil commemorating those killed in Atlanta. The morning vigil was scheduled so that massage workers could attend before work. The attendees included Native organizers with the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, who tied the shootings to the legacy of colonialism, as well as Black sex workers who showed up in solidarity for their Asian sisters.
Incarcerated Asian and Pacific Islanders penned a solidarity statement (which did not arrive before the vigil). “The message is about cross-racial solidarity,” Shuxuan reflected. “We all need to see white supremacy and colonialism as the enemy.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
On March 16, 2020, as COVID-19 was first spreading across the U.S., then-President Donald Trump issued a tweet about his support of U.S. industries, saying that he would protect them from the “Chinese Virus.” What followed, a new study has found, was a steep rise in tweets containing anti-Asian hashtags as anti-Asian sentiments rose across the country.
The study, published Friday in the American Journal of Public Health, examined nearly 700,000 tweets and more than 1.2 million hashtags posted over the weeks surrounding Trump’s initial tweet about the “Chinese Virus,” and its authors found Trump’s tweet was likely the cause of a rise in the use of the #chinesevirus hashtag. While the use of #covid19 only rose by 379 percent through the course of the study period, the use of #chinesevirus rose by 8351 percent.
“The week before Trump’s tweet the dominant term [on Twitter] was #covid-19,” Yulin Hswen, study co-author and epidemiology professor at the University of California, San Francisco, told The Washington Post. “The week after his tweet, it was #chinesevirus.”
Those who used #chinesevirus were much more likely to attach other anti-Asian hashtags to the post than those who used #covid19, the study’s authors found. While only one in five of the #covid19 tweets examined had anti-Asian sentiments, half of the tweets with #chinesevirus were anti-Asian. Over the two-week course of the study, anti-Asian hashtags rose from 12,000 to almost half a million.
Though the study’s authors didn’t examine whether these tweets were tied to the rise in anti-Asian sentiments and hate incidents offline, they do note that other studies have found that the use of hashtags promoting hate speech has been associated with hate crimes.
“Hashtags allow information to travel beyond the initial social network and can form collations of speech,” the study authors wrote. “This has led researchers to examine how hate-speech hashtags are associated with hate crimes. In this research, the variable that best predicted real-world violence was the hashtag used in the tweet.”
The study’s authors also note that Trump’s position as an authority was likely partially responsible for the rise in anti-Asian posts online, since “racist attitudes may be reinforced by institutional support,” they write. Some of the tweets they cited in the study were particularly violent and virulent, with anti-Asian slurs and hashtags like #bombchina.
Previous studies on similar subjects have also found an increase in racism against Mexicans and Latino people during the 2016 election when Trump was spewing racist statement after racist statement to gain support for his presidency.
The study lends credence to what Asian Americans have been speaking up about for the duration of the pandemic: The scapegoating of China for the pandemic has led to the scapegoating of all Asian American people, regardless of their actual ethnic background, and is causing racism against Asian Americans to flare across the country.
This is also bolstered by another recent report by Stop AAPI Hate, which said that nearly 3,800 anti-Asian incidents have been reported in the past year. And last week, a white shooter killed eight people in a murder spree in Atlanta, Georgia, including six Asian women — an incident that has not been explicitly tied to the pandemic but that is inextricable from the rise in racist sentiments against Asian Americans.
Though the study examined sentiments on Twitter, politicians like Trump — largely Republicans — have uttered racist phrases like “Chinese virus” and “kung flu” in public forums and even on the House floor. These sentiments from public officials have likely also fueled anti-Asian racism in the country.
Last week, during a House hearing on violence and racism against Asian Americans, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) used derogatory terms against Chinese people while ranting about how China caused the pandemic, while simultaneously glorifying lynching, calling it a form of justice. Rants like Roy’s are likely part of why, polls have found, the vast majority of Republicans are convinced that China is responsible for the virus and an “enemy” to the U.S.
Though these sentiments are about a country that many Asian Americans may not have any affiliation with at all, views on the country, Stop AAPI Hate found, are likely tied to anti-Asian racism. In an analysis of more than 1,800 incidents reported to the organization between March and May of last year, 27 percent of the assailants in the incidents mentioned “China” or “Chinese” during the incident. Several of them directly used the term “Chinese virus.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
As Trump politicized the pandemic and attacked China, hate crimes against Asian-Americans began to rise. Continue reading
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During a hearing on the increasing discrimination and violence against Asian Americans in the House on Thursday, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) suggested that lynching was how justice can be carried out for the families of the Asian women who were murdered in Atlanta, Georgia.
In his testimony, Roy equated the white man who murdered eight people, including six Asian women in a racist murder spree on Tuesday, to immigrants in the south who he claims are “absolutely decimating” U.S. cities, and also to protesters in last summer’s Black Lives Matter uprisings who may have damaged property while advocating for racial justice.
Roy then suggests that the groups of people he listed deserve “justice” the way he defines it: “There’s old sayings in Texas about — find all the rope in Texas and get a tall oak tree.” Roy then went on to say, “You know, we take justice very seriously, and we ought to do that. Round up the bad guys, that’s what we believe.”
“There’s old sayings in Texas about find all the rope in Texas and get a tall oak tree. You know, we take justice very seriously, & we ought to do that. Round up the bad guys.” — here’s Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) glorifying lynchings during hearing on violence against Asian-Americans pic.twitter.com/uy5irfmJCo
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 18, 2021
Roy immediately faced criticism for his statements, with many pointing out that what he’s describing isn’t a real form of restorative justice. “No, that’s just American lynching,” said Cornell Williams Brooks on Twitter, Harvard professor and former CEO of the NAACP. “Rep. Roy, don’t dip your rhetoric in the blood of racial trauma.”
Roy went on to complain, “My concern about this hearing is that it seems to want to venture into the policing of rhetoric in a free society, free speech, and away from the rule of law and taking out bad guys.”
Following which, he went on a rant about the Chinese government, its treatment of the Uighurs, and holding China responsible for the coronavirus pandemic, while repeatedly using the disparaging phrase “ChiComs,” popularized by the virulently racist late talk show host Rush Limbaugh. He displayed printouts of screenshots and evidence that he believed showed the extent of the Chinese government’s responsibility for the spread of COVID-19.
“I’m not going to be afraid of saying I oppose the ChiComs,” said Roy during the hearing. “And when we say things like that, talking about that, we shouldn’t be worried about having a committee of members of Congress policing our rhetoric because some evil doers go engage in some evil activity as occurred in Atlanta, Georgia.”
Blaming the Chinese government for COVID and extending that blame to Asian Americans is exactly what members of Congress and the Asian community have been speaking out against for the past year, and especially in the wake of Tuesday’s attack.
This sort of blaming and inflamed rhetoric that Roy is so afraid to have taken away from him is, advocates say, partially responsible for a precipitous rise in anti-Asian incidents, including the murder of a Thai man in San Francisco, during the pandemic. On Wednesday, the group Stop AAPI Hate released their newest report showing nearly 3,800 documented incidents expressing anti-Asian hate like verbal harassment and physical assault over the past year. Women, in particular, suffered most of those attacks.
Jay Baker, a Georgia sheriff’s spokesperson who had chalked up the Atlanta shooter’s motive to his having had “a bad day,” came under fire on Wednesday when reporters discovered that he, too, had perpetuated the idea that Chinese people were responsible for the pandemic. Last year, on Facebook, Baker shared a picture of a T-shirt he was promoting that said, “Covid 19 IMPORTED VIRUS FROM CHY-NA.”
The fact that the hearing was held in part to discuss and condemn this sort of racist rhetoric was apparently lost on Congressman Roy who spent a majority of his five minutes perpetuating it. Roy’s words elicited an emotional response from Rep. Grace Meng (D-New York) during the hearing.
Comments like Roy’s, Meng said, blaming the Chinese government for the pandemic are “putting a bull’s eye on the backs of Asian Americans across this country, on our grandparents and on our kids,” Meng said. “This hearing was to address the hurt and pain of our community and to find solutions. We will not let you take our voice away from us.”
Some observers like Rep. Ted Lieu (D-California) pointed out that Roy’s celebrating lynching as a form of justice flies in the face of the fact that lynching has been historically used as a weapon against marginalized groups. One of the worst mass lynchings in U.S. history was against Asian Americans: In 1871, a mob of an estimated 500 white people rounded up a group of Chinese men and one child and hanged them on gallows erected in downtown Los Angeles.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
During a prime-time address to the nation on Thursday night, President Joe Biden condemned hate crimes against Asian Americans, which have surged since the pandemic hit the U.S. a year ago.
“At this very moment, so many of them, our fellow Americans, they’re on the front lines of this pandemic trying to save lives, and still they are forced to live in fear for their lives, just walking down streets in America,” Biden said. “It’s wrong, it’s un-American, and it must stop.”
A recent poll has shown that 75 percent of Asian Americans are fearful of increased hate crimes and discrimination. Violent attacks in places like San Francisco and New York have left the Asian community on edge. In January, Asian Americans reported two violent attacks against elderly Asian people in California, one of whom died from his injuries.
Last year, New York City officials reported a dramatic increase in violence against Asian Americans: Between February and April of 2020, there were 105 reported counts of anti-Asian harassment and discrimination, versus only five in 2019.
Between March and the end of 2020, Stop AAPI Hate received over 2,800 counts of anti-Asian hate incidents. A recent report by California State University, San Bernardino, found that, in 16 cities across the country, hate crimes against Asians rose by 150 percent in 2020.
However, it’s entirely possible that the actual hate crime numbers could be even higher. The U.S. government has a history of vastly undercounting hate crimes.
Former President Donald Trump continually referred to COVID-19 using racist terms like the “kung flu” or the “Chinese virus.” This terminology from Trump exacerbated xenophobia and racism against Asian Americans during the public health crisis, experts say.
Flaring of racism and xenophobia during public health crises, especially against Asian Americans, has a long history in the U.S. During the SARS outbreak in 2003, there were reports of people actively avoiding Asian Americans in public. An outbreak of the bubonic plague in 1899, which was later found to be spread by rats and vermin at the time, caused public health officials to lock down a predominantly Asian neighborhood in Honolulu, Hawaii, and attempt to “sanitize” the neighborhood by setting fires.
Many Americans view the COVID-19 pandemic as China’s fault and negative perceptions of the country have soared, especially among Republicans.
As Asian American celebrities and advocates have raised awareness about the violence, however, they say that Biden’s actions to oppose the violence have thus far been lacking, or even harmful. Biden’s agenda on ending anti-Asian hate crimes includes empowering the Justice Department to prosecute them. But, as activists and advocates have pointed out, increasing policing and pushing hate crime statutes can often empower the wrong people and lead to further violence.
“While calling out anti-Asian racism and violence is vital, the violence that Asian Americans experience is deeper than just hateful attitudes or interpersonal racial bias, it is also a story of state violence, including police-perpetrated violence,” wrote Jason Wu for Truthout.
When people call for more policing in the face of anti-Asian hate crimes, Wu writes, they not only hurt their own cause but also the cause of the Black protesters and abolitionists who have fought hard against policing.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.