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leilamulveny

Asian-American Voters Can Help Decide Elections. But for Which Party? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...asian-american-voters.html

voters new york times Politics

shared by leilamulveny on 03 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • They turned out in record numbers. In Georgia, the increase in Asian-American voters was so significant in the general election that they could play a decisive role in the two Senate runoff races this week.
  • Demographics alone are not destiny. Asian-American voters and Latino voters made clear that while they generally support Democrats, they do not do so at the same rate as Black voters, and remain very much up for grabs by either party.
  • but with Asian-Americans making up less than 6 percent of the U.S. population, concentrated mostly in traditionally safe blue and red states like California, New York and Texas, they were seldom part of a presidential campaign’s calculus.
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  • With the Senate runoffs approaching on Tuesday, Asian-American political operatives from across the country have joined local groups in Georgia to try to ensure that the tens of thousands of Asian-Americans who voted for the first time in the general election will vote again this week.
  • Mr. Trump’s rhetoric on the virus, among other things, made progressive organizers and Democratic candidates optimistic that Asian-American voters would flock to them. In some cases, it did motivate people.
  • Over the last two decades, as their numbers grew, Asian-Americans as a whole moved left politically and slowly amassed enough power to help decide some tightly contested House races in districts where they had clustered
  • Now, as Mr. Biden forms his administration, Asian-American congressional leaders and many of their colleagues are already chafing at what could be a cabinet without a single Asian-American secretary for the first time in decades.
  • At the presidential level, Asian-Americans cast a record number of ballots in battleground states where Joseph R. Biden Jr. notched narrow victories. But a New York Times analysis showed that in immigrant neighborhoods across the country, Asian-American and Latino voters shifted to the right
  • For the first time, three Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders sought a major party’s nomination for president. One, Ms. Harris, is set to be vice president; another, the entrepreneur Andrew Yang, has been privately telling New York City leaders that he intends to run for mayor this year.
  • When analysts get a complete picture of the 2020 electorate, he said, the data will probably show that the total number of ballots cast by Asian-Americans nearly doubled.
  • Despite the modest increase in support for Mr. Trump, roughly two-thirds of Asian-American voters backed Mr. Biden — a fact often cited by the Asian-American officials who have urged the president-elect to pick a cabinet secretary from their community.
  • Roughly 30 percent of Asian-American voters do not identify as either Democrats or Republicans, and many are settling in the suburban swing districts that are the focus of both parties.It is a demographic and political reality that has been playing out in parts of Southern California for years. Randall Avila, the executive director of the Republican Party of Orange County, said he had found that many Asian-American voters — and potential candidates he had worked to recruit — approached Republican ideas with an open mind.
  • The real victory, experts on the Latino and Asian-American vote agreed, would be for voters of color to be pursued with the same vigor as white voters, who are routinely grouped into subcategories based on where they live, or their income or education level.“Democrats need to stop obsessing about white rural voters and white suburban moms,” said Janelle Wong, a professor of American studies at the University of Maryland.
  • One place they may demonstrate their growing political power is in Georgia this week. Neil Makhija leads an Indian-American political organization that is running a $2.5 million campaign to turn out A.A.P.I. voters in the state’s Senate runoffs. He sees the significant increase in Asian-American voter participation in November as a success — and a lesson.“What we’re going to try to do is take some of what we’ve learned,” he said, “and really go all in.”
anonymous

Asians in the US suffer more attacks as deadly shootings highlight the vulnerability of... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by anonymous on 19 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • At least two of the eight people killed at Atlanta-area Asian massage spas Tuesday lived in the same spa where they worked,
  • "This one fact alone highlights the vulnerability, the invisibility, and the isolation of working-class Asian women in our country,"
  • Authorities have not yet confirmed a motive for the shootings at three Atlanta-area spas, which killed eight people -- including six Asian women. A suspect is in custody.
  • ...30 more annotations...
  • Atlanta Deputy Police Chief Charles Hampton Jr. said Wednesday the suspect, Robert Aaron Long, frequented the two Atlanta spas and bought the gun used in the shooting the day of the incident.
  • President Joe Biden ordered flags to be flown at half-staff Thursday to honor the victims. Biden also plans to visit Atlanta on Friday to meet with Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, as well as Asian American and Pacific Islander leaders, according to Georgia State Rep. Bee Nguyen.
  • Among the issues they will bring up is the concern that the shootings be "taken seriously" and seriously considered as a hate crime against Asians and not dismissed as the suspect having a "bad day,"
  • Across the US, Asian Americans are riddled with fear as unprovoked attacks against them intensify. Anti-Asian hate crimes have more than doubled during the pandemic,
  • The violence has surged amid racist rhetoric during the coronavirus pandemic -- some popularized by ex-President Donald Trump. Many Asian Americans have been subjected to vitriol about the "China virus" or the "kung flu" -- even those who have never been to Asia.
  • whenever anyone disagrees with her opinion or policies, the first thing they do is criticize the country her parents came from and, second, her gender.
  • Three of the victims were 52, 75 and 64 years of age, according to birth years listed in an Atlanta police incident report.
  • Bottoms told CNN that nowadays "there seems to be permission now to be hateful."
  • "There seems to be a permission that I've not seen, at least in my lifetime," Bottoms said. "It does predate Donald Trump, but he certainly has given permission and done his part to elevate the hatred."
  • Kim, a 24-year-old Korean American, said she often feels like she has a target on her back. Last year, she said a parent wanted to remove one of her students from her second-grade class because Kim was Asian.
  • Yet despite outrage over the shootings, attacks against Asian Americans continue. An Asian man and woman were assaulted Wednesday by the same suspect in separate attacks,
  • "While we're relieved the suspect was quickly apprehended, we're certainly not at peace as this attack still points to an escalating threat many in the Asian American community feel today,"
  • Delaina Ashley Yaun, 33, of Acworth; Paul Andre Michels, 54, of Atlanta; Xiaojie Tan, 49, of Kennesaw; and Daoyou Feng, 44, were all fatally shot at Youngs Asian Massage in Cherokee County.
  • Actress Lucy Liu told CNN's Erin Burnett on Thursday that she believes race relations will get worse before they can get better.
  • Three more victims were found dead at Gold Massage Spa in Atlanta, and another victim was found dead across the street at the Aroma Therapy Spa.
  • Long, 21, faces eight counts of murder and one count of aggravated assault.Long was on his way to Florida, possibly to take the lives of more victims, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said, citing investigators.
  • The suspect told police he believed he had a sex addiction and that he saw the spas as "a temptation ... that he wanted to eliminate,"
  • It's not clear whether any of the three businesses offered sexual services in addition to massages. But authorities have given no indication the three businesses were operating illegally
  • Capt. Jay Baker on Tuesday said Long "was pretty much fed up and had been kind of at the end of his rope. Yesterday was a really bad day for him, and this is what he did."
  • Sheriff Frank Reynolds said in a statement Thursday he has known and worked with Baker for many years and his comments "were not intended disrespect any of the victims, the gravity of this tragedy or express empathy or sympathy for the suspect."
  • Shortly before 5 p.m. Tuesday, deputies were called to Youngs Asian Massage between the Georgia cities of Woodstock and Acworth after reports of a shooting, Cherokee County sheriff's officials said.That shooting left four people -- two Asian and two White -- dead and one person injured, Baker said.
  • About an hour later and 30 miles away, Atlanta police responded to the Gold Massage Spa on Piedmont Road in Atlanta. Police said they found three people dead.While there, police received another call of shots fired across the street at the Aroma Therapy Spa, where they found one person dead
  • Investigators found surveillance video of a suspect near the Cherokee County scene and published images on social media.Long's family saw the images, contacted authorities and helped identify him, Cherokee County Sheriff Frank Reynolds said Wednesday."(The family members) are very distraught, and they were very helpful in this apprehension," Reynolds said.
  • Long has claimed responsibility for the shootings at the spas, the Cherokee County sheriff's office said.
  • He is facing four counts of murder and a charge of aggravated assault, according to the county sheriff's office. He also has been charged with more four counts of murder,
  • A law enforcement source told CNN that Long was recently kicked out of the house by his family due to his sexual addiction, which, the source said, included frequently spending hours watching pornography online.
  • "It looked like a hate crime to me," she said. "This was targeted at Asian spas. Six of the women who were killed were Asian so it's difficult to see it as anything but that."
  • "Sex" is a hate crime category under Georgia's new law. If Long was targeting women out of hatred for them or scapegoating them for his own problems, it could potentially be a hate crime.
  • The shootings don't have to be racially motivated to constitute a hate crime in Georgia.
  • "We hear your concerns and want it to be known that these victims will receive the very best efforts of this office," Wallace said. "We anticipate beginning to meet with the impacted families in the near future, and earn their trust, as we continue to develop our case against the defendant."
hannahcarter11

As attacks against Asian Americans spike, advocates call for action to protect communit... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

Asian American Hate Crime Coronavirus

shared by hannahcarter11 on 16 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • A string of recent attacks against Asian Americans has communities and advocates on high alert, especially as many in the United States gather this weekend to celebrate the Lunar New Year.
  • An 84-year-old man from Thailand died in late January after being attacked on his morning walk in San Francisco. Days later, a 91-year-old Asian man was violently shoved to the ground in Oakland's Chinatown. Last week, a 64-year-old woman was robbed outside a Vietnamese market in San Jose, California. And a 61-year-old Filipino man was slashed in the face last week on the New York City subway.
  • But authorities and advocates for the Asian community say that hate and violence against Asians has been brewing for several months -- and needs to be addressed.
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  • Kulkarni likened the rise of hate against Asian Americans since the pandemic began to the 19th century era of "yellow peril," during which racist laws as well as stereotypes of East Asian immigrants as a threat to society proliferated in the US.
  • From then through the end of 2020, the organization received more than 2,800 firsthand reports of anti-Asian hate across 47 states and Washington, DC, according to data released this week.
  • The majority of those incidents -- about 71% -- were cases of verbal harassment, while shunning or avoidance made up about 21%. About 9% of the incidents involved physical assaults, and 6% included being purposely coughed or spit on, according to a Stop AAPI Hate news release.
  • A report published Wednesday by the Asian American Bar Association of New York noted that from January 1 to November 1, 2020, the New York Police Department saw an eight-fold increase in reported anti-Asian hate crimes compared to the same period in 2019.
  • From 2017 to 2019, the organization received less than 500 reported instances of hate against Asian Americans. But from February to December last year, they said they estimate there have been 3,000 incidents of hate cataloged by their group and others.
  • Yang attributes the rise of anti-Asian hate in the US partially to former President Donald Trump, who repeatedly referred to the coronavirus as the "China virus" in the early days of the pandemic.
  • Experts also blame the insecurity and fear brought on by the pandemic. People may respond to threats of disease or other crises by scapegoating another group perceived as falling outside the cultural norms -- in this case Asian Americans, the authors of the Asian American Bar Association report wrote.
  • Asian Americans are seen as easy targets for crime, perhaps because of language and cultural barriers that might prevent them from reporting incidents, according to Yang. And the elderly are particularly vulnerable, with concerns that they could be targeted for robberies as they are out shopping for the Lunar New Year.
  • But community leaders say that more needs to be done.Both Kulkarni and Yang are calling on community solutions to help address the problem. Yang called for bystander intervention training and local efforts such as neighborhood walk services and shopping services for the elderly. Kulkarni has called for more support and resources for Asian Americans to help them address incidents of assault and harassment.
Javier E

Lee Kuan Yew, the Man Who Remade Asia - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...man-who-remade-asia-1427475547

Singapore history modernization Chinese authoritarian development economic role model asians

shared by Javier E on 28 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Left with no other allies, he turned to Singapore’s own people, who were immigrants like himself. Because they were so divided by what he called “the most hideous collection of dialects and languages,” he quickly concluded that, if full democracy were implemented, everyone would simply vote for their own ethnic group and overlook the common interests of the country.
  • Impressed by the economic growth enjoyed by Asian countries such as Japan, Korea, Taiwan and finally China, Lee began wondering if their common Confucian heritage was not the foundation of their success. He was soon propounding the Confucian virtues that came to be known as “Asian values”—family, diligence, filial piety, education and obedience to authority. He viewed these values as binding agents for developing countries that needed to find a way to maintain order during times of rapid change.
  • Where did his enormous commitment and energy come from? How was he able to create such an unusual success story from virtually nothing?
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  • Then, just as Lee was extolling his notion of “Asian values” abroad, something unexpected happened in China. Faced with social upheaval brought about by Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, leaders in Beijing began groping for new ways to maintain order themselves. Intrigued by what Lee had been doing in Singapore, they too began reviving aspects of their old cultural edifice as a stabilizing force. The cultural vacuums in Singapore and China may have had different origins, but some version of “Asian values” suddenly felt like a comfortable remedy for both.
  • “I consider Deng a greater leader who changed the destiny of China and the world,” he said. He was deeply gratified by the way that Deng had brought wealth, power, order and pride back to China—still his racial homeland—as well as to all Chinese.
  • Deng’s admiration of Lee was just as deep. He appreciated Lee’s pragmatism and friendship, especially his refusal to criticize China for its undemocratic form of statecraft, even after the infamy of 1989. And, because “the Singapore model” proved that a country could modernize without surrendering to “wholesale Westernization,” Deng (and all subsequent leaders in Beijing) celebrated it. “If I had only Shanghai, I too might be able to change Shanghai as quickly,” he once wistfully lamented of his success. “But I have the whole of China!”
  • For Lee, the Chinese aphorism that best captured the uniquely Asian/Confucian view of the individual’s role in society was: Xiushen, qijia, zhiguo, pingtianxia: “Bringing peace under heaven first requires cultivating oneself, then taking care of one’s family, and finally looking after one’s country.”
  • Various people have described today’s supremely well-ordered Singapore as “a think tank state,” “a paradise designed by McKinsey” or “Disneyland with the death penalty.”
  • Modern Singapore boasts the world’s second-busiest port, its most celebrated airline and an airport that hosts 15 million visitors a year. With an annual average growth rate of almost 7% since 1976, it now has a per capita income of well over $50,000, making it the wealthiest country in Asia. And it has the second most entrepreneurs per capita in the world, trailing only the U.S.
  • there was an irony in Lee’s latter-day conversion to Chinese traditionalism and Asian authoritarianism, especially in his insistence that they could serve as agents of modernization. After all, it was only a few decades earlier that reform-minded Chinese intellectuals (including Communists like Mao Zedong) had identified such Confucian “Asian values” as the very cause of their country’s backwardness and weakness, and then sought to extirpate them from Chinese thinking.
  • Lee was a very different leader from his confreres in Beijing, but he shared something important with them: a mutual sense that, despite the long, painful and humiliating history of the Chinese people’s modern weakness, it was their destiny to make something of themselves
  • Lee once described the Chinese as burdened by “a sense of frustration that they were down for so long” and as “enormously ambitious to catch up.” As this rebirth finally began in the 1990s, it allowed Lee to proudly proclaim that China’s “reawakened sense of destiny is an overpowering force.” In making such utterances, he seemed to be speaking as a Chinese who identified as much with his race as with his nation
  • When Lee’s ancestors joined the great Chinese diaspora, they were stripped of their culture and national identities. This defoliating process created, in them and later generations of overseas Chinese, a strange kind of hunger for advancement
  • in Singapore, Lee could begin to satisfy that longing for progress uninhibited by the conservative traditions that have so often clashed with modernizing impulses around the world. His new country may have been an almost synthetic nation, without a coherent cultural core, but this relative vacuum ended up being a blessing in disguise when it came to the challenges of creating a completely new state from the bottom up.
  • China faced a similar situation in the wake of its own tectonic revolutionary upheavals. Mao Zedong once spoke of his people as possessing “two remarkable peculiarities.” They were, he said, “first poor and secondly blank,” which meant that they were inclined to “want revolution.” As he observed, “a clean sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the newest and most beautiful pictures can be painted on it.”
  • Mao’s savage Cultural Revolution destroyed even more of his country’s cultural legacy. But he was fond of reminding his followers that, “Without destruction there can be no reconstruction.” By the time Deng came to power in the late 1970s, his own reforms met with little resistance from those traditional forces that had so obstructed change earlier in the century. Like Lee in Singapore, Deng was aided by the fact that traditional culture had already been demolished.
  • Lee Kuan Yew not only made Singaporeans proud; he also made Chinese and other Asians proud. He was a master builder, a sophisticated Asian nationalist dedicated not only to the success of his own small nation but to bequeathing the world a new model of governance
  • Instead of trying to impose Western political models on Asian realities, he sought to make autocracy respectable by leavening it with meritocracy, the rule of law and a strict intolerance for corruption to make it deliver growth.
  • He saw “Asian values” as a source of legitimacy for the idea that authoritarian leadership, constrained by certain Western legal and administrative checks, offered an effective “Asian” alternative to the messiness of liberal democracy. Because his thinking proved so agreeable to the Chinese Communist Party, he became the darling of Beijing. And because China has now become the political keystone of the modern Asian arch, Beijing’s imprimatur helped him and his ideas to gain a pan-Asian stature that Singapore alone could not have provided.
anonymous

Attacks Blaming Asians For Pandemic Reflect Racist History Of Global Health : Goats and... - 0 views

www.npr.org/...e-from-black-death-to-covid-19

shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The pandemic has been responsible for an outbreak of violence and hate directed against Asians around the world, blaming them for the spread of COVID-19. During this surge in attacks, the perpetrators have made their motives clear, taunting their victims with declarations like, "You have the Chinese Virus, go back to China!" and assaulting them and spitting on them.
  • The numbers over the past year in the U.S. alone are alarming. As NPR has reported, nearly 3,800 instances of discrimination against Asians have been reported just in the past year to Stop AAPI Hate, a coalition that tracks incidents of violence and harassment against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the U.S.
  • Then came mass shooting in Atlanta last week, which took the lives of eight people, including six women of Asian descent. The shooter's motive has not been determined, but the incident has spawned a deeper discourse on racism and violence targeting Asians in the wake of the coronavirus.
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  • This narrative – that "others," often from far-flung places, are to blame for epidemics – is a dramatic example of a long tradition of hatred. In 14th-century Europe, Jewish communities were wrongfully accused of poisoning wells to spread the Black Death. In 1900, Chinese people were unfairly vilified for an outbreak of the plague in San Francisco's Chinatown. And in the '80s, Haitians were blamed for bringing HIV/AIDS to the U.S., a theory that's considered unsubstantiated by many global health experts.
  • Some public health practitioners say the global health system is partially responsible for perpetuating these ideas.According to Abraar Karan, a doctor at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, the notion persists in global health that "the West is the best." This led to an assumption early on in the pandemic that COVID-19 spread to the rest of the world because China wasn't able to control it.
  • China's response was not without fault. The government's decision to silence doctors and not warn the public about a likely pandemic for six days in mid-January caused more than 3,000 people to become infected within a week, according to a report by the Associated Press, and created ripe conditions for global spread. Some of the aggressive measures China took to control the epidemic – confining people to their homes, for example — have been described as "draconian" and a violation of civil rights, even if they ultimately proved effective.
  • But it soon became clear that assumptions about the superiority of Western health systems were false when China and other Asian countries, along with many African countries, controlled outbreaks far more effectively and faster than Western countries did, says Karan.
  • Some politicians, including former President Donald Trump publicly blamed China for the pandemic, calling this novel coronavirus the "Chinese Virus" or the "Wuhan Virus." They consistently pushed that narrative even after the World Health Organization (WHO) warned as early as March 2020, when the pandemic was declared, that such language would encourage racial profiling and stigmatization against Asians. Trump has continued to use stigmatizing language in the wake of the Atlanta shooting, using the phrase "China virus" during a March 16 call to Fox News.
  • A report by researchers at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF), released this month, directly linked Trump's first tweet about a "Chinese virus" to a significant increase in anti-Asian hashtags. According to a separate report by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, anti-Asian hate crimes in 16 U.S. cities increased 149 percent in 2020, from 49 to 122.
  • Suspicion tends to manifest more during times of vulnerability, like in wartime or during a pandemic, says ElsaMarie D'Silva, an Aspen Institute New Voices fellow from India who studies violence and harassment issues. It just so happened that COVID-19 was originally identified in China, but, as NPR's Jason Beaubien has reported, some of the early clusters of cases elsewhere came from jet setters who traveled to Europe and ski destinations.
  • the West is usually regarded as the hub of expertise and knowledge, says Sriram Shamasunder, an associate professor of medicine at UCSF, and there's a sense among Western health workers that epidemics occur in impoverished contexts because the people there engage in primitive behaviors and just don't care as much about health.
  • In the early days of COVID-19, skepticism by Western public health officials about the efficacy of Asian mask protocols hindered the U.S.'s ability to control the pandemic. Additionally, stereotypes about who was and wasn't at risk had significant consequences, says Nancy Kass, deputy director for public health at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics.
  • According to Kass, doctors initially only considered a possible COVID-19 diagnosis among people who had recently flown back from China. That narrow focus caused the U.S. to misdiagnose patients who presented with what we now call classic COVID symptoms simply because they hadn't traveled from China.
  • It's reminiscent of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, Kass says. Because itwas so widely billed as a "gay disease," there are many documented cases of heterosexual women who presented with symptoms but weren't diagnosed until they were on their deathbeds.
  • That's not to say that we should ignore facts and patterns about new diseases. For example, Kass says it's appropriate to warn pregnant women about the risks of traveling to countries where the Zika virus, which is linked to birth and developmental defects, is present.
  • But there's a difference, she says, between making sure people have enough information to understand a disease and attaching a label, like "Chinese virus," that is inaccurate and that leads to stereotyping.
  • Karan says we also need to shift our approach to epidemics. In the case of COVID-19 and other outbreaks, Western countries often think of them as a national security issue, closing borders and blaming the countries where the disease was first reported. This approach encourages stigmatization, he says.
  • Instead, Karan suggests reframing the discussion to focus on global solidarity, which promotes the idea that we are all in this together. One way for wealthy countries to demonstrate solidarity now, Karan says, is by supporting the equitable and speedy distribution of vaccines among countries globally as well as among communities within their own borders.Without such commitments in place, "it prompts the question, whose lives matter most?" says Shamasunder.
  • Ultimately, the global health community – and Western society as a whole – has to discard its deep-rooted mindset of coloniality and tendency to scapegoat others, says Hswen. The public health community can start by talking more about the historic racism and atrocities that have been tied to diseases.
  • Additionally, Karan says, leaders should reframe the pandemic for people: Instead of blaming Asians for the virus, blame the systems that weren't adequately prepared to respond to a pandemic.
  • Although WHO has had specific guidance since 2015 about not naming diseases after places, Hswen says the public health community at large should have spoken out earlier and stronger last year against racialized language and the ensuing violence. She says they should have anticipated the backlash against Asians and preempted it with public messaging and education about why neutral terms like "COVID-19" should be used instead of "Chinese virus."
yehbru

Why Asian-American Health Gets So Little Research Attention : Shots - Health News : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...search-into-its-health-effects

US Politics Asian American Racism Health Affects

shared by yehbru on 01 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Chang and her family, like many other Asian Americans, can see themselves in the thousands of reported hate incidents against Asians over the past year, and it's adding a new layer of stress to their lives.
  • "For many Asian Americans, these acts of harassment and violence are activating old wounds, memories of racial traumas. For others, they may now worry about going out alone to the grocery store, worrying about loved ones," she says.
  • But research into the health effects on Asian Americans of living with such violence is sparse. Health scientists like Chang say that's been damaging to the Asian community, and the research gap needs to close as soon as possible.
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  • Past research on other communities of color finds that repeated exposure to racism and racial violence can grind one's physical and mental health down. Race-related stress has been linked to higher infant mortality rates and cardiovascular disease in African American communities, and researchers continue to find more insidious ways racism harms health.
  • Without the research specific to Asian Americans' experience, it means any problems currently facing the Asian American community will likely continue to fester, unnoticed and unaddressed.
  • One is the model minority myth, which can suggest that Asians don't suffer economic or health disparities compared to whites.
  • From 1992 to 2018, only 0.17% of the National Institutes of Health's budget went to studying Asian, native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Americans.
  • "Aside from the language barrier, immigrants may not understand the justice system and that may be another reason that prevents them from reporting."
  • "If you look at all those cases, you will find that many people had the same or similar experiences before they reported,"
  • From March 19, 2020 to Feb 28, 2021, a period encompassing the ballooning of the country's coronavirus pandemic and some politicians' insistence on linking the virus to China, the Stop AAPI Hate Reporting Center recorded nearly 3,800 separate incidents of hate against Asians in the United States.
  • "White toxicity and racism have put an inordinate amount of pressure on Asians living in diaspora communities to cope with the trauma of being in an environment that does not see them and does not protect them."
Javier E

Suing For An Affirmative End To Affirmative Action « The Dish - 0 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...tive-end-to-affirmative-action

affirmative action asians elite University race discrimination harvard

shared by Javier E on 26 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • The suit cites statistical evidence to claim that Harvard holds Asian applicants to a “far higher standard than other students” and that Harvard uses “racial classifications to engage in the same brand of invidious discrimination against Asian Americans that it formerly used to limit the number of Jewish students in its student body.”
  • To get into the top schools, Asians need SAT scores that are about 140 points higher than those of their white peers. In 2008, over half of all applicants to Harvard with exceptionally high SAT scores were Asian, yet they made up only 17 percent of the entering class (now 20 percent). Asians are the fastest-growing racial group in America, but their proportion of Harvard undergraduates has been flat for two decades.
  • discrimination against an entire race of students is simply unmistakable. Fixing it could be accomplished not at the expense of racial diversity, but in curtailing affirmative action for athletes and legacy admissions.
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  • In 2008, Asian Americans composed 27 percent of Harvard’s applicant pool, 46 percent of applicants who earned above 2200 on the SAT and 55 percent of those students who earned about 2300 and sent scores to Harvard. … “In light of Harvard’s discriminatory admissions policies, [Asian Americans] are competing only against each other, and all other racial and ethnic groups are insulated from competing against high-achieving Asian Americans,”
  • It may well be salutary for universities to experiment with different means of achieving a diverse student body. At least some may find formally race-neutral means that work well. What these lawsuits seek, however, is not merely to encourage experimentation but to forbid taking race into account altogether. That is a different story.
  • the argument that affirmative action is categorically illegal under the Fourteenth Amendment or the Civil Rights Act is simply wrong. Neither text explicitly forbids affirmative action. And it is illogical — not to mention ahistorical — to argue that racial classifications intended to promote diversity are the legal equivalent of racial classifications that sought to uphold a white supremacist caste system. Opponents of affirmative action are hardly underrepresented in the ordinary political process, and this is where they should make their case.
  • Yes, the suits seek an end to all affirmative action. But the courts could provide a less extreme remedy that both gave Asian-American candidates a fair shake and kept a race-neutral way of encouraging diversity.
  • The way Jeff Yang sees it, this lawsuit isn’t really about helping Asians in the first place. After all, “Jane Dou” – as he calls the rejected Harvard hopeful – “didn’t end up at the center of the Harvard suit accidentally”: She was discovered through a broad-based campaign conducted by SFFA founder Edward Blum — a frustrated Republican congressional candidate who has chosen to make a career out of waging war on laws and policies that give “special privileges” to minorities.
  • What this lawsuit is really is just the latest attempt to derail an apparatus that has given hundreds of thousands of blacks, Hispanics and, yes, Asians a means to climb out of circumstances defined by our society’s historical racism.
yehbru

Opinion | 'Asian American' Is a Fiction. We Still Need It. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rican-AAPI-decolonization.html

US Asian Americans AAPI Politics

shared by yehbru on 31 May 21 - No Cached
  • One is not born an Asian American. It’s an identity that is inherently political, and must be chosen.
  • My family and I were refugees from Vietnam and the war fought there, but all I knew of the history that had brought us and many of our neighbors to the United States was what Hollywood told me. It confused me and shamed me to see people who looked like my parents being reduced to wordless masses, condemned to be killed, raped, rescued or silenced.
  • When my parents talked about Americans, they meant other people, not us, but I felt American, as well as Vietnamese
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • I discovered that Asian Americans had been writing and fighting in English since the late 19th century: the sisters Sui Sin Far and Onoto Watanna, Carlos Bulosan, John Okada, Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston and many more.
  • I didn’t learn about them before because racism isolates us, disempowers us and erases our history.
  • Against this racist and sexist fiction of the Oriental, we built the anti-racist, anti-sexist fiction of the Asian American. We willed ourselves into being, but as with every other act of American self-conjuring, we became marked by a contradiction between American aspiration and American reality.
  • On the one hand, Asian Americans have long insisted that we are patriotic and productive Americans. This self-defense often leans on the model minority myth and the idea that Asian Americans have succeeded in fields such as medicine and technology because we immigrated with educational credentials and we raise our children to work hard. But Asian Americans are also haunting reminders of wars that killed millions of people and generated many refugees. And Asian Americans have come to satisfy the American need for cheap, exploitable labor — from working on railroads to giving pedicures. We were and are perceived to be competitors in a capitalist economy fractured by divisions of race, gender and class and the ever-widening gap of inequality that affects all Americans.
  • As long as the United States remains committed to aggressive capitalism domestically and aggressive militarism internationally, Asians and Asian Americans will continue to be scapegoats who embody threat and aspiration, an inhuman “yellow peril” and a superhuman model minority.
  • “Asian American” has now morphed into a newer fiction: the “Asian American and Pacific Islander” community, or A.A.P.I. But again, there are contradictions inherent in this identity
carolinehayter

Bay Area Attacks On Asian American Seniors Evoke Anger And Fear : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...s-targeted-in-bay-area-attacks

Politics US trump culture policy

shared by carolinehayter on 12 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • Business and civil rights groups in California are demanding action after a recent surge of xenophobic violence against Asian Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area left one person dead and others badly injured. The brazen, mostly daylight assaults have rattled nerves in communities ahead of Friday's Lunar New Year holiday.
  • a 64-year-old grandmother was assaulted and robbed of cash she'd just withdrawn from an ATM for Lunar New Year gifts.
  • a 91-year-old man in Oakland's Chinatown, who was hospitalized with serious injuries after being shoved to the ground by a man who walked up behind him.
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  • In January, a 52-year-old Asian American woman was shot in the head with a flare gun, also in Chinatown.
  • 84-year-old Vicha Ratanapakdee was going for a morning walk in his San Francisco neighborhood. Surveillance cameras captured a man running at him full speed and smashing his frail body to the pavement.
  • The Oakland Anti Police-Terror Project has asked people "to wear yellow to show you're in support of Chinatown seniors and businesses."
  • The more than two dozen recent assaults and robberies in the Bay Area mirror a national rise in hate crimes against older Asian Americans during the pandemic. From last March through the end of 2020, Kulkarni's group has documented nearly 3,000 incidents of anti-Asian hate across 47 states and the District of Columbia.
  • Despite arrests in some of the high-profile attacks, the violence has prompted many Chinatown businesses to reduce hours during a normally bustling shopping period ahead of Friday's Lunar New Year holiday.
  • Separately, more than 200 people across the area have volunteered to serve as "community strollers" in Chinatown starting next week.
  • "These attacks taking place in the Bay Area are part of a larger trend of anti-Asian American/Pacific Islander hate brought on in many ways by COVID-19, as well as some of the xenophobic policies and racist rhetoric that were pushed forward by the prior administration,"
  • "Racist rhetoric from the pandemic has targeted us as being the reason for the coronavirus," Wu says, singling out phrases used by former President Trump to describe the outbreak's origins.
  • Civil rights advocate Kulkarni also shared criticism of politically charged speech. "Oftentimes, perpetrators have used the exact language of the prior president, words like 'human virus, kung flu, China virus, China plague,' "Kulkarni says. "And sometimes they have even weaponized the former president himself saying 'Trump is going to get you, go back to your country.'
  • Across the bay in Oakland, Calif., police say they've added foot and car patrols and set up a mobile command post in Chinatown, measures the community welcomes.
  • "It's not unique to Chinatown or to the Asian community the increase in crime we've seen across the city and across the county, but we have seen in the last several weeks and month a very specific increase in crimes committed against Asians," O'Malley told a press conference in Chinatown.
  • "I believe there are some individuals in our community that have targeted people of different races," he says noting that some offenders may see Asian Americans as less likely report crimes to law enforcement.
  • The pandemic, chief Armstrong tells NPR, had certainly made it easier for criminals, with time on their hands, to mask up and often slip away unidentified. "That's why it's so important that businesses and others that have video that they share with us. The mask wearing, although it's required and I think very important for health reasons, it also is definitely a deterrence in identifying those that are responsible," he says.
  • President Biden, meantime, recently signed a memorandum pledging to combat anti-Asian and Pacific Islander discrimination. It was part of a series of racial equity-focused executive orders.
  • "What the incidents in the Bay Area remind us of is that action is needed now," Kulkarni says, "not a few months from now, not a few years from now."
Javier E

Opinion | What the Asian-American Coalition Can Teach the Democrats - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...asian-american-democrats.html

diversity inequality justice race class coalition Asian-American culture politics

shared by Javier E on 17 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Asian-Americans have built this political coalition not in spite of identities, but because of identities. Their success is a rebuke to those who denigrate “identity politics” and call for emphasizing class over race or identity.
  • The cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s insight is evergreen: “Race is the modality in which class is lived.” The creation of race and the exploitation of racial difference has always been a part of capitalism. This is why any call for privileging class over race is fundamentally mistaken at best and dishonest at worst.
  • the problem is not necessarily with identity politics per se. The problem lies in Mr. Trump’s conjoining of white identity politics with economic policies that favor the wealthy and a political strategy that includes demonizing other races
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  • The Asian-American coalition, by contrast, is demanding policies that in some way address those who are struggling and in need, and who are often people of color.
  • “Asian-Americans converge in several notable ways, including experiences with discrimination, voting behavior and attitudes on policies ranging from environmental protection to gun control to higher taxation and social service provision.”
  • The question for the Asian-American coalition, as for the Democratic Party as a whole, is what constitutes economic justice: the Clinton-Obama neoliberalism of favoring Wall Street and trade deals, with insufficient attention paid to the middle and working classes?
  • Or a more robust form of economic redistribution that would tax the wealthy at a higher rate, eliminate or greatly reduce student and medical debt, expand health insurance and child care, bolster public schools and enhance access to higher education?
  • As today’s Asian-American coalition sees it, no policy can be carried out effectively without paying attention to identities and differences
  • The majority of Asian-Americans, for example, support affirmative action, recognizing that it is needed to reduce inequities not only for African-Americans and Latinos but also for Pacific Islanders and poorer Asian-Americans.
  • Group interest and self-interest sometimes align and sometimes don’t, but solidarity entails that a coalition’s members sometimes seek justice for themselves, and sometimes for others.
  • A crucial lesson of the Asian-American coalition is that although celebrating diversity can sometimes draw attention away from issues of economic inequality, that does not mean that a focus on diversity, difference or identity ignores economic inequality. On the contrary, economic inequality in this country has always been built on racial differences.
  • Only the affirmation of racial differences, harnessed with a robust approach to economic justice, can help alleviate the many economic problems this country faces.
anonymous

Vigils For Atlanta Victims And Anti-Racism Protests Draw Thousands Across U.S. : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ctims-draw-mourners-across-u-s

shared by anonymous on 21 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • From Sacramento to Salt Lake City to Philadelphia, thousands gathered this weekend at vigils across the country with signs, candles, portraits and flowers grieving the eight victims of Tuesday's shootings in Atlanta and crying out against anti-Asian racism.
  • In Atlanta, hundreds attended a rally and march Saturday afternoon, some holding signs reading "Stop Asian Hate" and "Racism Is A Virus." The demonstrators met at Liberty Plaza, across the street from the Georgia state Capitol, where just last year lawmakers passed a hate crimes bill allowing additional penalties to be added when perpetrators are convicted of other crimes. The suspect in Tuesday's shootings, a 21-year-old white man, has been charged with eight counts of murder. Investigators say the suspect claims race did not play a role in targeting the businesses, but they have not yet ruled out a racist motive.
  • "I know there's a lot of fear in the Asian American community — fear to walk outside their door, fear to go to their businesses," said Georgia state Rep. Sam Park
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  • "I want to tell anyone who may be scared today: Do not be afraid. This is our home. This is our country. And we will not go back."
  • Tuesday's killings came as many Asian Americans were already trying to draw attention to an increase in anti-Asian hate incidents and violence during the coronavirus pandemic. A recent study from California State University-San Bernardino found anti-Asian hate crimes rose in several large cities in 2020.
  • President Biden spoke out against anti-Asian hate in an address from Atlanta Friday night, while a vigil in New York City drew Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and mayoral hopeful Andrew Yang.
  • Speaking to the crowd of hundreds gathered in Manhattan's Union Square, New York state Sen. John Liu joined the many this week who have criticized authorities in Cherokee County, Ga., for seemingly taking the shooter at his word in denying the attack was racially motivated.
  • For Asian American owners of businesses, the shootings left them newly worried about their own safety after a year many say has been marked by racist comments about the coronavirus pandemic.
  • At a virtual vigil hosted Friday night by the Atlanta chapter of the National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum, Atlanta-area restaurant owner Ching Hsia said Tuesday's attack left her afraid for her family and their employees at Yen Jing, their Korean-Chinese restaurant in Doraville, Ga.
aniyahbarnett

Hundreds gathered across the US to support Asian communities after Atlanta-area spa kil... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

crisis culture

shared by aniyahbarnett on 23 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Long-simmering fears of violence boiled over for many Asian Americans last week, when eight people were gunned down at Atlanta-area spas
  • "I'm Asian, and I'm a woman. And if I don't stand up for myself, then no one else will
  • "I want people to finally hear us ... not only when we're trending,"
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  • all the way down from our neighbors, all the way up to lawmakers. That's the kind of change I want to see."
  • Anti-Asian hate crimes have more than doubled during the pandemic,
  • y were hate crimes.
  • he had a sex addiction and that he saw the spas as "a temptation ... that he wanted to eliminate,"
  • Long is being held without the chance for bail in Cherokee County
  • one count of attempted murder, one count of aggravated assault and five counts of using a firearm while committing a felony
  • In Atlanta, multiple Korean church congregations held a Korean language service outside the Gold Spa in honor of the victims
  • There has been a rise in anti-Asian violence and an increase in vandalism at Asian-owned businesses across the Denver area in the past year,
  • Low said there have been reports of spitting, slurs, and graffiti targeting community members, as well as countless unreported crimes.
  • He said the US has had policies in place for more than 100 years that target and discriminate against Asian Americans, including the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and Executive Order 9066, which ordered Americans of Japanese descent into internment camps in the 1940s.
  • e 1982 killing of Vincent Chin,
  • Within an hour of the first shooting, four more Asian women were killed at two spas on Piedmont Road in Atlanta:
  • The families of the victims who have spoken out said they want justice for the senseless deaths of their loved ones.
  • "This was a massacre.
  • "no longer affirm that he is truly a regenerate believer in Jesus Christ.
  • "absolutely devastated at this senseless loss of life and callous disregard for human beings created in the image of God
aidenborst

Biden to sign order establishing White House initiative on Asian Americans, Native Hawa... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

US politics history crisis Culture policy Biden Biden-Administration Asian-Americans Racism Native-Hawaiians

shared by aidenborst on 03 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Friday renewing a White House initiative charged with advancing "equity, justice, and opportunity" for Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, including coordinating a "comprehensive" federal response to the rise in anti-Asian violence and discrimination.
  • "... For far too long, systemic barriers to equity, justice, and opportunity have put the American dream out of reach for many AA and NHPI communities, and racism, nativism, and xenophobia against AA and NHPI communities continues to threaten safety and dignity of AA and NHPI families," the White House said in a fact sheet released Friday.
  • The initiative, led out of the Department of Health and Human Services, aims to ensure the federal government is mitigating Covid-related anti-Asian bias, advancing health equity for AA and NHPI communities, and that they "equitably recover" from the dual crises caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and the anti-Asian attacks.
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  • The White House said the initiative will also address the "systemic lack of disaggregated data" on the AA and NHPI communities in federal statistical systems, as it noted how these communities together are the "fastest growing ethnic group" in the US. Read More
  • Krystal Ka'ai, who is a native Hawaiian, will lead the White House initiative. Ka'ai comes to her new role from Capitol Hill, where she served as the executive director of the bicameral Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus since 2013.
  • Last week, the President signed into law a bill intended to counter the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes by creating a new Justice Department position to expedite review of potential Covid-19-related hate crimes and incidents.
carolinehayter

As Asian Americans Seek Safety From A Rise In Attacks, Some Look To Guns : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...e-in-attacks-some-look-to-guns

Culture policy crisis history politics US

shared by carolinehayter on 08 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Asian Americans have been coping with the rise in anti-Asian attacks over the past year in a range of ways. Some are going out in public less. Others are organizing community ambassador programs, or escorts for the elderly.
  • But one small group of people in southern California is thinking about a very different response: Taking up firearms in self defense.
  • "My hope is that those who are interested in protecting themselves by exercising their Second Amendment rights learn a thing or two about how to properly and professionally handle a firearm," he said.
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  • Professor Brian Levin, with the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, says preliminary data show hate crimes targeting people of Asian descent surged nearly 150% last year across 16 major cities, from 49 in 2019 to 122 in 2020.
  • Many who chose to attend the training said they had been on the receiving end of racism
  • "And my other hope is that Asian Americans around the country realize that, look, we can't live our lives in fear. We have to at least do something about it and stand up to it," Kim said.
  • And a non-profit called Stop AAPI Hate (AAPI stands for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders) collected 3,795 reports of what it describes as hate incidents, from verbal harassment to physical assault, between March 19, 2020, and Feb. 28, 2021.
  • Teddy Tong, a 64-year-old ophthalmologist, had never fired a gun before attending the training and has no plans to buy one. But he said he wanted to learn how to handle firearms "in case that need ever arises." "It seems like a very practical and useful lesson at this point," he said.
  • Nationwide, the increase in violence has fueled a conversation about the causes of anti-Asian racism, and how to address it. Three weeks ago, the U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties held a hearing on the rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans.
  • Edward Chang, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Riverside, said the hearing is a good start, because over the years Asian Americans "were either being ignored or not invited" to discussions about race. "Asian American communities have been invisible," Chang said.
  • One woman - a senior physician at one of the area's top hospitals - was rattled by the experience. She declined to be identified because she wasn't sure how her colleagues would react to her considering using guns.
  • "I think it's ridiculous... I can't believe that I'm living in America now at this day and age where I have to think about how I can fend for myself and my family. And it's taken me to acquiring firearms to do that," Chung said.
  • A few weeks ago, he took his 16-year-old daughter to a gun range to teach her how to shoot. "I feel like I'm equipping her with something that empowers her, and hopefully she would never have to use it," he said.
Javier E

How Asian Groceries Like H Mart and Patel Brothers Are Reshaping America - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...an-grocery-stores-america.html

groceries food asian industry

shared by Javier E on 18 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • The H Mart of today is a $2 billion company with 96 stores and a namesake book (the best-selling memoir “Crying in H Mart,” by the musician Michelle Zauner). Last month, the chain purchased an entire shopping center in San Francisco for $37 million. Patel Brothers has 52 locations in 20 states, with six more stores planned in the next two years. 99 Ranch opened four new branches just last year, bringing its reach to 62 stores in 11 states. Weee!, an online Asian food store, is valued at $4.1 billion.
  • Asian grocery stores are no longer niche businesses: They are a cultural phenomenon.
  • Asian American grocers still represent less than one percent of the total U.S. grocery business,
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  • ate which products the big-box chains stock.
  • But these stores exercise an outsize impact, she said, as they di
  • more than any restaurant, cookbook or online video, Asian grocers are driving this shift.
  • April 2023 to April 2024, sales of items in the “Asian/ethnic aisle” in U.S. grocery stores grew nearly four times more than overall sales
  • Miso, ghee, turmeric, soy sauce — their journeys to becoming widely available pantry staples all began with an Asian grocer.
  • H Mart is attracting the clientele of the big grocers, too. Thirty percent of its shoppers today are non Asian, Mr. Kwon said, and he’s made changes to continue drawing them
  • placing more emphasis on in-store tastings, explaining how ingredients are used and posting signs in both Korean and English. Similarly, at 99 Ranch, the announcements ring out in Mandarin and English, and Western music has been added to the store playlists.
  • Swetal Patel, a partner at Patel Brothers, said that as the chain has expanded its audience — he estimates that 20 to 25 percent of shoppers are now non South Asian
  • “I find it fascinating that there are things on the shelf that I have no idea what they are,” said Jill Connors, an economic development director for the city of Dubuque, Iowa, who started shopping at Hornbill Asian Market earlier this year because she and her husband became vegan and wanted high-quality tofu at a reasonable price.
  • The sheer variety of foods to explore “brings more joy to the shopping and cooking process,”
brickol

'Coughing while Asian': living in fear as racism feeds off coronavirus panic | World ne... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...irus-us-asian-americans-racism

us COVID-19 crisis

shared by brickol on 25 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Across the US, Chinese Americans, and other Asians, are increasingly living in fear as the coronavirus spreads across the country amid racial prejudice that the outbreak is somehow the fault of China. It is a fear grounded in racism, but also promoted from the White House as Donald Trump – and his close advisers – insist on calling it “the Chinese virus”.
  • Last week Trump started to refer to Covid-19 as the Chinese virus.“The United States will be powerfully supporting those industries, like airlines and others, that are particularly affected by the Chinese virus. We will be stronger than ever before!” read one tweet on 16 March, the first time he referred to the illness as “Chinese virus” online. It comes from China, that’s why. It comes from China. I want to be accurate Trump’s use of the phrase sparked a chorus of criticism. Professional basketball player Jeremy Lin told Trump on Twitter that he should be instead supporting vulnerable people, “including those that will be affected by the racism you’re empowering”. Author Celeste Ng noted on Twitter that “Asians worldwide are facing actual harassment because of people who insist on calling the illness the Chinese virus”.
  • Trump’s new name for coronavirus comes after weeks of racist attacks against Asian American seen across the country. An Asian woman in New York City wearing a face mask was assaulted and called “diseased” in early February by a stranger in a subway station. In Los Angeles, a man directed a racist rant about coronavirus to a fellow passenger, who is Asian.
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  • “The increasing frequency [in incidents] is something we have to take seriously,” said Gregg Orton, national director of the National Council of Asian Pacific Americans (NCAPA). “Racial scapegoating is the exact opposite response we want to see from leaders of our country.”NCAPA led a group of 260 civil rights organizations in sending a call to Congress to denounce anti-Asian racism around coronavirus. The Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus sent a letter to their fellow members of Congress urging them to share verifiable information about the illness given the misconceptions about national origin and the spread of the virus.
  • “What is being accomplished by using this kind of language?” Kim said. “We’re being misled about what causes pandemics and how to possibly prevent them or reduce their severity in the future. That’s the kind of conversation that we need to be having.”
  • “It’s not really hatred that is the most operative in motion regarding [dangerous speech], it’s fear. Fear is what makes people turn violently against another group of people more than hatred,” Benesch said. “The level of fear is so great around this epidemic.”As the coronavirus and its effects appear to be long-lasting, advocates in the Asian American community emphasize the importance of speaking up and calling out any racist remarks, when the environment is safe.
yehbru

Anti-Asian Attacks Higher Than Numbers Indicate, Group Says : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ncidents-than-numbers-indicate

US Politics Asian Attacks Covid Pandemic California

shared by yehbru on 11 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • A surge in anti-Asian attacks reported since the start of the pandemic has left Asian Americans across the country scared and concerned, but a Los Angeles-based civil rights group says the actual number of hate incidents could be even higher.
  • This underreporting is due to a combination of several factors, ranging from language and cultural barriers to a lack of trust in law enforcement, Chung Joe said an interview with Morning Edition host Rachel Martin.
  • Stop AAPI Hate, a coalition aimed at addressing anti-Asian discrimination during the COVID-19 pandemic, received more than 2,800 firsthand reports of anti-Asian hate, including physical and verbal assaults, between March 19 and Dec. 31, 2020.
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  • The reported incidents range from verbal harassments to physical altercations.
  • As a man in his late 20s, Kim is not the typical victim of anti-Asian attacks. Chung Joe said that most attacks target the more vulnerable members of the Asian American community.
  • "Women are targeted more than twice as often as men," she said, and "we are seeing a spate of hate and violence targeted at our seniors."
  • Nearly 44% of all incidents reported to Stop AAPI Hate have come from California. Asian Americans account for roughly 15% of California's estimated 40 million people, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
  • "The Federal Government must recognize that it has played a role in furthering these xenophobic sentiments through the actions of political leaders, including references to the COVID-19 pandemic by the geographic location of its origin," Biden said. "Such statements have stoked unfounded fears and perpetuated stigma about Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and have contributed to increasing rates of bullying, harassment, and hate crimes against AAPI persons."
mimiterranova

Anti-Asian hate crimes increased by nearly 150% in 2020, mostly in N.Y. and L.A., new r... - 0 views

www.nbcnews.com/...rly-150-2020-mostly-n-n1260264

hate crimes culture

shared by mimiterranova on 12 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • he analysis released by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, this month examined hate crimes in 16 of America’s largest cities. It revealed that while such crimes in 2020 decreased overall by 7 percent, those targeting Asian people rose by nearly 150 percent.
  • What Trump did is that he weaponized it in a way,” Ramakrishnan said. “Trump's rhetoric helps set a certain narrative in place — and presidents have an outsized role in terms of shaping narrative. They don't call it a bully pulpit for nothing, and especially Trump, the way he frequently used Twitter as well as press conferences and off-the-cuff remarks to campaign rallies to frame the narrative in a particular way, it likely played a role.”
  • The analysis revealed a surge in cities such as New York, where anti-Asian hate crimes rose from three in 2019 to 28 in 2020, a 833 percent increase. Los Angeles and Boston also experienced notable rises, from seven to 15 and six to 14, respectively. Meanwhile, Washington, D.C., experienced a decline from six to three anti-Asian hate crimes. Chicago remained unchanged, with two crimes each year.
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  • The first spike in anti-Asian hate crimes occurred in March and April last year. However, it occurred alongside a rise in Covid-19 cases and ongoing negative associations of Asian Americans with the virus, the analysis noted.
  • A separate study revealed that the use of “China virus” language to refer to the coronavirus, particularly by GOP officials and conservative outlets, has already resulted in a shift in how many people in the U.S. perceive Asian Americans. The significant uptick in discriminatory coronavirus speech that occurred on March 8 — the day Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., tweeted about the “Wuhan virus,” which coincided with then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s interview the day before on "Fox and Friends" in which he referred to the "China virus" — was followed by a rapid reversal of a decadelong decline in anti-Asian bias.
  • "Many of these Chinatowns are in places that are low income and also suffering economically. So that might be one set of explanations as to why this phenomenon is taking this particular shape," he said. "On top of that, we live in an age of viral social media, and … especially the shock value of some of these videos increases awareness and maybe anxiety in the community.
Javier E

Opinion | At Harvard, Affirmative Action Shouldn't Be Just Black and White - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mative-action-harvard-unc.html

affirmative action scouts decision history policy

shared by Javier E on 07 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • It’s not that I oppose affirmative action per se; boosting opportunities for members of a historically disadvantaged group as a means of reparation and social justice seems to me easily morally justifiable.
  • nothing so defensible has been playing out in the admissions offices of the most selective American universities.
  • The voluminous record in the cases brought against Harvard and U.N.C. suggest that in order to maintain a vaguely defined notion of “diversity,” the schools’ admissions officials bumped up the chances primarily of Black and Hispanic applicants by undermining opportunities of another historically disadvantaged racial group — Asian Americans.
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  • As The New Yorker’s Jay Caspian Kang writes, elite colleges’ affirmative action programs seemed “designed for a racially binary America” and “never got meaningfully updated for today’s multiracial democracy.” He argues that much of the public debate about the court’s decision seems stuck in that binary, too.
  • As Roberts and Gorsuch observe, these categories are in some ways too broad and in other ways too narrow
  • Perhaps the fundamental problem with these schools’ policies is their limited conception of the capacious and fluid nature of racial identity.
  • at Harvard, U.N.C. and other colleges that use the common admissions application, applicants are asked to choose one or more options from a list “to explain ‘how you identify yourself.’ The available choices are American Indian or Alaska Native; Asian; Black or African American; Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander; Hispanic or Latino; or White,” adding, “Applicants can write in further details if they choose.”
  • He’s right. As I followed the case, it was this outdatedness that stuck in my craw
  • I will note a couple of points to undercut the liberal justices’ worry: First, it’s worth remembering that the decision’s impact is limited — as the sociologists Richard Arum and Mitchell Stevens argued recently in The Times, affirmative action mattered most for only a small group of the most selective colleges
  • Where do these categories come from? Gorsuch puts it pithily: “Bureaucrats.
  • Another instance of confusion came during oral argument, when U.N.C.’s attorney was asked which box a person from Jordan, Iraq, Iran or Egypt should check. He said he didn’t know, which seemed a pretty revealing answer: If U.N.C. doesn’t know what race a person of Middle Eastern descent is, should it really be making decisions based on race?
  • according to the American government, there is a correct answer to this question: Although some Arab American groups have lobbied to change the designation, people of Middle Eastern descent are officially classified as white.
  • the records suggests that Harvard also treated racial categories quite like stereotypes: Applicants of Asian descent were more likely than members of other racial categories to be labeled “standard strong,” meaning that admissions personnel determined they were academically qualified but otherwise unremarkable
  • Asian Americans scored better than other groups on academic and extracurricular measures, but Harvard’s admissions officers consistently gave Asians lower “personal” ratings than members of other groups. Harvard’s use of such subjective criteria to curb the number of Asian students admitted smacked of its efforts a century ago to keep out Jewish applicants it deemed unworthy of its “character and fitness” standards.
  • In dissent, the three liberal justices argued persuasively that the court’s ruling might significantly reduce enrollment of Black and Hispanic students at elite colleges. I agree this is a serious concern
  • Ignore if you can the ugly stereotyping — how the perfect SAT score would have been more impressive if the student had been “brown,” how “of course” it was an Asian kid who did so well, even if “still” impressive — and note the racial confusion: According to the colleges’ own categories, Asian includes brown people from, or whose forebears hailed from, the Indian subcontinent. But apparently U.N.C.’s officers’ mental picture didn’t match their official racial boxes.
  • The ruling presents us with another opportunity, too: To think about race more realistically, with far more specificity and precision. The 2020 census showed that America is growing more multiracial and more ethnically and racially diverse. We are far more than six categories on a demographic form — we contain multitudes, and we should recognize them.
  • “The ruling provides America with an opportunity to redirect the conversation from a relatively small number of schools and instead direct urgently needed attention to the vast middle and lower tiers of postsecondary education,” they wrote.
mimiterranova

8 Dead in Atlanta Spa Shootings, With Fears of Anti-Asian Bias - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...shooting-atlanta-acworth

dead hate crimes Culture crisis fears atlanta

shared by mimiterranova on 03 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • The man who police say went on a rampage at three spas in the Atlanta area has been charged with eight counts of murder in connection with the attacks.
  • The man who police say went on a rampage at three spas in the Atlanta area, killing eight people, was charged on Wednesday with eight counts of murder in connection with the attacks.
  • The brazen shootings, which took the lives of six women of Asian descent, stirred considerable outrage and fear in the Asian-American community
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  • The suspect told the police that he had a “sexual addiction” and had carried out the shootings at the massage parlors to eliminate his “temptation,” the authorities said on Wednesday.
  • Six of the eight people killed in the shootings at Atlanta-area spas on Tuesday were women of Asian descent
  • Ms. Yaun was a customer at Young’s Asian Massage and had been planning a date night with her husband, her half sister, Dana Toole, said. She was killed, and her husband survived after locking himself in a nearby room as gunshots rang out, Ms. Toole said.
  • President Biden said on Wednesday that “the question of motivation is still to be determined” in the Georgia shootings, while renewing his concerns over a recent surge in violence against Asian-Americans.
  • “I know Asian-Americans are very concerned. Because as you know I have been speaking about the brutality against Asian-Americans for the last couple months, and I think it’s very, very troubling. But I am making no connection at this moment to the motivation of the killer. I’m waiting for an answer from — as the investigation proceeds — from the F.B.I. and from the Justice Department. And I’ll have more to say when the investigation is completed.”
  • “This speaks to a larger issue, which is the issue of violence in our country and what we must do to never tolerate it and to always speak out against it,” Ms. Harris said, adding that the motive in the shooting was still unclear.
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