From granular coverage of the career triumphs of nepo babies and the goings-on at elite universities, to deep dives about luxury real estate and ritzy goods and services most people have never heard of, it’s clear that the New York Times’ most cherished subject is the One Percent.
This is driven by prurient fascination with the lives of the rich and powerful, mixed with a priggish desire to shame them for individual consumer choices. (“Owning or operating a superyacht is probably the most harmful thing an individual can do to the climate”—4/10/23.) This reflects the class and educational background of Times staffers, many of whom are status-obsessed graduates of elite institutions whose personal wealth and privilege, or proximity to it, skews their worldview.
The New York Times (5/14/24) reports on how luxury hotels are offering “ever-more-lavish activities for guests,” including a “personalized shopping extravaganza”($2,860), an “Enlightenment Retreat” with “four days of holistic treatments ($5,745) or an “invitation to an artist’s private studio to learn about their process” ($7,500).
Here is the Times (5/4/24) on Dylan Lauren, the paradoxically svelte “candy queen of New York City” and empress of the boutique candy store chain Dylan’s Candy Bar:
Ms. Lauren, who is the daughter of the fashion designer Ralph Lauren, lives on the Upper East Side and in Bedford, N.Y., with her husband of nearly 13 years, Paul Arrouet, 53, who is a managing partner at a private equity firm, and their 9-year-old fraternal twins Cooper Blue and Kingsley Rainbow.
Yachts, butlers and “next-level” hotels are of keen and constant interest. The paper (4/10/23) declared last year:
If you’re a billionaire with a palatial boat, there’s only one thing to do in mid-May: Chart your course for Istanbul and join your fellow elites for an Oscars-style ceremony honoring the builders, designers and owners of the world’s most luxurious vessels.
This May alone, the Times ran stories on multimillion-dollar designer “eco-yachts” (“‘silent luxury’ is fast displacing opulence”—5/10/24), luxury hotel experiences (“From cooking with a Michelin-star chef to taking a chauffeured shopping spree in Singapore, hotels and resorts are offering ever-more-lavish activities for guests”—5/14/24), and a new breed of butler employed by “the One Percent of the One Percent” (“The modern butler…is no longer a grandfatherly type in morning trousers that stays in the background, if not out of sight”—5/14/24).
‘Affluent social cohort’
The founders of Betches Media have “the chance to make another $30 million if the company can reach certain revenue and profit targets by 2026” (New York Times, 5/11/24).
The paper finds much to admire in buzzy businesses founded by millennial and Gen Z entrepreneurs. Take Betches Media, a women’s humor company that satirizes the “affluent social cohort” of young women who grew up in the “well-to-do” Long Island suburb of Roslyn, and joined sororities while undergrads at Cornell University. Industry watchers “took notice” last fall when the company’s founders sold it to LBG Media for $24 million, the Times (5/11/24) reported. (The term “betch” is meant to “mock the preferences of a type of shallow, higher-income, college-educated woman,” who is also most likely white.) The sale netted the three founders around $8 million apiece. One told the Times she had treated herself to a gold Cartier watch; another said she had refreshed her wardrobe.
Several former Betches employees complained that many of the rank-and-file workers were underpaid, with some earning around $50,000 a year to churn out the content that made the business a success. Yet the focus on the more-affluent-than-ever founders suggests that the Times is more interested in winners who can afford Cartier watches than in the grumbling of those left behind.
The fact that the Betches Media founders attended Cornell is not an incidental detail. The Times’ coverage of Ivy League schools and their alumni sometimes suggests that if a phenomenon didn’t happen at an elite university, it didn’t really happen at all.
A 2021 story (6/7/21) on a Yale Law School kerfuffle dubbed “Dinner Party-gate” claimed that the episode exposed a culture that pitted “student against student” and “professor against professor,” forcing the school to confront a “venomous divide.” Far from being a tempest in a teapot, this was indicative of a broader cultural shift: Students at Yale Law now “regularly attack their professors, and one another, for their scholarship, professional choices and perceived political views.” In a place “awash in rumor and anonymous accusations,” the paper breathlessly continued, “almost no one would speak on the record.”
What exactly was “Dinner Party–gate,” and why did the Times consider it a story of compelling national interest? A group of students alleged that Amy Chua, a “popular but polarizing” professor, had been hosting drunken dinner parties with other students, and possibly federal judges, during the pandemic. Five paragraphs in, and after “more than two dozen interviews with students, professors and administrators,” the Times doggedly reported, “possibly the only sure thing in the murky saga is this: There is no hard proof that Ms. Chua is guilty of what she was originally accused of doing.” Nevertheless, the story persisted for an astonishing 36 paragraphs.
‘We’re not oligarchs’
A New York Times (11/3/17) love story: “When the night was over, they departed to their separate yachts.”
In addition to small private parties that may or may not have taken place at Yale Law School, the Times is always on hand to cover larger and more luxurious private parties. The principals of a 2017 wedding chronicled by the Times (11/3/17) met on a yachting excursion off the coast of Croatia. After the ceremony, “guests were greeted by two trumpeters in medieval attire at the Metropolitan Club on 60th Street,” and the bridal couple, who “created their own family crest” for their wedding invitations, menus, wax seals, programs, napkins and cake, departed the venue atop a white carriage drawn by two white Percherons.
In 2019, the Times (2/22/19) covered the union of law firm associate Yelena Ambartsumian and engineer and executive Miroslav Grajewski. Both are avid art collectors whose romance was fueled by “robust curiosity” and “the desire to build a legacy.” The art they’ve acquired includes pieces “priced in the tens of thousands or more.” (High-end art notwithstanding, the bride assured the Times, “We’re not oligarchs.”)
The couple married at St. Illuminator’s Armenian Apostolic Cathedral in Manhattan, and held their reception at Eleven Madison Park, a Manhattan restaurant the Michelin guide describes as a “temple of modern elegance” where “nothing is out of place and everything is custom made, from the staff’s suits to the handblown water vases.” Dinner for two, with wine, now costs $1,314.
Toward the end of the ceremony, the Times reported, the officiant “placed gilded coronets on the heads of the bride and groom, an Armenian tradition anointing the couple as the rulers of their domestic kingdom.”
It’s not just parties and weddings, but the luxury goods and services purchased for them, that catch the Times’ eye. In April, the paper (4/13/24) wrote about the cake designer Bastien Blanc-Tailleur, who creates “opulent confections” for “high-profile clients,” including European aristocrats, movie stars, fashion designers, and Saudi and Bahraini royals. Blanc-Tailleur’s wedding cakes start at 7,500 euros, or around $8,100, while simpler cakes, which start at roughly $3,700, are “relatively more affordable.”
‘Go broke or go home’
“People now look at pictures of others who might have incomes 10 to 100 times what we have,” a New York Times article (7/16/19) observes—referring to social media, though it could be talking about its own lifestyle coverage.
As fascinated as the Times is by the lifestyles of the rich and famous, it takes care to note that the luxe life is not for everyone. In a 2019 essay (7/16/19) on “Go Broke or Go Home Bachelorette Parties,” the paper tackled tough questions like, “What happens when friends are consumed by wanting their bachelorette parties to be picture perfect at any cost?” (Answer: “Credit cards are maxed out and debt rises.”)
Yet even essays warning against mindless excess tend to glamorize it at the same time. “The cost of bachelorette parties is ever growing, with weekend wedding festivities at destination locales now the norm,” the author noted, adding that millennials like her are “going broke” to attend. She then described a bachelorette outing she was invited to: “a long weekend in Spain from my home in Clifton, England, with an itinerary packed with VIP yacht trips, exclusive booths in glamorous nightclubs, a luxury villa and afternoon teas at high-end restaurants.” Suddenly racking up a little credit card debt doesn’t sound so bad!
Attraction to the sweet life is part of our culture. But readers would be better served by a newspaper that scrutinized rather than fetishized wealth and consumption.
As we enter the month of June, scorching temperatures are already making deadly heat waves around the world. Data confirmed last month was the hottest May on record, putting the Earth on a 12-month streak of record-breaking temperatures. On Wednesday, the World Meteorological Organization announced there is an 80% chance the average global temperature will exceed 1.5…
As we enter the month of June, scorching temperatures are already making deadly heat waves around the world. Data confirmed last month was the hottest May on record, putting the Earth on a 12-month streak of record-breaking temperatures. On Wednesday, the World Meteorological Organization announced there is an 80% chance the average global temperature will exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels for at least one of the next five years. “We’re going to see a more chaotic planet as the climate heats up,” says Jeff Goodell, a journalist covering the climate crisis. Goodell describes “the heat wave scenario that keeps climate scientists up at night”: a major power outage that could cut off air conditioning and cause thousands of deaths from extreme temperatures.
In Mexico, it’s already so hot that howler monkeys and parrots are falling dead from the trees. “What we’re experiencing right now goes beyond what is normal,” says Ruth Cerezo-Mota, climate researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “We have been saying this for many years now.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
It’s often thought of as a promise that was never kept. But “40 acres and a mule” was more than that.
It was real.
In “40 Acres and a Lie, ” a three-part podcast series from Reveal and the Center for Public Integrity, we tell the history of an often-misunderstood government program that gave formerly enslaved people land titles, only to take the land back. We explore a reparation that wasn’t – and the wealth gap that remains.
Listen to the trailer now:
Coming June 15, from Reveal and the Center for Public Integrity.
40 Acres and a Lie is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
CUED (5/15/24): “A large share of Amazon warehouse workers report facing financial strain, including difficulties meeting basic needs.”
A new report (5/15/24) from the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois/Chicago reflects the largest nationwide study of Amazon workers to date, some 1,500 Amazon workers across 451 facilities in 42 states. The big takeaway: Roughly half of Amazon’s frontline warehouse workers are struggling with food and housing insecurity, with a third relying on public assistance programs.
Now, the Washington Post, owned by Amazon chair Jeff Bezos, has heard of the Center. The paper quoted it in a 2022 piece (12/10/22) about robots that led with the news that “Amazon has robotic arms that can pick and sort cumbersome items like headphones or plushy toys.” Oh, and “other companies are making progress, too.”
And even in a 2020 piece (9/3/20) on how overworked and exhausted warehouse workers were “bracing for a frenzied holiday rush.” Though beleaguered Amazon workers came in at the end, after Kohl’s and Wayfair, Best Buy and Target and so on. Bezos’ paper allows some pointed criticism of Amazon; it’s just often in “opinion” pieces, like a 2020 oped from Alex Press (4/25/20).
So we’ll wait and see if the paper gives proper news coverage to what is incontrovertibly a news story: the clear association, as report co-author Beth Gutelius put it, between “the company’s health and safety issues, and experiences of economic insecurity among its workforce.”
Featured Image: Photo of Amazon warehouse worker from CUED report (5/15/24).
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.
Janine Jackson interviewed Voting Booth‘s Ian Vandewalker about small donors for the May 17, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: If you ask people to boil down what “democracy” means, many will say, “One person, one vote.” If powerful people, rich people, get more voice, it’s not democracy. Even as practices and policies have moved us materially further from that reality, that’s still the selling point. Even the reason the US can invade other places is they “don’t believe in democracy like we do.”
Now we see more and more people saying, “Well, democracy shouldn’t actually mean everyone gets equal voice (but we would like to keep using the label).” You can forgive a person for being a bit confused. And since courts have declared that money is speech, you can forgive a person for being more confused. That’s the landscape in which the latest fillip seems to be that people who give small amounts of money to political campaigns somehow have outsized voice?
Here to help us make sense of that is Ian Vandewalker. He’s senior counsel of the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Ian Vandewalker.
JJ: I will say, when I first saw the headline of your report, “Do Small Donors Cause Political Dysfunction?,” I thought, “Huh? Who would say that?” It turns out it’s a number of folks, including author and New York Times writer Thomas Edsall, who wrote, “For $200, a Person Can Fuel the Decline of Our Major Parties.” And then David Byler at the Washington Postwrote, “Small-Dollar Donors Didn’t Save Democracy. They Made It Worse.” So this is not like a subreddit, obscure line of thought. Before I ask you to engage it, putting the best face on it, what is the argument here?
IV: The argument is this contrarian line that you think small donors are democratizing, because anybody can be one. But if you look at who gets a lot of small money, it tends to be people who engage in disruptive antics, like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Matt Gaetz—people who try to attract a lot of attention with extremist or polarizing rhetoric. And so the argument is, what small donors are really doing is encouraging these people who are showboating, and not engaged in serious moderation or governance.
JJ: So the idea, though, is it that these small donors aren’t real, that they’re kind of orchestrated? That these folks are trying to get folks to just give $12 to make some kind of point? And it’s not that actually it’s people who can only give $12?
IV: Right, I mean, I think there’s something here in that the media ecosystem that we live in, both the mainstream media and social media clickbait, does gravitate towards outrage and controversy and people screaming at each other. We all get these fundraising emails with all caps: “The world’s going to come crashing down if you don’t send me $12.”
So I think there are incentives in the media system that say to certain people, “I can engage a national small-donor fundraising base by saying crazy things.” That exists. Now, one of the critiques is that most small donors don’t actually respond to that. Small donors tend to give to competitive races where they think they can help their party win control of a chamber of Congress or the White House.
JJ: So first of all, I like how you go right to the media ecosystem. I think a lot of folks go, “Well, there’s a political system and there’s a media system, and they’re different.” You’re already saying, “No, these things are intimately integrated.”
IV: Yes, campaign fundraising doesn’t happen in a vacuum. And, look, the internet has been a huge beneficial force for fundraising and allows people to connect across the nation to things that they believe in. But one of the other effects of that has been this clickbait world of, say the most outrageous thing in order to get the clicks and get the small-dollar fundraising.
There’s a question whether these candidates that engage in this kind of extremist rhetoric, are they doing it for the small-dollar fundraising, or would they be doing it anyway, given who votes in their district?—I think is a question we should also look into.
JJ: There is a reality, there is a foot we can keep on base. And so what do you say in this piece about, when you actually investigate, are small donors causing political dysfunction? What did you find?
Ian Vandewalker: “Even though the amount of small money in the system has dramatically increased, the money from the biggest donors…has increased even faster.”
IV: So first of all, there’s lots of reasons for polarization, people moving farther to the right and left and other kinds of dysfunction. They have to do with gerrymandering and the media ecosystem and the parties making strategic choices about how they’re going to engage their voter bases, and things that have nothing to do with campaign finance.
As I said, small donors, they give to people they’ve heard of, so one way to get heard of is to say crazy things, but it’s certainly not the only way. Some candidates are trying to find policy solutions to the problems that face us. And the other thing we haven’t mentioned yet is big donors. Even though the amount of small money in the system has dramatically increased, the money from the biggest donors, people who give millions, 10 millions, has increased even faster. So that’s actually the biggest part of the campaign finance system, is the big money, and those people give to extremists as well.
So it’s hard to say, when you look at all those facts together, that small donors are causing dysfunction or polarization, even though there are these notorious examples of extremists who raise lots of small money.
JJ: It just sounds weird to say that people who can give less, people who don’t have a million dollars, their throwing in their money wherever they throw it is throwing off the system. It makes you ask, “Well, what’s the system?” Is the system that only people who can afford to give tens of thousands of dollars should be included? It just sounds weird.
IV: Yeah, that’s right. I think one of the things, the sort of thought experiments I like to do with these arguments is, well, replace small donor with voter, right? If small donors give a lot of money to a candidate because they believe in that candidate, OK, that’s just like voters voting for a candidate because they believe in that candidate. And it’s hard to say that that’s, as you say, a problem with the system itself.
JJ: Obviously, every election year is important, but hoo boy, 2024. Thoughts for reporters who are going to be engaging this?
IV: Yeah, I think for reporters it’s important to get away from the high profile anecdotes. It’s easy to say, “Oh, Marjorie Taylor Green raised a bunch of small money,” but there’s data out there that can show you, what are small donors actually doing across the entire system. And that’s a very different story.
And as for reforms, the Brennan Center supports a small-donor public financing system that matches small donations. So it amplifies those amounts from regular people, to make them competitive with the big donors. And that changes the way the candidates fundraise, and makes them fundraise by essentially asking people in their communities for votes. And so it amplifies those regular people’s voices, and engages a kind of connection between elected representative and constituent that’s good for representative democracy, because politicians are listening to the voters in another way.
JJ: All right, then, and we’ll have another conversation about the role of money in politics generally, and why do you have to have money to participate? That’s a whole bigger conversation.
IV: Yes, definitely. There’s a lot to say about the uniquely American way of running politics with private dollars and the biggest donors calling the tune.
JJ: All right, then. Well, for now, we’ve been speaking with Ian Vandewalker. He’s senior counsel of the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. Thank you so much, Ian Vandewalker, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is being taken to task by progressive critics after coming out Monday in opposition to a proposed global tax on billionaires at an upcoming Group of 7 nations meeting where the measure is on the agenda. Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Yellen told the newspaper that while the Biden administration broadly supports more progressive taxation, in which those at…
Editor’s note: This story has graphic language and descriptions of racial slurs, harmful rhetoric and violence against Asians and other students of color attending public schools. If you need support or have experienced violence, discrimination, harassment or racism, find an organization that can help in this database.
Hai Au Huynh was fed up.
The 45-year-old Texas mother had been trying to reach a resolution with teachers and administrators for months after both her boys experienced anti-Asian racial harassment at their elementary school. Despite multiple emails, meetings and officially filed grievances, school officials would neither condemn the racist acts nor guarantee her boys any protection, she said.
On Nov. 13, she took the podium in front of the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District board meeting in the Houston suburb, ready to share her story.
“My Asian-American children have been the target of several racist attacks in CFISD this past year. My 8- and 11-year-old should not have to repeatedly tell other children why it is wrong to use racist slurs,” she said.
Huynh told the board her boys had been called “ching-chong-wing-wong” on their entire bus ride home, an incident caught on video. After her older son and classmates commemorated their last day of school by signing each other’s shirts, he looked at the back of his own and discovered to his horror someone had drawn a swastika on it.
“The lack of accountability by CFISD is appalling. The district’s job is to protect all children, and it has failed miserably in that regard,” she said as she asked the board to grant a “stay away” order against the student who drew the swastika, a request school officials denied. “My children do not feel CFISD will keep them safe.”
The school district did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.
The experiences of generations of Asian American and Pacific Islander children educated in U.S. public schools point to a pattern of racial harassment and bullying that is not fully reflected in data due to lack of reporting. Families who do report hate incidents are often not taken seriously enough for school officials to put a stop to it.
While past generations typically endured abuse without saying anything about it, the hostility fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed parents and students to break the pattern of silence.
“This is not an isolated incident of racism, but one of institutional systemic racism that must also be addressed at the instructional and administrative levels,” Syed told the board. “What we want is public acknowledgement that this happened and to condemn this publicly, and action steps to prevent it from happening again.”
Huynh knew this hate. As a child growing up in South Philadelphia, she’d seen and experienced it many times over. Now it was happening to her kids.
COVID-19 reinvigorated a dormant strain of anti-Asian thought, the kind of logic that regarded Asian Americans as strangers in their own country. As then-President Donald Trump popularized terms like “Chinese virus” and “Kung flu,” vitriol spread.
Rhetoric was having real-life consequences. A report by researchers at California State University, San Bernardino, found that anti-Asian hate crimes in the 16 largest U.S. cities rose 145% in 2020 – a year when overall hate crimes declined in those same places.
Hai Au Huynh, a Texas mother, spoke at a school board meeting about racism her sons have faced. (Courtesy Hai Au Huynh)
Following the surge in anti-Asian violence and the Atlanta spa shootings that left eight people dead, Huynh and her family attended a rally in Texas in April 2021. Ever since the boys were toddlers, Huynh had discussed social justice issues, including anti-Asian racism.
“We’re going to be called all these names because it’s not the first time that it will happen, and it most likely won’t be the last,” she said.
She told them about Vincent Chin, a Chinese American man who was beaten to death with a baseball bat in Detroit in 1982. The two men responsible, angry about Japan’s auto industry and misidentifying him as Japanese, got three years of probation and $3,000 in fines after charges were reduced to manslaughter, according to the Vincent Chin Institute.
Why wasn’t anyone doing anything to stop this, her boys asked. She reassured them that by speaking up, they would inspire others to do the same until those in power do their job and protect them.
So when her sons told her about the racial harassment they were beginning to face, she did what she told her boys to do. Speak up.
Data clues and glaring problems
The federal government requires schools to report racially motivated harassment and bullying, like what Huynh says her children experienced at Cypress-Fairbanks. The Department of Education also investigates complaints of civil rights violations in educational settings. And if an incident is deemed criminal, it may appear in nationwide databases tracking hate crimes.
But gaps separate the data from the reality students experience.
The Education Department, which tracks reports of bullying and harassment in a survey called the Civil Rights Data Collection, cautioned users to “consider the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on students and on educational conditions” when comparing its 2020-21 survey to previous years. This concern appears justified: the number of students that reported being bullied or harassed on the basis of race dropped by more than half between 2020-21 and the last pre-pandemic survey in 2017-18 — a steep decrease that hints at a difficult time for data collection.
Gaps lurk in criminal justice data, too. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program includes data on hate crimes, but some law enforcement agencies don’t participate in the program. Most of those that do simply report zero hate crimes.
The FBI says many hate crimes go unreported. And that may be more prevalent in Asian American and Pacific Islander — or AAPI — communities than in other racial or ethnic groups, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights says. A 2023 report by the commission noted that few police officers are fluent in Asian languages, a barrier that may discourage victims from reporting.
When the nonprofit Act To Change surveyed students in 2021, meanwhile, it found that the majority of bullied Asian students didn’t tell an adult about their experience. The reverse was true of bullied students from other racial groups.
Bethany Li, legal director of the Asian American Legal Defense Education Fund, said immigrants who feared government agencies in their country of origin may also avoid reporting to the FBI. And incidents like verbal harassment are so normalized in the U.S., she said, that people don’t always think to report them.
“There is going to be underreporting no matter what,” she said.
The federal data, with all those serious caveats, suggests AAPI students experienced racially motivated harassment at rates roughly proportional to their enrollment. Surveys taken in the 2015-16, 2017-18 and 2020-21 school years all show such students were victims in about one in 20 such cases, the same as their share of the student population.
The education data also shows what’s happening within specific schools and school districts. Four Asian students were reported harassed or bullied due to racial bias in Cypress-Fairbanks schools over a 10-year period – two in 2011-12 and one each in 2017-18 and 2020-21, before Huynh’s sons faced harassment.
It’s unclear if those figures are exact. Data from the national survey is subject to small adjustments to prevent users from identifying specific students. And an Education Department spokesperson would not answer questions about how to accurately aggregate school data to the district level, saying the agency’s Office for Civil Rights “is unable to comment on third-party analyses.”
Cypress-Fairbanks didn’t respond to several requests by the Center for Public Integrity to confirm the numbers.
Reported hate crimes in schools and colleges show an across-the-board decrease in 2020, followed by a rebound the following two years.
In 2022, anti-Asian or Pacific Islander bias accounted for roughly 4% of racially motivated hate crime offenses reported at schools; students from these communities comprised about 6% of the K-12 population.
Concern about the gaps in official government reports of bullying, harassment and hate crimes prompted a nonprofit, Stop AAPI Hate, to start compiling voluntarily submitted data.
“Stop AAPI Hate’s data sheds light on more systemic and complex forms of hate facing our communities — from interpersonal acts of hate to infringements on our everyday civil rights,” Cynthia Choi and Manjusha Kulkarni, co-founders of the Stop AAPI Hate coalition, said in a prepared statement. “It also reflects the voice of our community in a way that surveys cannot. Each report we receive represents something that happened to an AAPI individual, that left them feeling harmed and motivated them to speak out and share their experience.”
They added: “This kind of data is much needed — by community-based organizations, government agencies, and researchers alike — and can help drive policy solutions that keep AAPI communities safe.”
Youth in K-12 schools told Stop AAPI Hate about 167 instances of verbal harassment they’d experienced, 16 instances in which they were “coughed at or spat on” and nine instances in which they were physically injured between 2020 and 2022, among other harms.
Some 1.3 million students ages 12 to 18 were bullied on the basis of race, national origin, religion, disability, gender or sexual orientation, the GAO found.
The analysis also found that an estimated 1.6 million students were subjected to hate speech related to these identities.
The persistent harassment of students of color attending public schools is revealed in some of the Department of Education’s recent Office of Civil Rights investigations.
An OCR investigation into Peoria Unified School District in Arizona revealed reports of a dozen students from 5th through 8th grade experiencing harassment based on race, color and national origin. Peer-to-peer harassment was widespread, and OCR found three teachers harassed a student between 2020 and 2022. The district knew about incidents and failed to respond adequately, further fueling a hostile environment for the children, OCR found.
Black, Hispanic and Asian students were called racial slurs, according to the findings. Asian children reported that students would pull their eyes back to imitate Asians. One white student told an Asian student to go back to her country and to eat dog because that is “what they do.”
Because the district didn’t look into the “known hostile environment” at the school, OCR said officials failed to identify other students who may not have reported their own experiences because of the “repeated failures to respond promptly and effectively to reported harassment.”
Danielle Airey, the district’s chief communications officer, said Peoria has complied with OCR’s “suggested recommendations to ensure that our students feel known, valued, cared for and challenged.”
Students used multiple derogatory racial slurs aimed at Black and Asian children. Harassment of one Asian student became so pervasive, her parents withdrew her from the district after four complaints to the staff did not resolve matters.
While federal investigations are “very comprehensive,” said Sherri Doughty, assistant director at the GAO, they can take a long time.
As of April 30, OCR’s pending cases include one on racial harassment dating back to July 2012. According to the Department of Education’s 2023 Budget Summary, OCR complaints have doubled since 2009, while investigative staff increased only slightly.
Many incidents, meanwhile, aren’t on their radar at all.
“A lot of what is reported out there in the media never makes it to the federal government,” Doughty said.
A history of exclusion
Before Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 allowed “equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races” and Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 deemed school race-based segregation unconstitutional, there was the Tape v. Hurley case of 1885. A San Francisco family of Chinese heritage fought for their 8-year-old daughter’s right to attend a local school in 1884.
Just two years prior, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 banned Chinese laborers from immigrating to the United States and denied a path to citizenship for those already in the country.
Joseph and Mary Tape sought to enroll their daughter Mamie in the nearby Spring Valley Primary School, only for the principal to tell them school board policy didn't allow admission for Chinese students, according to a write-up by the Library of Congress.
Claiming that excluding Mamie from the school violated California state law, the Tapes sued the San Francisco Board of Education — and won.
The court decision prompted Andrew J. Moulder, the superintendent of San Francisco schools, to telegram Sacramento. He urged the California State Legislature to pass a bill establishing separate schools for Chinese students.
“Without such action I have every reason to believe that some of our classes will be inundated by Mongolians. Trouble will follow. Please answer,” Moulder wrote in his telegram March 4, 1885. The bill authorizing the establishment of “separate schools for children of Mongolian or Chinese descent” was approved several days later. It also barred Asian children from attending public schools if separate schools were established.
In Bolivar County, Mississippi, Gong Lum didn’t have a Chinese school nearby to send his 9-year-old daughter Martha. In 1927, he tried to send her to Rosedale Consolidated High School District, only for the superintendent to tell her she couldn’t attend because she was “not a member of the white or Caucasian race,” court records show.
In court, Lum argued that his daughter was “pure Chinese” and “not a member of the colored race,” nor did she have “mixed blood.” But the courts ruled that Martha Lum was “of the Mongolian or yellow race” and instead of attending the whites-only school, she had “the right to attend and enjoy the privileges of a common school education in a colored school.”
It was a time when Asians had to navigate the “rigid binary color of this country,” in which they were not white, but also not Black, says Ellen Wu, history professor at Indiana University Bloomington and author of “The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority.”
She points to the U.S. Supreme Court cases of two Asians, Takao Ozawa, a Japanese American, and Bhagat Singh Thind, an Indian American, who used different arguments for being classified as white in order to obtain American citizenship, but were denied.
“These were strategies to kind of improve people's life chances at a time when they had very constricted life chances,” Wu said.
For some Japanese American children, their first educational experience was in a windowless barrack that would become unbearable as temperatures rose outside, according to an online exhibition by the Digital Public Library of America.
In a 1992 report, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights flagged numerous anti-Asian incidents in public schools, where students were pushed, spat on, called names, laughed at and teased because of their accents. School officials often failed to take adequate steps to deal with the “racially charged environment,” the report concluded, and both teachers and administrators “frequently minimize or overlook the seriousness of anti-Asian sentiments in public schools.” The commission heard complaints that school officials imposed harsher disciplinary actions on Asian students when they were involved in a fight, and often brushed aside racial tensions in a “glib manner.”
Wei Chen, who became involved with Asian Americans United following anti-Asian attacks at his high school, helps with voter registration in Philadelphia’s Chinatown. (Courtesy of Wei Chen)
Seventeen years later, Wei Chen was seeing all of that and more, he says.
At South Philadelphia High School, he said he’d witnessed Asians get ridiculed, belittled, beaten in bathrooms and have food and milk thrown at them. He’d seen some of them fight back, then get suspended.
Sometimes school staff were the bullies, he said. When he and other Asian students lined up in the cafeteria for lunch and pointed to food they wanted, the cafeteria worker would force them to pronounce the name of the item to get it, Chen said.
It came to a head on Dec. 3, 2009, when 30 Asian students were physically attacked by other students throughout the day and approximately 13 went to the hospital for injuries, according to the settlement agreement the school district reached with the U.S. Department of Justice.
Students and parents met with district officials following the incident, hoping for a solution that would keep the students safe. Instead, Chen said, they told everyone to move on. Reporting at the time showed the district publicly said the violence was retaliation for a group attack the day before on a Black student with disabilities. Later, a judge tapped to investigate said that attack was a rumor he could not substantiate.
“We are not going to move forward and not address the issue,” Chen remembers thinking. “Historically, people in power in the system, when they don’t want to change, when they don’t want to take responsibility of the violent incident or any kind of anti-Asian incident that happened in the system, they just want to push the responsibility to others.”
Using a mix of English, Mandarin and Cantonese, Chen, who was not hurt in the Dec. 3 incident, began calling other Asian students, coaxing them to meet. He was planning a press conference for the students to share their stories. Backed by Asian Americans United, where Chen works today as a civic engagement director, the event was followed by an eight-day boycott of the school. Fifty students participated in the boycott, CNN reported, sending a message that school officials needed to be held accountable.
As a result of students organizing, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund filed a civil rights violation complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice about the situation.
“Defendants had actual knowledge of this severe and pervasive harassment, and were deliberately indifferent,” the complaint read.
That got results.
The Justice Department reached a settlement agreement with the school district, requiring the district to hire an expert to review its policies on harassment and discrimination, develop a plan to address student-on-student harassment, and train faculty, staff and students on discrimination and harassment based on race, color and national origin.
“Schools have an obligation to ensure a safe learning environment for everyone. We will continue to use all of the tools in our law enforcement arsenal to ensure that all students can go to school without fearing harassment,” Thomas E. Perez, then assistant attorney general for the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, said at the time.
Asked to comment about that period and what actions officials have taken since then, the School District of Philadelphia said it has prioritized student safety. District policy is to investigate all complaints that allege bullying, harassment and discrimination, and school climate programs aim to improve students’ relationships with each other.
“The School District of Philadelphia strives to provide a safe and positive educational environment for all school community members,” the district said in its statement.
When bullied Asian children ask for help, is anyone listening?
Huynh, the mother who spoke before the school board in Texas, was in sixth grade when she first experienced a hate incident. As she walked home from school, a boy kicked her in the knee, causing her to fall. Then he pulled her hair.
“Chink,” she remembered him calling her, as she nursed her scraped knee.
At school, she’d been called “immigrant” and had pretzels thrown at her. To protect themselves from assaults, her friends carried brass knuckles.
She felt like she couldn’t tell her parents about the violence and bullying she saw in school. As with many immigrant families, she and her sister were often their parents’ translators. Without language access offered by the school, Huynh said she didn’t think there were resources to support her.
“We didn't know what to do, and we just kept quiet,” she said about her experience.
As AAPI students break that cycle of silence by reporting incidents to their schools, many of the responses have not inspired confidence.
One respondent to the 2021 Act to Change Asian American Bullying survey, conducted in partnership with Admerasia and NextShark, said their school didn’t take meaningful action when they reported bullying, and they felt the administration and teachers were victim blaming and gaslighting them. Another said their bullying was discussed once in class, then swept “under the rug.” The majority of the time, students said, reporting their experience to an adult did not make the situation better.
That expected outcome drives a lot of the underreporting, the survey suggests.
Believing the experiences of AAPI youth is the “baseline” requirement for improving the situation, said Soukprida Phetmisy, executive director of Act to Change.
“And then as adults, making sure that we can follow through on making them feel protected and heard,” she said. “We need to be able to say as AAPI folks that something is happening to us and we need people to see it and take it seriously.”
Victoria Zhang at her high school graduation in 2023. Zhang has been vocal about the racism she's faced since she was 6 years old. (Courtesy of Victoria Zhang)
Victoria Zhang, 19, educated her whole life in the same Texas district that Huynh’s sons attend, said she was six years old when she first experienced racism there. As more anti-Asian hate incidents were reported across the country during the height of the pandemic, Zhang felt compelled to do something at her Cypress Woods High School campus that showed there was an Asian community that was present and active. As leader of the Asian Pacific American Culture Club, she had the idea to put up “Stop Asian Hate” posters around the school.
Zhang said school officials were initially reluctant to approve the posters but eventually relented.
“It was clearly something the administration was not comfortable engaging in,” she said.
Flabbergasted, she managed to persuade officials that standing up against Asian hate was neither “political” nor controversial.
“It's simply a statement that we should be protecting and supporting a large community,” she told them.
Zhang also felt school officials didn't do enough to address racially targeted bullying on campus.
Students mocked her eyes and the food she ate, told her to go back to where she came from, and took pictures of her and her friends and compared them to characters on the Korean show “Squid Game.” When she would inform staff of incidents, they asked if she was threatened or harmed physically, and when she said she wasn’t, they did nothing to respond to the harassment, Zhang said. She later found out that one of the boys who took pictures was placed in detention.
She wonders if teachers didn't view the incidents as racist.
“I guess there was no roadmap of how to address this, how to handle it, when there was a need to take action,” she said.
But there was.
Over the years, the federal government has issued multiple letters reminding schools of their responsibility to protect children from such harassment.
In a joint letter, the Department of Justice, the Department of Education and the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders urged schools in 2016 to protect Asian American, Pacific Islander, Native Hawaiian, Sikh, Muslim and Arab students from discrimination.
Amid the pandemic surge in anti-Asian hate incidents, the Department of Education issued a March 2020 letter asking for “careful attention” to address the problem and a May 2021 letter “to remind you of schools’ obligations to investigate and address all forms of harassment based on race, color, and national origin.”
In February 2023, Zhang participated in a school sit-in about addressing on-campus racism. Those same students asked the CFISD board to update the code of conduct so people would be held accountable for racist and discriminatory acts. In her testimony, Zhang said administrative inaction was “a trend.”
Victoria Zhang speaks at the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District board meeting in February 2023 about racism on campus. (Courtesy of Victoria Zhang)
“I have addressed the issue of racism at multiple student council and president council meetings, yet there's been no change,” she told the board. “We will not expect a continued lack of consequences. Racism must be expelled from our schools.”
CFISD and Cypress Woods High School did not respond to questions about Zhang’s experience and whether the district’s code of conduct has been updated.
Zhang said she did convince administrators to let her put up the posters. But Black peers who wanted a “Black Lives Matter” poster on campus were not permitted to do the same, she said.
Huynh, meanwhile, continues to push for accountability. The problems haven’t stopped, she said.
In February, her younger son told school officials he heard two students using derogatory slurs against Asians and told them to stop. Huynh said she found out later that one of the students retaliated by punching him in the back.
Her older son, now 12 and in middle school, told Huynh that a student who verbally and physically bullied him wore a white paper bag over his head in physical education class and said it signified the KKK. The student performed Nazi salutes in class over multiple days, Huynh said. After she complained in March, the assistant principal took steps to separate the students, and have had no interactions since.
Project team
Reporter: Amritpal Kaur Sandhu-Longoria
Data reporter: Amy DiPierro
Editors: Mc Nelly Torres and Jamie Smith Hopkins
Design: Janeen Jones
Data check: Amy DiPierro and Joe Yerardi
CFISD did not respond to multiple requests by Public Integrity seeking comment about the incidents or its efforts to address anti-Asian harassment generally.
Huynh said she asked the school to publicly condemn racism following the school bus incident. But she said officials told her they would only counsel the students about bullying, not address the racial component of what happened. Administrators told her she was “making a big deal out of the situation” and it was an “isolated” incident, she said.
But she knows these incidents can become a big deal. They’re already taking an emotional toll on both her boys. Her older son is hyper-aware of his surroundings, constantly looking around to make sure he is safe, and her younger boy is afraid to be alone in case someone might attack him.
After she spoke before the school board in November, Huynh said other parents told her they were glad she spoke up. Their children were encountering racial harassment too.
“I don't want this to happen to other children or my children,” Huynh said. “It already happened to my children. I know it's happening to other children.”
Amy DiPierro, a data reporter with the Center for Public Integrity, contributed to this report.
Amritpal Kaur Sandhu-Longoria is an award-winning investigative reporter whose work focuses on keeping people at the center of the story. She has worked with USA TODAY and Record Searchlight in Redding, California, and has held fellowships with the American Political Science Association in Washington, D.C., and Global Health Corps in Uganda. She is a former nurse and is fluent in Hindi and Punjabi.
Tesco has caused uproar after it announced its boss’s huge salary – which is around 447 times greater than it’s lowest-paid worker. It comes as the supermarket giant is also ripping off farmers, and being a dick about how charities can collect its unsold food. But just to round this story off – what if we told your the Tesco CEO doesn’t even pay tax in the UK?
Ken Murphy, who took over as chief executive of the UK’s largest supermarket group in October 2020, was paid £4.7m in salary and bonuses in the year to February.
The rest came from shares that were awarded to Mr Murphy when he joined and paid out this year after he surpassed a number of performance targets.
For the coming year, Mr Murphy’s basic salary will be increased by 3%, which Tesco said was below a raise for its UK hourly-paid colleagues.
The company said: “When considering base salary increases for our senior executives, the committee continues to be mindful of both the wider colleague experience and our fairness principles.”
Tesco staff earn £12.02 or £13.15 an hour, depending on where they work.
Murphy’s £4.4m pay rise from the year before means his pay is 447 times greater than a full time Tesco worker at the lower quartile of the workforce and 431 times greater than the median Tesco employee.
Capitalism on steroids
Of course, his huge pay packet is also at the expense of struggling working-class people. As one person on X pointed out:
Tesco CEO collected £9.9m pay packet, doubled from last year.
Profits up 159%, cause cost of living crisis.
Most Tesco workers are at/around the minimum wage. Many rely on food banks, universal credit.
The supermarket giant is also ripping off farmers:
Tesco made a £2.3bn profit last year while 49% of fruit and veg farmers fear they’ll be out of business before the end of this year.
Tesco are paying unfair prices to farmers, selling at unfair prices to consumers and posting record profits – all during a cost of living crisis.
— No Farmers, No Food (@NoFarmsNoFoods) May 15, 2024
Moreover, Tesco is also now restricting when charities can collect unsold food from it:
Tesco is facing criticism from “shocked” charities who say they are struggling to distribute unwanted food to homeless and hungry people after they claim the retailer brought in rules that mean unwanted food can only be collected in the evening… https://t.co/jbHT2maDx6
Luke Hildyard, executive director of the High Pay Centre, highlighted the extreme disparity between the CEO’s pay and the pay of the supermarket giant’s workers.
This is the third highest gap between the CEO of any firm and their typical employee recorded since pay ratio reporting began five years ago.
You couldn’t really get a better indicator of how the UK economy serves the interests of the super rich at the expense of everybody else than this – a multi-millionaire chief executive trousering another £10 million while their customers endure major price rises and their employees have to get by on less than a quarter of a percent of what the CEO takes home.
Like a 68-story glass-clad monument to imperialism, the Mítikah tower is now the tallest building in Mexico City. Operating since 2022, it was designed and built by U.S. and Mexican real estate and architecture companies, including Fibra Uno, Parks Hospitality Holdings and Pelli Clarke & Partners. It is the biggest shopping complex in the city and also features residential and office spaces.
China’s one-child policy was implemented in 1980, restricting families to one child per couple in an effort to curb the country’s population growth rate.
Until it officially ended on Jan. 1, 2016, this policy was enforced at the provincial level through a variety of measures, including contraception, fines, sanctions, intimidation and coercion, and abortion and sterilization — consensual or otherwise. Additionally, if parents did not comply with the policy, additional children were prevented from being registered in the national household system, excluding them from legal documentation and social services.
Throughout China’s history, families have privileged male children due to cultural and social conventions and expectations. These traditions included sons inheriting their family name and property, and providing for their aging parents, whereas daughters were expected to leave their family homes upon marriage. This was further exacerbated during the 1980s when birth planning restrictions were on the rise and the growing retiree population strained collective welfare.
In 1991, the central Chinese government issued the Adoption Law of the People’s Republic of China. This law raised penalties on households that had an “unauthorized” child, including Chinese children adopted by Chinese families who went unreported in census and surveys. China subsequently opened the country to international adoption. Up until this time, adoptive parents in China were not penalized for violating the birth quota.
After this loophole closed, abandonment peaked and resulted in around 2 million Chinese children — primarily girls — whose biological families deserted them.
According to the U.S. Department of State, American parents adopted 78,257 children from China between 1999 and 2016. More than 60% of adoptees were girls, according to the Pew Research Center.
I was one of them.
In 1996, an American couple from Boston longing for a child adopted me. The orphanage told them I was abandoned outside a post office in Wuhan, less than 48 hours after I was born.
My childhood was a happy one, full of dance classes, birthday parties and making my mom play Barbies with me. I lived in Boston’s West End neighborhood, sandwiched between the Charles River and the city’s historic Beacon Hill.
Lian Parsons-Thomason as a toddler at Spruce Street nursery school. (Photo courtesy of Lian Parsons-Thomason)
The majority of parents who adopt children internationally were like mine: white, wealthy and over the age of 35. Many Chinese adoptees are raised in communities drastically different from those they would have experienced with their biological families.
Though Boston was considerably diverse by that time, I was among just a handful of Asian students in my first elementary school and the only one in my grade.
My parents did their best to explain adoption and what it meant for our family. By the time I learned to talk, I already knew key phrases like “birth family” and “adoption agency,” and could recite the city and province where I was born (but of which I had no memory).
I had stacks of picture books on the topics, owned movies like “Big Bird Goes to China” and even attended Chinese culture class for a year, where I sang songs and played games with a class full of other Chinese American adoptees.
When my parents and I were out in public together, we’d be subjected to stares of curiosity, confusion and sometimes downright hostility.
When I transferred to a public school located in close proximity to Boston’s Chinatown, many of my classmates were children of Chinese immigrants and lived in lower-income households. Many of them spoke English as a second language or spoke exclusively Mandarin or Cantonese at home. We had trouble understanding each others’ lived experiences. As children, we did not have the sophisticated communication skills and social awareness to bridge the numerous gaps.
Because of this divide, I struggled to connect and find community with my fellow Chinese American classmates. Instead, I gravitated toward other children with whom I shared a similar background and life experiences. Many of my childhood friends were from white, upper-middle-class families like mine.
As I continued to grow up, I was rarely in a social or professional situation where most of the other people were also Asian. I felt isolated and untethered wherever I went, estranged from my own identity, with no blueprint to follow.
This experience is by no means unique for Chinese American adoptees. Because of the disconnect between Chinese adoptees, their American families and the wider Chinese American community, it is difficult for many of us to engage with and embrace the culture we left behind as young children.
Lian Parsons-Thomason smiles for the camera on the playground at John Hancock Childcare Center in Boston at age 4. (Photo courtesy of Lian Parsons-Thomason)
No connection to the past
Many of us will never find our biological families. Because child abandonment is illegal in China and subject to strict criminal punishment, no documentation connects parents to abandoned babies.
Meanwhile, many children were abducted and trafficked rather than abandoned. Domestic adoption was prohibitively expensive for average Chinese families, while international adoption was lucrative, and this created a market for kidnappers to bring babies to orphanages.
Fabricated “finding ads” in newspapers that included false information about children in orphanages further obfuscates the process if adoptees or their biological families are searching for one another.
As adoptees, our pasts prior to being adopted are utterly obscured. In most cases, we do not speak our birth country’s language, practice its customs or celebrate its holidays. We do not have family or members within our community to help us understand expectations, familial roles and personal history across generations.
But one thing we do share — with each other and with other members of the Asian American and Pacific Islander community — is the effects of racism.
I was born in the same city where COVID-19 originated. The first time I saw Wuhan covered by American media was when news of the emerging pandemic reached the U.S. This was my first connection to my birth city since I was taken from it, not knowing whether my biological family still lived there or if the virus had killed them. All around me, discussions of “wet markets,” tropes and stereotypes of Chinese people eating bats and dogs, and other unfounded speculations ran rampant.
There was also a rise in negative attention toward Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. According to Stop AAPI Hate, one in five respondents to a survey conducted from mid-March 2020 through September 2021 reported experiencing a “hate act,” including harassment, shunning and physical assault.
Additionally, the way that former President Donald Trump referred to COVID-19, using terms like “Chinese virus,” ”Wuhan virus” and “kung flu,” stigmatized Asian Americans, experts say.
Just because we are adoptees does not mean we are exempt from the harm of these events. People who commit violent acts, use inflammatory rhetoric and exclude us from their communities do not see the difference, either.
I have done — and continue to do — comprehensive exploration of myself, my fellow Chinese adoptees and the AAPI communities as a whole. I now understand concepts like generational trauma, internalized racism and institutional oppression. While this journey will be a lifelong one, being a part of these communities is one of my greatest joys; I have finally learned how to be “Asian enough,” without shame and with great honor.
Chinese American adoptees are just one facet of the AAPI community, with tens of thousands of individual stories among us. Each and every one is worth telling.
Lian Parsons–Thomason is a Boston-based writer and journalist. She has served as New England chapter president for the Asian American Journalists Association since 2022. Her bylines can be found in Boston Art Review, the Harvard Gazette, Technical.ly Media, iPondr and more. She currently works at Harvard’s Division of Continuing Education as a digital content producer.
One May evening in 2022, two Filipino women — mother and daughter — went to pick up snacks at a McDonald’s drive-thru in North Hollywood when a white man allegedly rear-ended their car, drove alongside them and began to shout racial slurs, threatening to kill them.
Nerissa Roque, the mother, called the police and husband Gabriel Roque, who showed up before officers did. As daughter Patricia recorded on her cell phone, the attacker tried to open her locked door, the video showed, pushed Gabriel Roque to the ground — breaking his rib — and grabbed Nerissa Roque by her throat. A bystander intervened and stopped the assault, according to news reports.
Police did not arrest the man, Nicholas Weber. He instead received a citation to appear in court and later was charged with two felony batteries with hate crime enhancements. But a year later, the judge dropped the hate crime enhancements and charged Weber with two felony assaults and driving under the influence.
The family was stunned.
“I went there with the hope that the court would shed more light to what happened to us,” Gabriel Roque said at a July 2023 community panel on stopping Asian hate. “Instead of getting the truth out, the truth was twisted; therefore, justice was not served.”
The Roques’ violent experience follows a national trend stoked in part by anti-Asian rhetoric amid the COVID-19 pandemic. But prosecuting hate crimes successfully is rare, leaving victims disappointed.
To convict someone of a hate crime, the offense must be motivated by a person’s prejudice against an individual’s “race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender or gender identity,” according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
In the Roques’ case, the court concluded the evidence was insufficient for a hate crime charge due to the defendant’s actions toward a non-Asian bystander and the fact that the racial slurs took place approximately 10-15 minutes before the physical attack. The non-Asian bystander left the scene, and it’s not clear if police ever identified and questioned the witness about the incident.
Experts estimate an average of 250,000 hate crimes were committed in the United States each year between 2004 and 2015, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. But the lack of reporting is common and problematic — the National Crime Victimization Survey found that about half of hate crimes are never reported to police.
Michael Lieberman, a senior policy counsel for the Southern Poverty Law Center, said there are many obstacles to prosecuting a hate crime case and that often starts from the very beginning. Based in Montgomery, Alabama, SPLC is a nonprofit that specializes in civil rights and public interest litigation.
“There’s a gap in reporting,” said Lieberman, who has spent three decades working on hate crime issues, including testifying before Congress, writing and advocating for hate crime legislation. “If you don’t have accurate data, you cannot effectively address the problem. And we do not have accurate data. The FBI has been trying to collect this data since 1991.”
In Texas, for example, only eight cases ended in convictions from the nearly 1,000 hate crimes reported from 2010 to 2015, according to an analysis by ProPublica. Nationwide, prosecutors pursue charges for traditional criminal offenses — if anything — when evidence like hate speech is absent, hampering their ability to show bias after an attack takes place on people from marginalized communities.
The Washington Post summed it up this way: “Researchers, advocates and law enforcement officials have described a breakdown at nearly every step of the justice system leading to a disturbing conclusion: Hate crimes go unpunished.”
For victims, the lack of culpability is compounded by the absence of institutional support. A 2022 U.S. survey of crime survivors found that only 20% received any aid from the criminal justice system, with the majority of victims finding support in their community or the health care system. More obstacles appear for undocumented victims.
Yet these cracks in the handling of hate crimes also reveal critical reporting opportunities. Media coverage, along with pressure from advocacy groups, can increase the visibility of hate crimes and potentially keep cases from falling off the radar. For journalists seeking to investigate cases in their own community, here’s an overview of the systemic barriers facing hate crime survivors.
After a judge dropped the hate crime enhancement on a felony assault that left him with a broken rib, Gabriel Roque said justice was not served. (Photo courtesy of John Haas)
Lack of reporting and convictions: ‘systemic neglect’
Before a hate crime case can enter the criminal justice system, victims must acknowledge what they’ve experienced was a hate crime and report it to law enforcement.
“A major factor in under-reporting is distrust and lack of confidence in the police, especially for historically marginalized victims,” writes Brendan Lantz, an associate professor at Florida State University who studies hate crime victimization.
Lantz and his colleagues found that hate crime victims don’t report the crimes not because they thought “the police couldn’t do something” but because they thought “the police wouldn’t do something.”
Undocumented survivors are also wary of revealing their status to police. According to a 2015 report by the Center for Migration Studies and the Migration Policy Institute, 1 out of every 7 Asian immigrants is undocumented.
When survivors do come forward to law enforcement, officers must correctly identify and acknowledge the bias motivation related to the incident in order to proceed with hate crime charges. But law enforcement often lacks the appropriate training and resources for investigation. Hate crime legislation is not uniform across the U.S., and a handful of states, including Arkansas, South Carolina and Wyoming, don’t have hate crime laws at all.
“One of the most important things about hate crime laws is just to be able to call a crime what it is,” Lieberman said. “It’s just validating for the community.”
But one of the biggest problems in documenting hate crimes is lack of accountability when law enforcement agencies don’t collect this information. In 2019, 86% of such agencies reported zero hate crimes in their jurisdiction.
While that may be accurate for some jurisdictions, Lantz said, it’s statistically unlikely for the majority. Investigating this data and whether any hate crimes did in fact occur in these areas could potentially reveal “systemic neglect,” he said.
As a starting point, ProPublica developed a “reporting recipe” for journalists on how to request hate crime data from their local police departments. Some of those tips included:
File a public records request to law enforcement agencies for records of bias-motivated crimes reported to or investigated by the agency. Here’s some guidance to write the request.
Compare the number of bias-motivated crimes publicly reported by your local agency to what it reported to the FBI. Consider also comparing the numbers with reports from cities with similar population sizes.
If any discrepancies or differences are found, look into the processes officers use to report hate crimes. For example, are hate crimes designated with a checkbox on reporting forms? Are any additional reviews for determining hate crimes in place?
It’s possible future policy changes could ensure more cases are reported. Journalists can write solutions stories looking into approaches that could potentially improve hate crime reporting, such as police training programs or systems outside the U.S.
In a 2020 study, Lantz and colleagues found that in the U.K., which has reporting policies that are more victim-centric, hate crime reporting has steadily increased while reporting in the U.S. decreased over the same period.
A high bar
Once a hate crime case does enter the criminal justice system, the biggest barrier to conviction lies with the evidence at hand and the prosecution’s willingness to go to trial.
Research articles and news reports reveal a chorus of prosecutors who say that hate crimes are extremely difficult to prove in court in order to obtain a conviction.
There are various reasons why so few hate crimes are convicted in court, according to a ProPublica investigation that included interviews with advocates, lawmakers and 15 prosecutors in Texas. Among the problems: difficulty proving intent, lack of will among prosecutors to pursue hate crime enhancements and lack of training for police about the necessary steps to investigate such cases.
Police training is really important, Lieberman said. For example, if there was a cross burning on a Black family’s lawn and police interpreted that as trespassing without any aspect of hate or bias, they’re missing something. “You have to have law enforcement officials that are willing and able to identify it and report it.”
Another issue is police officers, victims’ liaisons and prosecutors believing that hate crimes have a higher burden of proof than what the law requires, according to a study by Ryan D. King of the Ohio State University and Besiki L. Kutateladze at Florida International University.
But the key disconnect lies in a common assumption in law enforcement that hatred must be the sole motivation for a crime. Many state laws are written more broadly, stating that prejudice or bias against a protected class must be a motivator. And states like California even explicitly include language clarifying that hate crimes may be “committed in whole or in part” because of bias.
For anti-Asian hate crimes in particular, experts say that the lack of known racist symbolism, compared with objects like nooses in regards to anti-Black crimes, makes it more challenging to win a conviction in court. Other experts point to potential racial bias at every level of the justice system from law enforcement to prosecutors to judges that may affect case outcomes.
But there is some good news. Media coverage has the potential to impact hate crime outcomes. When King and Kutateladze interviewed prosecutors for their study, they found that attention from media and advocacy groups can keep cases on officials’ radar. In some instances, local reporting has a direct impact on cases, such as an investigative story by the Oregonian that led to officials reopening and re-examining multiple hate crime cases.
Still, survivors can wait months or years to have their day in court. The Roques, for example, waited nearly a year — the norm in many states — before a preliminary hearing date was held.
Weber, the man ultimately charged for attacking the Roques, took a plea deal and was convicted on three counts: two felony assaults and a misdemeanor DUI.
“The criminal justice process, including the gathering of evidence and the decision to prosecute, often works against those with less power and against minority groups,” King and Kutateladze wrote in their study.
“The law is a blunt instrument,” said Lieberman, and suggests that the more effective route for addressing hate crimes is prevention. He encouraged local journalists to ask law enforcement and government officials directly what they’re doing to prevent these crimes from happening.
Nerissa Roque (left) and her daughter Patricia (right) at a community rally in June 2022 after a court hearing at the Van Nuys Courthouse in California. (Photo courtesy of John Haas)
Barriers to supporting survivors
Victims’ services programs are typically administered at the state level with the help of district attorneys’ offices. These programs offer trauma counseling and funds for relocation, wage loss and medical care. Yet vanishingly few crime survivors seem to be accessing these services.
A large national survey of crime survivors reported that 74% did not receive mental health counseling, a particular concern for Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, as this population rates among the lowest when it comes to receiving mental health services generally.
Ninety-six percent of crime victims did not receive any victim compensation to help recover from their experience, the survey showed. These statistics reveal a breakdown between victims and governmental resources, which as of February 2024 total over $1.2 billion in the federal Crime Victims Fund.
In early 2024, the Justice Department proposed reforms to address the subjective nature of evaluating victim compensation after an AP investigation exposed racial disparities in the system. The news organization’s reporting showed that Black victims were disproportionately denied in many states, often due to factors stemming from implicit bias.
While the proposals are still pending, the AP’s investigation could serve as a roadmap for reporting on bias that may affect other groups, such as the Asian American and Pacific Islander community or undocumented immigrants.
What happens to survivors ripples through communities. Many Asian Americans shared in a 2021 poll that racial bias and violence impacts their mental health.
“Hate crimes are unique as a crime in that they do reverberate through the community in a way that other crimes don’t,” said Lantz, the Florida State University professor. He points out that people in the Asian diaspora may experience their own feelings of distress and lack of safety when hearing about hate crimes that could have happened to them.
“That’s something that our criminal justice system and law enforcers don’t always take into account on the same level,” he said. “Bringing that extra hate crime charge has meaning even if you could have gotten a punishment another way.”
Tiên Nguyễn is an award-winning journalist, independent filmmaker and reformed PhD chemist. Her work spans history, science and human rights with a focus on uplifting historically oppressed communities. Her stories have covered death, drugs, dino poop and more for outlets including Chemical & Engineering News, Nature, PBS, Scientific American and VICE News. Born in Vietnam and raised in North Carolina, she’s now based in Los Angeles.
On Tuesday 7 May, European Union (EU) countries backed the bloc’s first law devoted to combatting violence against women and girls (VAWG). However, the text was a far-cry from enshrining intersectional feminist justice. Notably, the EU’s racist borderisation will continue to expose migrant women to the threat of gender-based violence.
New EU law on VAWG
On the face of it, the new law did take some significant steps on tackling VAWG.
Specifically, the sweeping law aims to protect women in the 27-nation EU from gender-based violence, forced marriages, female genital mutilation, and online harassment. Additionally, it contained provisions addressing non-consensual sharing of intimate images, cyber stalking and harassment, as well as cyber incitement to hatred or violence.
Essentially, it criminalises these offences and sets minimum sentences – ranging from one year to five years in prison depending on the crime.
On top of this, as the European Council’s press release detailed:
The directive also comes with an extensive list of aggravating circumstances, such as committing the offence against a child, a former or current spouse or partner or a public representative, a journalist or a human rights defender, which carry more severe penalties.
Moreover, it also sets out rules on measures of “assistance and protection” that countries must provide to victims of gender-based violence.
However, the new law fell short in a number of crucial areas. Most notably, countries controversially derailed settling on a consent-based definition of rape at the EU level.
The bloc was split on putting this in the directive. Countries including Italy and Greece who wanted a definition of rape in the final text. Meanwhile, nations like France and Germany opposed its inclusion, arguing the EU did not have competence in the matter.
Exposing migrant women to racist immigration
A group of human rights and women’s equality organisations commended aspects of the new law. However, they have also highlighted its major shortcomings.
In particular, they dragged the EU’s law on its failure to protect migrant women. The group, including Amnesty International and Women Against Violence Europe (WAVE), said that:
EU lawmakers yet again silenced women impacted by EU migration policies. The only concrete step forward for migrant women is that the text requires Member States to make shelters available to all women experiencing domestic abuse, regardless of their residence status.
Nonetheless we condemn that the final text does not retain provisions on protecting undocumented women’s personal data from being transmitted to immigration authorities (neither in the context of accessing shelters, nor in terms of accessing justice).
Member States must ensure that women are not deterred from going to the police because of their residence status, by including access to safe reporting in the ongoing revision of the Victims’ Rights Directive
Worse still, in February, a leaked version of the EU’s new directive showed that this didn’t have to be the case. Instead, the earlier text had in fact included a data non-disclosure clause. This would have prevented collusion between domestic violence services and immigration authorities.
Ultimately, the bloc’s white supremacist fortress Europe project has always persecuted migrants seeking safety. So it’s no surprise Europe’s anti-migrant racism is once again putting vulnerable lives at risk. As ever, it shows that there can be no feminist justice, without migrant justice.
The Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act was supposed to be a strong dose of medicine for the ills of heirs’ property — jointly owned land with multiple heirs not documented in wills or deedbooks, which have hindered multi-generational land ownership and family wealth for Black families since Reconstruction.
Twenty-two states and Washington, D.C., have enacted the law, first passed in 2011. The act has helped to prevent land loss among low- and middle-income families by applying standard practices when courts split property, known as partition actions.
But other ills of heirs’ property persist. And as a result, it’s still unclear how effective the law will be, attorneys, educators, mediators and academics told the Center for Public Integrity.
“People don’t have money to hire a lawyer, and if you can’t defend the partition action, the UPHPA is not going to help you,” said Fran Miller, senior staff attorney and adjunct faculty member at the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law and Graduate School.
On top of that, heirs’ property practitioners say there’s too little awareness of the law among attorneys and judges.
According to the drafters of the act, the law is intended to protect the generational wealth of property owners who lack the necessary records, resources and wealth to simply claim ownership over the property.
The usual method for partitioning property is guided by the answer to one question: Can the property be physically divided, equitably and proportional to everyone’s share? If not, sell it. The act inserts other considerations, such as the land’s sentimental value.
But with heirs’ property, the number of people who can claim ownership of the land tends to multiply with each new generation. That makes heirs’ property disputes harder than other types of dispute resolution, not to mention the complexity of those families’ relationships. Over time, people move and change. Some heirs may be living on the land, while others may be physically and emotionally disconnected from the property. And some may be totally unaware that they have rights to property.
“All the protections just slow down the process,” said Kara Woods, a research analyst at a center at the historically Black Alcorn State University that focuses on agricultural policy recommendations for farmers of color. “It helps because more people can be involved. … Donations can be raised and families can actually decide what they want to do with the land.”
Woods works at the Socially Disadvantaged Farmers and Ranchers Policy Research Center in Mississippi, the state with the highest proportion of Black-owned farmland.
Land ownership and the development value of land, critical components of individual and intergenerational wealth, have become a big part of efforts to close the racial wealth gap. Rightful title to land, a commodity in dwindling supply, is usually resolved with key legal documents like trusts, wills and birth, death and marriage certificates.
But among people of color, those documents are often nonexistent. About 75% of Black parents do not have a will, compared with about a third of white parents.
In the years since 1910, Black families have lost 80% of the agricultural land owned by previous generations in part because of the problems with the heirs’ property system. Up to one-half of Black-owned land is estimated to be heirs’ property. According to one study, the value of Black land loss is about $326 billion.
Heirs’ property, though, is common in low-income and marginalized communities of any race, including Indigenous peoples in tribal nations, whites in Appalachia and Latinos in the Southwest. It’s found in Brooklyn, N.Y.; Washington, D.C.; and other cities experiencing significant gentrification.
Lack of access to attorneys, distrust of government, racial violence, systemic racism — “all of it contributed mightily to the development of heirs’ property, the prevalence of heirs’ property and the difficulties of solving it,” Miller said.
Major reforms
The Uniform Act makes three major reforms to partition law, the principle by which property is divided among joint owners based on the particular interests each holds in the property.
First, the law standardizes a uniform criteria for a so-called buyout round, permitting co-owners to purchase one another’s shares. This step encourages ownership to be consolidated. Although there are mechanisms in some older state laws that allow co-owners to buy each other’s shares, those mechanisms vary. If the buyout round isn’t effective, the court will decide between dividing the property among the heirs or selling it and dividing the proceeds equitably.
Second, during this stage the court may consider factors including “ancestral” attachments, or whether a co-owner would be “harmed” without it. There’s a strong preference for dividing the land where possible, called a partition in kind. But dividing the property may be impossible.
Third, the act specifies that the property should be sold on the open market rather than at a courthouse auction so it may garner a higher sale price.
“Under the old statute, very rarely did a judge say, ‘I’m going to determine that this partition is fair and equitable,’” said Jacy Fisher, an attorney in Alabama.
Despite the law’s reforms, some attorneys say there’s still too much latitude for judges to declare that the land can’t be partitioned in kind and must be sold.
“The judge doesn’t want to decide who’s going to get the piece by the road versus the piece by the gully,” Fisher said.
The best investment
Nearly all 15 attorneys in Georgia and Alabama who were interviewed in a 2021 study prepared for the Alcorn policy center said that heirs’ property owners typically can’t afford legal advice or genealogical research, “much less the funds to retain an attorney.”
Legal fees to clear title can cost upwards of $10,000, even if it’s just five acres, said Woods, of Alcorn’s policy center. The Biden administration is investing $67 million from American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 funds to provide low-interest loans for heirs’ property owners to clear title, obtain legal services, engage in mediation and resolve ownership issues. But some critics argue it may not be worth going into debt for property whose value could be more emotional than monetary.
Despite the attention given to partition actions, 18 attorneys interviewed in the Alcorn study indicated that they’re rare in Alabama, Georgia and Kentucky. The researchers found relatively few partition cases due in part to a lack of accessible data.
But California, Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C., have expanded the act so that it doesn’t just apply to heirs’ property, but to all partition actions.
North Carolina is among the few southern states where the act has been introduced but has not passed. Paul Stam, an attorney and former North Carolina state representative, hopes it doesn’t.
Stam said the bill would “drastically” increase the length of time and cost associated with the partition process. But it also seeks advantage for a group at the expense of other individuals by considering sentimental attachments to the property or whether selling it might mean an individual is displaced.
“It takes away rights from especially the minority shareholder who may not have been as assertive as their big brother or uncles or aunts or whoever remained in possession,” Stam said.
He argued that land loss among disadvantaged groups is not a particular problem in North Carolina and is also not the worst outcome.
“Land is not always the best investment,” Stam said. “A matter of fact, where many, many partitions take place are in land where the property is not worth that much, and by selling it, they can put their money into more productive wealth-creating uses.”
Heirs’ property is present in every county in North Carolina, concentrated in underserved communities, according to a 2023 study by Wake Forest Law that found 4% of the state’s property is in heirs’ property. Total value: about $2 billion.
Partition actions are more common in waterfront locations that have higher developmental value, such as South Carolina’s Hilton Head, the South Carolina Lowcountry and the Gulf Coast of Alabama, although it’s a growing problem in timber-rich areas of Alabama and Georgia.
South Carolina is seeing population growth in metropolitan regions outside Charleston, Columbia and Greenville, said Josh Walden, chief of operations at the Center for Heirs’ Property Preservation in North Charleston. As large companies like Volvo and Boeing bring jobs and infrastructure, they’re driving up tax assessments and the value of properties that used to be primarily rural.
Joint owners of heirs’ property are then targeted by developers, who offer to buy out distant heirs with little to no relationship to the land, Walden said. When developers buy out such heirs, it may be possible for them to force a sale of the entire property.
Education and diplomacy
Arkansas attorney Furonda Brasfield said there’s a critical need to educate judges and attorneys on the act, especially when people are pro se litigants representing themselves in court, often because they can’t afford to hire legal representation.
“These people are going to court pro se and they don’t know about [the act], and the judge knows and doesn’t want to enforce it, or doesn’t know,” Brasfield said. “People lose their land.”
The act has strict requirements and deadlines, Fisher said. “It’s not a statute that a person could navigate on their own without an attorney.”
Attorneys in Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, all states where the act has been approved since 2012, also told Public Integrity that they either were aware of or had experienced firsthand judges applying old statutes that the act had replaced or opposing counsel making arguments based on those outdated laws.
Several attorneys told Public Integrity that judges and opposing counsel often don’t understand the cultural significance of the act, seeing it merely as a burden on the litigation process.
So, attorneys are sharing resources and lawyering tactics in the Heirs’ Property Practitioners Network, a group that has grown to about 80 lawyers over the past year.
In the best of circumstances, families with heirs’ property resolve their disputes in mediation before they go to court. Once they reach a judge, yes-or-no legal principles take precedence in a conflict that requires diplomacy and flexibility.
New York modified the act by requiring court-ordered mediation. The modification is based on similar provisions in North Carolina and Indiana, two states that have not adopted the act.
But some attorneys say that mediation can drag on for years. And it becomes more complicated depending on the number of heirs involved and the nature of their relationships.
“It’s not like traditional mediation, where you have two parties at the table,” Fisher said. “Now you have 155. How do you practically even do that?”
Fisher says she’s the only attorney in Alabama who does adversarial work on heirs’ property. She doesn’t handle mediations because she doesn’t want to be unable to represent an heir who might later want her to represent them in a partition action.
Some organizations, such as the Center for Heirs’ Property Preservation, get to know the heirs through a “family presentation,” a seminar that kicks off by teaching the family about heirs’ property but moves to addressing family dynamics. “Most people won’t come to a mediation session,” Walden said.
During the presentation, attorneys meet with heirs collectively, typically at a community center or church, but Walden has also accepted last-minute invitations to family reunions an hour away.
“You have to do everything they tell you not to do in law school, meaning getting to know and almost getting emotionally involved with folks because you spend so much time with them,” Walden said.
LyTanya Brown, land retention attorney and mediator for the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, said it’s critical to get to the root of the problem while preserving the family relationship.
“Because a lot of times, it can be as simple as something that happened in childhood, that they’re still holding against another heir,” Brown said. “It has nothing to do with the property.”
Stopping the cycle
Heirs’ property practitioners and academic scholarship propose several solutions, such as creating comprehensive and thorough estate plans that specify how a property ought to be divided among children.
“Stress estate planning to stop the bleeding,” said Ebony Woodruff, director of the Southern University Law Center Agricultural Law Institute for Underserved and Underrepresented Communities. “People can create a will now.”
Wider acceptance of estate planning documents such as heirship affidavits also could have an impact. Heirship affidavits establish the legal heirs to a property and can be a cheaper alternative to clearing title.
Families need more access to public funding for estate planning and clearing titles. They can stop the cycle of heirs’ property by willing or transferring their interest to another person, buying out each other’s shares or creating a limited liability company together.
An article in the April 2021 Columbia Journal of Race and Law suggests modifying the act to mandate that land is partitioned in kind, unless “there is consensus among all located co-tenants that a partition-by-sale is preferred.”
But another problem affecting heirs’ property owners isn’t addressed by the Uniform Act: tax liens. These are legal interests a local government may impose on property to collect on delinquent taxes. During a tax lien sale, an outsider could step in and buy the lien, then eventually foreclose on the owners or gain title to the home.
“We need to be really careful to track and monitor how much heirs’ property is being lost to those tax lien sales,” Fisher said. She added, “I think a lot of that happens under our nose and we don’t even know it.”
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Activists welcomed Thailand’s senate passing the first reading of a bill to legalise same-sex marriage on Tuesday 2 April, bringing the kingdom another step closer to becoming the first Southeast Asian country to recognise marriage equality for the LGBTQ+ community.
Thailand same-sex marriage one step closer
Thailand has long enjoyed an international reputation for embracing the LGBTQ+ community, but campaigners have struggled for decades against conservative attitudes and values.
The vote sailed through the unelected upper house – stacked with conservative appointees named by the last junta – with 147 votes in favour, building on the momentum from last week’s landslide vote in parliament.
“It’s as if we have received the greatest gift since I’ve been pushing for 12 years,” LGBTQ+ gender rights activist Waaddao Chumaporn said after the senators voted.
“It has meaning not only for LGBTQ+ couples, but for family institutions.”
On 2 April the body debated the legislation, which will change references to “men”, “women”, “husbands” and “wives” in the marriage law to gender-neutral terms.
Activist and bill representative Chanya Rattanathada also addressed the chamber, asking senators: “Please, can I trust my future with you?”
The legislation will now go to a 27-person committee for further consideration. The senate cannot reject the proposed changes but can send the bill back to the lower house for further debate for 180 days. It will come back for two more senate votes, with the next probably no earlier than July.
The tone in parliament was muted, with many in the LGBTQ+ community waiting for the legislation to become law before celebrating fully.
In a side room off from the chamber, activist Siritata Ninlapruek clutched a rainbow flag and threw her fist to the air as the bill passed its first reading.
But there was more to be done to help and protect the LGBTQ+ community, she told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
“We still need to keep fighting for our rights.”
‘Proud of our pride’
Senate Deputy President Singsuk Singpai said the bill passed with 147 agreeing, four against and seven abstaining in the upper house.
Last week, Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin said he was “proud of our pride” after the lower house voted to approve the bill.
“The passing (of this law) in the parliament today is a proud moment for Thai society who will walk together towards social equality and respect differences,” he wrote on social media platform X.
Across Asia, only Taiwan and Nepal recognise same-sex marriage. Last year, India’s highest court deferred the decision to parliament, and Hong Kong’s top court stopped just short of granting full marriage rights.
LGBTQ+ activists celebrated the recent vote as a significant milestone on the road to equality.
Paulie Nataya Paomephan, who won Miss Trans Thailand in 2023, said until recently she had never dreamed that transgender people would be able to legally marry in Thailand.
“I think it is because politicians have to adapt themselves to the changing world,” she told AFP, adding she and her boyfriend of three years planned to marry if the law passed.
The prime minister has been vocal in his support for the LGBTQ+ community, making the marriage equality policy a signature issue and telling reporters last year that the change would strengthen family structures.
Opinion polls reported by local media show the law has overwhelming support among Thais.
Thailand same-sex marriage: ‘inspiring others to fight’
While Thailand has a reputation for tolerance, much of the Buddhist-majority country remains conservative, and LGBTQ+ people, while highly visible, still face barriers and discrimination.
Activists have been pushing for same-sex marriage rights for more than a decade, but in a kingdom where politics is regularly upended by coups and mass street protests, their advocacy did not get far.
Campaigner Waaddao said she knew of dozens of LGBTQ+ couples ready to tie the knot once the law is passed, which she hoped would happen this year.
“Once the law is enforced, yes of course, it will change Thai society,” she told AFP.
“It will inspire other fights for other equalities.”
Households across all continents wasted over one billion meals a day in 2022, while 783 million people were affected by hunger and a third of humanity faced food insecurity. Food waste continues to hurt the global economy and fuel the climate crisis, nature loss, and pollution. These are the key findings of a UN Environment Programme (UNEP) food waste report published on Wednesday 27 March, ahead of the International Day of Zero Waste.
UNEP food waste report
The UNEP Food Waste Index Report 2024, co-authored with WRAP, provides the most accurate global estimate on food waste at retail and consumer levels. It provides guidance for countries on improving data collection and suggests best practices in moving from measuring to reducing food waste.
In 2022 there were 1.05 billion tonnes of food waste generated (including inedible parts), amounting to 132 kilograms per capita and almost one-fifth of all food available to consumers. Out of the total food wasted in 2022, 60% happened at the household level, with food services responsible for 28 per cent and retail 12 per cent.
Inger Andersen, executive director of UNEP, said:
Food waste is a global tragedy. Millions will go hungry today as food is wasted across the world. Not only is this a major development issue, but the impacts of such unnecessary waste are causing substantial costs to the climate and nature.
The good news is we know if countries prioritise this issue, they can significantly reverse food loss and waste, reduce climate impacts and economic losses, and accelerate progress on global goals.
One billion meals wasted
Key points from the report include:
In 2022, the world wasted 1.05 billion tonnes of food. This amounts to one fifth (19%) of food available to consumers being wasted, at the retail, food service, and household level. That is in addition to the 13% of the world’s food lost in the supply chain, as estimated by FAO, from post-harvest up to and excluding retail.
Most of the world’s food waste comes from households. Out of the total food wasted in 2022, households were responsible for 631 million tonnes equivalent to 60%, the food service sector for 290 and the retail sector for 131.
Reducing food waste provides compounding benefits: Food loss and waste generates 8-10% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions – almost five times the total emissions from the aviation sector. It occurs while 783 million people are hungry and a third of humanity faces food insecurity.
Households waste at least one billion meals a day: On average, each person wastes 79kg of food annually. The equivalent of at least one billion meals of edible food is being wasted in households worldwide every single day, using a very conservative assessment on the share of food waste that is edible. This is the equivalent of 1.3 meals every day for everyone in the world impacted by hunger.
Food waste is not just a ‘rich country’ problem. Following a near doubling of data coverage since the 2021 Food Waste Index Report was published, there has been increased convergence in the average per capita household food waste. High-income, upper-middle income, and lower-middle income countries differ in observed average levels of household food waste by just 7 kg/capita/year.
UNEP food waste report: countries lack ‘adequate systems’
Since 2021, there’s been a strengthening of the data infrastructure with more studies tracking food waste. Globally, the number of data points at the household level almost doubled.
Nevertheless, many low- and middle-income countries continue to lack adequate systems for tracking progress to meet Sustainable Development Goal 12.3 of halving food waste by 2030, particularly in retail and food services.
Only four G20 countries (Australia, Japan, UK, the US) and the European Union have food waste estimates suitable for tracking progress to 2030. Canada and Saudi Arabia have suitable household estimates, with Brazil’s estimate expected late 2024. In this context, the report serves as a practical guide for countries to consistently measure and report food waste.
Food must ‘feed people – not landfills’
Harriet Lamb, CEO of UK climate action NGO WRAP, said:
With the huge cost to the environment, society, and global economies caused by food waste, we need greater coordinated action across continents and supply chains. We support UNEP in calling for more G20 countries to measure food waste and work towards SDG12.3.
This is critical to ensuring food feeds people, not landfills. Public-Private Partnerships are one key tool delivering results today, but they require support: whether philanthropic, business, or governmental, actors must rally behind programmes addressing the enormous impact wasting food has on food security, our climate, and our wallets.
The boss of British Gas’s parent company Centrica, Chris O’Shea, was given over an 80% payrise in 2023 – despite customers struggling to pay their bills, controversy over it sending bailiffs to force-fit prepayment meters – and the CEO himself saying just weeks ago he was paid too much.
Centrica CEO Chris O’Shea’s total pay package in 2023 was £8.2 million, a jump of more than 80% from 2022, the British Gas owner’s annual report showed on Tuesday.
O’Shea’s total remuneration in 2023 included bonuses and awards of about £7.3 million.
Centrica in February had hiked dividends by about 33% after annual profits surged last year, partly driven by one-off benefits as the government provided help for consumers struggling with high-energy costs and compensated energy suppliers for unpaid debts they could not recover.
O’Shea’s pay can hardly be down to an ethical performance by British Gas. For example, as the Canary reported in February 2023, a month earlier an undercover investigation by the Times newspaper found that contractors working for British Gas sent debt collectors to “break into” homes and “force-fit” meters.
Some of the customers the report identified had “extreme vulnerabilities”. Journalist Paul Morgan-Bentley went undercover with British Gas and exposed its practice. He noted that the company was breaking into the homes of disabled people.
Then, there’s fuel poverty. National Energy Action (NEA) reported that some four million households across the UK were in fuel poverty by October 2021. The NEA estimates there will be 6.5 million households in fuel poverty in the UK in April when the new price cap comes in.
You can’t justify a salary of that size… It’s a huge amount of money; I am incredibly fortunate. I don’t set my own pay; that’s set by our remuneration committee.
His statement leaves you wondering what he has to say about his 80-something-percent increase now. People on X had a few answers to that:
Two months ago British Gas CEO Chris O'Shea was on TV saying that his £4.5m salary couldn't be justified, so he wouldn't even try.
It's heartening that in these difficult times the British Gas owner Centrica has been thrifty enough to be able to grant Chris O’Shea, the CEO a doubling of his remuneration to £8 million.
— Citizen Paul Templeman (Betamax Male) #FBPE (@PaulTempleman6) March 26, 2024
Just a reminder that the Centrica (British Gas) CEOs salary and bonus for this year was £8.2 million. He got £7.3 million of bonuses. For raising profits and share prices by charging the public 5 x their normal billls. A “cost rise” allegedly caused by a war.
— The Ayrshire Separatist. (@DanielJMath1) March 26, 2024
British Gas: happy to screw us over
Meanwhile, Luke Hildyard is the executive director for the High Pay Centre – a think tank focused on pay, corporate governance and responsible business. He said:
As Mr O’Shea himself admitted a few weeks ago, it’s not really credible to argue the work that he does is at all proportionate to a pay award even half this size, nor is it necessary to the success of the company. It’s a major governance failure and by extension a policy failure.
The dysfunctional pay culture of corporate Britain is one of the biggest economic problems facing the country. We should stop major employers from wasting so much money on a tiny number of executives and investors, and put it towards something more efficient and socially useful like raising the pay of the wider workforce or investment in research and technology.
Amen to that. O’Shea’s preposterously high salary has no justification – apart from rewarding people who are happy to screw the rest of us over.
Featured image via BBC News – screengrab and Wikimedia
Britain’s housing stock offers the poorest value for money among advanced nations. That’s the verdict of a Resolution Foundation study published on Monday 25 March. It warns that the UK’s crisis-hit sector will loom large over this year’s election.
UK housing: worst in the Global North
The Resolution Foundation think-tank, publishing its quarterly outlook for the UK housing market, slammed the quality of UK homes as expensive, small, ageing, and energy inefficient. Its report used OECD data to compare UK housing stock with that of similar economies. It said:
When it comes to housing, UK households are getting an inferior product in terms of both quantity and quality.
Homes in Britain have less floorspace per person than many other Global North economies, trailing France, Germany, Japan, the US – plus Taiwan.
And they even have less floorspace per person than those in New York’s central city district, the study noted.
The Resolution Foundation also said that the UK spends less on housing than many other Global North countries:
Countries that have a similar level of prosperity to us consistently consume more housing (in terms of amount) per person than we do in the UK. Our total expenditure per capita is just 4% lower than that of Austria, for example, but we spend 24% less on housing per person than Austrians do. The equivalent figures for Canada are 2% and 22% respectively.
The think-tank found that homes were located further from jobs than the “majority” of other European nations. They were also older and less well insulated despite the UK government’s plan to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
‘Expensive, cramped, and ageing’ – and that’s NOT the Tory government
The UK housing crisis, long regarded as one of the country’s most glaring social problems, has been sparked by a historic shortage of affordable housing which has pushed up rents and house prices.
It has been exacerbated by a cost-of-living crisis caused by government-induced high inflation and elevated interest rates. This makes it difficult for Britons to get financing in place to buy a first home.
The UK faces a general election in the second half of 2024, with the main opposition Labour Party tipped by opinion polls to beat prime minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives.
Adam Corlett, principal economist at the Resolution Foundation, said:
Britain’s housing crisis is likely to be a big topic in the election campaign, as parties debate how to address the problems of high costs, poor quality and low security that face so many households.
By looking at housing costs, floorspace and wider issues of quality, we find that the UK’s expensive, cramped and ageing housing stock offers the worst value for money of any advanced economy.
You can read the Resolution Foundation’s full report here.
A group of over 20 leading academic social scientists, including professors Prem Sikka and Danny Dorling, have written to the UK’s biggest investment firms and pension funds in a letter highlighting the risks associated with increased executive pay awards. It comes after think tank the High Pay Centre found that many bosses are still earning 75 times more than their lowest paid employees; doing nothing to improve inequality in society.
High Pay Centre: high pay does not equal productivity
The letter was co-ordinated by the High Pay Centre. It follows claims by the London Stock Exchange and a number of business leaders that higher top pay awards would improve the competitiveness of the UK economy.
The academics have expressed reservations about these claims, arguing that:
There is limited evidence, beyond individual anecdotes, of UK companies failing to attract or retain key executives because of low pay levels.
The link between higher executive pay and better business performance remains questionable.
Any shortage of capable candidates for executive roles should also prompt scrutiny of companies’ leadership training and development processes.
Top pay increases for senior staff could have opportunity costs in terms of, for example, pay for low and middle income workers or investment in the business.
Wider pay gaps between executives and ordinary workers could have a negative impact on employee engagement, productivity and ultimately business performance that should be considered alongside the arguments for higher top pay.
Higher executive pay at major employers could trigger an increase in income inequality, leading to socio-economic problems that would damage the UK’s long-term prospects of economic success.
The letter does not express blanket opposition to higher executive pay at all companies. It instead recommends that investors treat proposals for top pay increases with appropriate scepticism before choosing whether or not to support them on a case-by-case basis.
Professor Alexander Pepper, emeritus professor of management practice at the London School of Economic and Political Science, said:
While I welcome constructive debate, it’s hard not to conclude that the London stock market’s unfavourable international competitive position is a consequence of political uncertainty, a confused approach to international trade, a shortage of capital, and the absence of a coherent industrial policy, rather than a failure to remunerate top executives at US pay levels.
Wider social policy issues also need to be recognised. Business is not carried on in a social and political vacuum.
Inequality is not good for anyone
Luke Hildyard, Director of the High Pay Centre said:
The debate about pay in the UK needs to recognise that there is considerable evidence and a number of expert voices opposed to very high top pay awards. While it is not a zero sum game, excessive executive pay does have implications for the pay levels of the wider workforce.
There is also a well-documented link between higher levels of inequality and much worse lower levels of happiness, health and wellbeing across society.
The median CEO/median employee pay ratio across the FTSE 350 was 57:1 in 2022, slightly up from 56:1 in 2021.
2022 saw a slight decrease in the median CEO/lower quartile (25th percentile, or lowest paid) employee pay ratio for the FTSE 350, at 75:1 compared to 78:1 in 2021.
In the FTSE 100, the median CEO/median employee ratio was 80:1 and the median CEO/lower quartile employee ratio was 119:1 (83:1 and 111:1 in 2021).
Previous High Pay Centre research found that 76% of people think top earners should not be paid more than 20 times their low and middle earning colleagues, while just 3% thought that it was right for CEOs to make more than low and middle earners.
Signatories
Signatories to the High Pay Centre’s letter are:
Professor Sandy Pepper, Emeritus Professor of Management Practice, London School of Economic and Political Science
Professor Ruth Bender, Emeritus Professor of Corporate Financial Strategy, Cranfield University
Professor Gwyn Bevan, Emeritus Professor of Policy Analysis, Department of Management, London School of Economic and Political Science
Professor Christine Cooper, Chair in Accounting, University of Edinburgh Business School
Professor Chris Cowton, Emeritus Professor of Accounting, University of Huddersfield
Professor Danny Dorling, Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography, Oxford University Centre for the Environment
Professor Patrick Dunleavy, Emeritus Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, Department of Government, London School of Economics
Professor Gary Fooks, Professor of Criminology, School of Policy Studies, Bristol University
Dr Aditi Gupta, Senior Lecturer in Accounting and Financial Management, King’s College London
Professor Lynn Hodgkinson, Professor in Accounting and Finance, Bangor University
Professor Jonathan Hopkin, Professor of Comparative Politics, Department of Government, London School of Economic and Political Science
Stewart Lansley, Visiting Fellow, School of Policy Studies, University of Bristol
Professor the Baroness Ruth Lister of Burtersett, Emeritus Professor of Social Policy, Loughborough University
Professor Brian Main, Professor of Business Economics, University of Edinburgh Business School
Professor Kate Pickett, Professor of Epidemiology, University of York
Professor Andrew Sayer, Emeritus Professor of Social Theory and Political Economy, Lancaster University
Professor the Lord Prem Sikka of Kingswood, Emeritus Professor Accounting, University of Essex
Professor Tracy Shildrick, Professor of Inequalities, School of Geography Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University
Professor Peter Taylor-Gooby, Research Professor of Sociology, School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research, University of Kent
Dr Ben Tippett, Lecturer in Economics, School of Accounting, Finance and Economics, University of Greenwich
Professor Richard Wilkinson, Professor Emeritus of Social Epidemiology, University of Nottingham Medical School
Professor Steven Young, Professor of Accounting, Lancaster University Management School
On 22 March, Jeremy Hunt accidentally agreed that more Britons than ever are underpaid in Tory Britain. On Sunday 24 March, he went on a media blitz to confirm this.
Guess how well that went down?
If people can’t cope with the cost of living on £100,000 and the average salary is £35,000, then the economy is so spectacularly fucked that you, as Chancellor, should resign and trigger an election.
Finally I spoke to a lady from Godalming about eligibility for the government’s childcare offer which is not available if one parent is earning over £100k. That is an issue I would really like to sort out after the next election as I am aware that it is not huge salary in our area if you have a mortgage to pay.
According to The Salary Calculator, a salary of £100k will net you about £5.7k a month after deductions. When Hunt first made his comments, Sky News reported:
According to the Office for National Statistics, the average salary for someone in full-time work was £34,963 in April 2023.
Mr Hunt is standing for the Godalming and Ash constituency, having represented the Farnham and Haslemere constituency.
According to Rightmove, the property marketplace website, the average price of a house in Godalming has been £683,463 in the past year.
Looking on RightMove, if you bought a house that cost that much right now, you’d be looking at monthly mortgage repayments of £3.5k a month with a 10% deposit.
Notably, mortgages are much higher than they’ve been in years, so the majority of Godalming homeowners will not be paying that much, but even if you’re paying £2.5k, the cost-of-living in that area (including childcare) will definitely mean that many are feeling the pinch for the first time.
So, going through the figures, the man has something of a point. There are certainly areas of the country in which you can be earning three times the national average and yet still be affected by the cost-of-living crisis.
Before you raise an eyebrow, we’re not pointing this out because we think people are being unfair to Hunt; we’re pointing it out because it highlights the absolute state of this country under the Tories.
After all, this is a party which runs on a platform of hounding and impoverishing benefit claimants. Now, with the cost-of-living crisis becoming the cost-of-living reality, the chancellor can think of no solution other than to extend benefits to cover Middle England’s middle-class middle managers.
In other words, if you live in Tory Britain and you’re not in a position to pay yourself, you’re probably underpaid.
A Hunt’s trick
All that aside, it’s staggering that Jeremy Hunt didn’t realise how bad it would sound to suggest £100k is a benefits-worthy income. Most people don’t live in areas in which you need to win the lottery to buy a bungalow. It’s even more staggering that he’s now gone on the Sunday politics shows to smirk and repeat this statement:
#TrevorPhillips: You tweeted that £100k wasn't a huge salary in your constituency… do you regret that?
Tory MP Jeremy Hunt claiming it’s a struggle to live on £100k a year in the same week it was announced there’s been a *68%* increase *in one year* in the number of people who don't have enough food
Several tweets demonstrated that many can’t actually fathom £100k being a low wage:
'The sooner we get rid of the wretched Tories forever, the better!' 'They're just on a different planet!'
As Jeremy Hunt claims £100K is 'not a huge salary' in Surrey, it's safe to say that caller Paul will not be voting Conservative in the next election…@PaulBrandITVpic.twitter.com/3NIitcaj36
Jeremy Hunt stating people on 100k are struggling. Average wage U.K. is £33k. Only 4% earn 100k or over. 10% of population earn below average salary. 5% earn min wage with another 12.2% earning below min wage. Struggling my arse pic.twitter.com/oWEJ4AnVmS
If £100k isn't a huge salary, how come the average salary is a third of that, how come qualified doctors earn less than a third of that, and how come carers have to survive on £76 a week, @Jeremy_Hunt? https://t.co/nbSuFxCIWj
How can you operate a functioning country in which cost-of-living varies so wildly from place to place? Because let’s not forget – even in areas like Godalming, many people will still be earning the minimum wage.
What happens to them when £200k becomes the benchmark? Things will spiral even further, of course, as the managerial classes have to choose between paying their cleaners £80k a year or bussing them in from several counties over.
Some pointed out why the gap between the rich and the poor is increasingly widening in Toy Britain – namely because the Tories have pushed the two realities apart with a crowbar:
“You did say that £100k is not a huge salary…”
£100k is about the same amount of money Jeremy Hunt saved in taxes by exploiting a loophole for people who buy more than six properties in bulk. He bought seven.
Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt saved almost £100,000 in stamp duty on his purchase of seven flats after exploiting a Tory loophole.
Stamp duty rules changed in 2016 so anyone buying a second home or buy-to-let property pays a 3% surcharge.
But bulk purchases of six properties or more are exempt, meaning Mr Hunt will have saved at least £94,500 by buying the seven homes at once .
Properties in the Southampton development are on the market for between £450,000 and £1million.
He already faces a parliamentary sleaze probe into his alleged failure to register an interest in the company he used to purchase the flats in Ocean Village.
Britain is increasingly a country in which hard work – or indeed any work – doesn’t pay.
What does pay is having the cash to buy into an economic system which prints off free money for those without need.
Greed eats itself
Runaway greed is increasingly a problem for the Tories.
It’s getting harder and harder to squeeze the poor, so the system has no option but to squeeze the middle class.
Tories like Jeremy Hunt tend to sit in affluent constituencies, and now – when they make their once-an-election-cycle appearance at the village fetes – they’re having to say: ‘I’m sorry, Mr and Mrs Miggins, but it turns out you’re poor now. Don’t worry, though, because we’re lining up a spiffing benefits package for you to sign on to’.
Given this situation, it’s clear to see why the Tories are losing support all over. And while Labour and the Liberal Democrats don’t have a plan beyond ‘more of the same’, they probably won’t get found out until five years from now when they’re on the telly telling us £500k is the new Universal Credit threshold, and Channel 4 films season 16 of Benefits Street on Park Lane and Mayfair.
Recent studies of lawmakers in the United States have found that less than 2% of those serving on Capitol Hill held blue-collar jobs before they were elected. That percentage drops even further among the nearly 7,300 state legislators across all 50 states, according to researchers at Duke University and Loyola University Chicago, who found that only 81 of those legislators were previously employed...
Janine Jackson: If you ask people to boil down what “democracy” means, many will say, “One person, one vote.” If powerful people, rich people, get more voice, it’s not democracy. Even as practices and policies have moved us materially further from that reality, that’s still the selling point. Even the reason the US can invade other places is they “don’t believe in democracy like we do.”
#FBPE (@PaulTempleman6) 
(@mettlesome_teri) 