Happy #BlackHistoryMonth !
I still haven't made it to Black history. Still on white US history.
Q: Why does it seem like so much of the anti-Asian hate that I see on TV and in newspapers is done by Black people? It seems like Asian folk should be legitimately afraid of Black people! Why does it seem that way?
A: Racism. Most Asian hate attacks are done by white folk. Asian folk are significantly safer from Asian hate, when they are around Black folk.🙂🙃
Newspapers lied on us.
90% of the US Anti-Asian hate attacks, are done by white folk
https://npr.org/transcripts/980437156
And yet the press focuses on Black-on-Asian violence (~5% of total). Because racism. So our "solution" is a carceral one that Asian groups oppose🤦🏿♂️
Because it'll harm the Black and brown folk that racism has told us to expect are causing whatever problem US society has.
If Black folk were at least as prejudiced against Asian folk as white folk are, we would expect at least 13% of the Asian hate attacks to be done by Black folk. But we don't see that in the data. We see the opposite. And we see white US folk significantly over-represented in Asian hate crimes.
A racist news media cannot fairly report on crime involving Black people. Instead, it shapes opinions and pushes false narratives about crime and Black people.
It plays into the "Southern Strategy."
This is beyond simply saying "newspapers do this to make more money!" and "If it bleeds, it leads!" Given changing demographics of who buys newspapers, it *costs* newspapers money to push this tired, debunked, racist narrative.🤡
Newspapers are starting initiatives to "win young Black and brown people over."
vanityfair.com/news/2021/09/inside-ag-sulzbergers-top-times-project
This initiative is so incredibly misguided that it's bound to fail.
Young Black and brown folk don't trust the NYT, because it's not trustworthy.🤷🏿♂️
It's not about marketing the good stuff better. It's about not printing the misleading, anti-Black, anti-brown, anti-trans stuff.
NYT would increase circulation more by canceling this initiative, and going 12 months without printing any anti-Black content, and by being early or on time, instead of embarrassingly late, to any of the most important civil rights stories of our time: police reform, Trump, transphobia.
It's easy to see how Twitter's anti-woke obsession drove away key user segments in a matter of months, and made the business not viable. It's harder to see how newspapers have done the same exact thing to themselves, slowly, over 50 years, as the demographics of who buys news, has changed beneath their feet.
If your business depends on everyone paying a monthly fee, to hear rich white men lie about and harm them... I don't know how to tell you this, but that business is not long for this world.
Newspapers' anti-Black framing doesn't just hurt Black people. It hurts white people and Asian people too. It scares people that don't know white US history into making poor decisions.
The US passes laws not based on crime, but based on how white people feel about crime. How white people feel about crime, is largely based on fabrications by news coverage.
US media can invent a crime wave whenever it is convenient. Usually around elections, or after any progressive politician or DA is elected.🤡
This playing fast and loose with the truth, hurts Asian people too. For example, it is true that San Francisco is one of the worst cities in the US for incidents of Anti-asian hate. But that's because San Francisco is one of the *least Black* major cities in the US. 🙂🙃
Detroit is 77% Black. It's the Blackest US city and it's a rough place. No one wonders why Detroit isn't the Asian hate capital of North America.🤔
(RIP Vincent Chin. Killed in Detroit 40 years ago... by racist white autoworkers)
People that see the few hyper-amplified anti-Asian hate crimes committed by Black people in San Francisco, move to Portland, Oregon, or Seattle, Washington, or Vancouver, Canada to feel safer.
But... there are fewer Black people in those places... and more incidences of Anti-asian hate crime.😢
The *least* Black of those places, Vancouver, is the Asian hate crime capital of North America. 🤷🏿♂️
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2021-vancouver-canada-asian-hate-crimes/
Understand that most victims of Asian hate crimes, are Asian women.
Understand that there are Asian women civil rights experts whose families have been living in Black and Asian communities for generations.
Some of the clearest writing I've seen on this topic is from Michelle MiJung Kim.
https://medium.com/awaken-blog/on-anti-asian-hate-crimes-who-is-our-real-enemy-207ee7354926
Read what Michelle wrote. Then bookmark it. Then go back later and read it again. Then wait a few weeks and read it again. Do this every few months until what she's saying sinks in.
It wouldn't surprise folk to learn that the rise of Trump and his rhetoric around Covid, unleashed a relative increase in anti-Asian hate crimes that is greater than the relative increase experienced by other groups.
But it might surprise folk to realize that the absolute number of hate crimes, and rate of hate crimes, the probability of being attacked, is still highest for Black victims. Even though Black victims are significantly less likely to report incidents to the police.
The irony of the US response to "Black people harmed most by rising racism," being "Blame Black people and punish them even more."🤡
It's fine to be against Asian hate committed by Black people. Even 1 incident of Asian hate is too many. But understand that that's a very different thing than being against Asian hate in general.
We can't stop Asian hate, if we can't even acknowledge where it's coming from. We can't stop Asian hate, if white US history will only allow us to focus on 5% of it.
@mekkaokereke yeah. The New York Times: wrong for decades. And yet they do fund some good reporting; with the collapse of local news they are one of the few outlets that do. I am nonetheless unable to bring myself to subscribe.
Here’s an article on the latest “crime wave:” https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/myths-and-realities-understanding-recent-trends-violent-crime
@Esther2007 The Seattle Times is awful, has a union-busting management. I do subscribe to my local small-city paper, not because I like them, but because I want them to survive.
The Oregonian (Portland) is actually pretty good, though conservative, and Willamette Week (also Portland) has won a Pulitzer.
@ravenonthill @Esther2007 "The Seattle Times is awful, has a union-busting management"
Thanks for this info. New to WA. Will not be buying anything from this rag.
@mekkaokereke
Thank you for all these articles. You challenge "conventional wisdom" and bring receipts. I wish more of the people who need it would read and take a few minutes for introspection.
I truly wish it would be possible to find the gene so many of my fellow white folks have that makes us such a-holes. I really thought back in the '70s as we came out of the "civil rights era" that the racist dinosaurs would die off and it was "The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius."
Nope. Not even close.
Mmm. The intersection of newspapers confecting wild and inaccurate stories to push an agenda is not small.
#BlackHistoryMonth
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That's a fair question!
I'm not going to "oppression Olympics" this. It's all bad. But I will let you do some (horrific) human calculus.
Add up the number of Black church, supermarket etc shootings and bombings, etc in the US of the past 4 years, and compare to the synagogue shootings.
Both the FBI and Bureau of Justice statistics show that anti-Black hate crimes in the US are about double any other group that they track, including anti-Semitic attacks.
I say I'm not going to oppression Olympics this, because thinking that we don't need to address Asian hate or rising transphobia until other groups reach Black Americans' "suffering high score," is a degenerate position, and is not constructive or working towards any solution.
It also doesn't really matter, because it's the same bad actors doing all of this harm to all of us. If we reduce anti-black racism, we reduce transphobia, anti-Semitism, and Asian hate. ♥️👍🏿
This information is profoundly helpful. Thank you so much!
I have an Asian member of my team who called a Black coworker , and team leader,“ one of the good ones” Understandably, this comment has ignited agreed to attention between the two of them.
Hoping that the information you’ve shared in this powerful thread may help with some of the healing that needs to be done.
Thanks again!
> Nothing the US has ever done can compare to the residential school programs.
Except … their own residential school programs?
Those weren't just in Canada.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_boarding_schools
@ZDL Indeed. Ours (US) were just as awful, sometimes. (I'd say 'maybe worse', but it's hard to imagine how either could top what we already know.) That was the later phase of our systematic genocide against Natives, of course. But we share that -- for lack of a better term -- British cultural habit, also seen elsewhere in the world.
For what it's worth, though, Canada has done much better at facing up to its past. Here in the US, about a third of people are earnestly against that.
@cautionwip @sleepycactus @mekkaokereke But Canadians are far more *polite* while being racist, so that's all OK, right?
I think this convo is fine. Good actually!
These threads are opening points for people digging into the facts and history behind my snark and typos. Edward now has a better understanding of Asian hate, and what it feels like to be an Asian person living in Vancouver or Boston.
Some people reading this will think Boston is more racist. Others say Vancouver. It's not important that we all pick one winner. It is important that we agree that both are unacceptable.
@Artemis201 @mekkaokereke @ejsarge It is an interesting statistical puzzle. A racially homogenous community might have no instances of racist attacks, but still have violent racists. A more diverse population may have more observed racial conflict simply because of more inter-racial interactions.
There are lots of ways to slice the numbers (and adjust significance based on small numbers of observations). But any single statistic will surely be an oversimplification of the lived experience.
@knewman Without even thinking too hard, you can name just two white nationalist anti-Asian crime that killed more people than all of those incidents put together.
My point is that 3 incidents of a Black man punching a random elderly Asian person in San Francisco, will be amplified by the US news media more than *dozens of murders* of Asian women by white supremacists.
There is surveillance footage of those crimes as well. They don't get shared in the same way. That is an intentional choice.
@knewman NextDoor is simultaneously fantastically racist, and very ineffective.
I've already told folk, in the Bay area, your package thief is not Black. Your package thief is most likely a non-Black man with a backpack, or a non-white woman without one.
NextDoor is a tool for gossiping about Black people just walking through your neighborhood, and finding lost cats. We should just keep the cat part.
You're making justifications that aren't supported by the data.
Most of the sharing of one of the most shared videos of a Black man punching people in SF, was done well after the man was already identified, arrested, and charged. A mentally ill homeless man walked down the street punching people. He was on many cameras. Arrested. Charged. Still shared by the usual crew.
His sequence was part of what got Chesa recalled. An effort funded by the same right wing Trump supporters.
No.
You keep not hearing what I'm saying.
There were around *20 times* as many videos of white nationalists attacking people, mostly women. There are lots of these videos, even in the East Bay.
Videos of Trump supporters yelling racial slurs at people, and telling them to stop wearing masks. Punching people. Threatening to shoot them.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FSuxmaY6XXY
These videos are just much less likely to be shared.
Because racism.
There's a well documented phenomenon where newspapers are much more likely to release video clips of assaults where the assailant is Black. They're more likely to release mug shots where the assailant is Black. Cops are much more likely to reveal information about assailants where the assailant is Black.
All of this leads to much more rage-inducing shareable content of Black people acting badly.
This gives the opposite impression of what you see when you look at victim reports.
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