Asian Americans Are Confronting a New Wave of Racial Violence

By Jesse Jackson, Chicago Sun Times

11 March 21

The scapegoating of Asian Americans is taking an ugly, violent turn.

new wave of anti-Asian racial violence is sweeping the country. Sadly, racial violence, bigotry and hatred directed at Asian Americans has scarred their history in this country.

Nothing is more dehumanizing. Asian Americans come from many countries and many cultures. They have played a remarkable role in building this country. And yet, the violence erases their humanity, identifies them as the other, and ignores their contributions.

I remember in May of 1983, I met with Lily Chin and Asian American leaders at San Francisco Chinatown’s Cameron House. A year earlier, her son Vincent was chased down in the streets of Detroit by two unemployed white auto workers, who beat him to death with baseball bats.

“It’s because of you mother-(expletive)s we’re out of work!” shouted one of his attackers. They thought Vincent was Japanese. This was the 1980s when U.S. auto plants were shutting down during the Reagan recession, and blame was wrongfully placed on competition from Japanese auto imports, setting off a wave of anti-Japanese/anti-Asian hysteria.

I was struck then by the way Lily Chin stood up and fought against this injustice, and how leaders like Norman Fong, Mabel Teng and Helen Zia organized marches and resistance in the Asian American communities from Los Angeles to New York.

They rose up to organize against anti-Asian racial violence. They found common ground with African Americans, Latinos and others, and forged alliances with people and organizations that have long been targets of racial violence. The fight against racial violence became a key pillar of my 1984 presidential campaign, and Asian Americans became an integral part of our Rainbow Coalition from its very start.

Today, violence targeting Asian Americans is becoming an alarming weekly, if not daily, occurrence. It is stoked to no small degree by more than a year of Trump obsessively describing the coronavirus as the “China Virus” and “Kung Flu.” Fueling his base of white nationalism, Trump resurrected a “Yellow Peril” scare.

Trump combined this vitriol with a big lie, blaming our loss of jobs to China. The reality is that American corporations took our jobs to China, seeking to take advantage of low-wage labor with few rights and few environmental protections. It was U.S. policy that failed to protect our jobs. Now Trump and others blame China when it was our leaders who were at fault.

Words matter. The scapegoating of Asian Americans is taking an ugly, violent turn: On Jan. 28, 2021, 84-year-old Vicha Ratanapakdee was out for a morning walk in San Francisco when he was violently assaulted. Days later, he died.

On Feb. 3 in Manhattan, Noel Quintana, 61, was riding the subway when his assaulter slashed his face.

Last year, an Asian woman in Brooklyn had acid thrown in her face as she took out the garbage. A Burmese man and his two children were slashed by a knife-wielding attacker while shopping in Midland, Texas.

On street corners and in shopping malls, “Asian Americans Have Been Attacked, Spat On, and Cursed Out,” as reported by Slate. Stop AAPI Hate received reports of more than 3,000 incidents of anti-Asian violence in 2020.

It’s reminiscent of the post-9/11 hysteria that targeted Muslims, as well as Sikhs and other South Asians living in the U.S.

For Chinese Americans, Lunar New Year in the month of February is usually a time for firecrackers, lion dances and celebration in Asian communities. This year, community leaders marked the occasion by confronting this inglorious rise of racial violence.

From progressive Asian community activists to Hollywood actors, business leaders and athletes, Asian communities are rising up and confronting this new wave of racial violence. Community activists are organizing self-patrols and community escorts for the elderly. They want these anti-Asian attacks to be prosecuted as hate crimes.

In the best tradition of the civil and human rights movement, they are holding marches and rallies to defend their communities against violence, and building alliances with African Americans, Latinos and other communities fighting against racial injustice.

NBA basketball player Jeremy Lin said, “It would be hypocritical of me to say I’m anti-racism if I only stand up for people who look like me. There is definitely power in unification and solidarity. ... We as minorities also have to collaborate, unify and use our voices and stand up for each other.”

President Biden has weighed in, issuing an executive memorandum saying the “inflammatory and xenophobic rhetoric has put Asian American and Pacific Islander persons, families, communities and businesses at risk.” Special task forces are being organized by local police departments. Local elected leaders have taken to the media to call for unity with the Chinese and Asian communities and decry the violence and harassment.

Some of the most shameful chapters of our history involve racial prejudice against Asian Americans. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act (extended to all Asians in 1924) made it illegal for Chinese to immigrate to the U.S. In the Rock Springs Massacre of 1885, white mobs in Wyoming murdered 28 Chinese coal miners and burned Chinatown to the ground. World War II witnessed the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans in U.S. concentration camps, even as many of their sons fought loyally in the U.S. Armed Forces.

Asian communities are suffering, even as they are summoning the courage of Lily Chin, turning their pain into power, determined to stop the violence and never surrender. At Rainbow PUSH, we stand with them, and call on all citizens of conscience to join them in their drive to confront the hatred and stop the violence.

Rahm Emanuel Is in the Running for a Top Ambassador Post. The Prospect Is Appalling.

By Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News

11 March 21

ahm Emanuel has never been associated with the word “diplomatic,” but news reports say that President Biden is seriously considering him for a top position as U.S. ambassador to Japan or China. Naming Emanuel to such a post would be an affront to many of the constituencies that got Biden elected. The saga of Emanuel’s three decades in politics is an epic tale of methodical contempt for progressive values.

One thing Emanuel can’t be accused of is inconsistency. During his political career, he has steadily served elite corporate interests, and rarely the interests of the broad public or the causes of racial justice or peace.

Emanuel rose to prominence as the finance director for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. He excelled at pulling in large checks from super-wealthy individuals. As a high-level Clinton administration aide, he played a major role – and bragged about it – in the passage of the disastrous NAFTA trade bill, which was strongly opposed by unions, environmentalists and most Democrats in Congress. He also was a spark plug for passage of the mass-incarceration-oriented 1994 Crime Bill, with prison-term-lengthening provisions like “three strikes.”

In 1996, Emanuel boasted to a Washington Post reporter of the administration’s “tough” policies on “wedge issues – crime, welfare, and recently immigration.” In a memo that year, he urged Clinton to move rightward on immigration policy by working to “claim and achieve record deportations of criminal aliens.” The next year, Emanuel’s approach was explained by a senior staffer at the Immigration and Naturalization Service who worked closely with him: “As long as we dealt with illegal immigration, we could be to the right of Atilla the Hun. Rahm felt that Americans believed too many people were coming into this country, too many foreigners, so he wanted to show the administration returning people, deporting them, putting up bigger fences, sending them back.”

In July 1996, the Republican-controlled Congress pushed through its punitive "welfare reform" bill that ended the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, added work requirements and gave states the power to slash support. In the intense White House debate over whether to sign the bill, Emanuel was one of the strongest voices urging Bill Clinton not to veto the bill, as the president had done with earlier GOP welfare bills. Clinton signed the “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996,” prompting an outcry from anti-poverty activists and high-level administration resignations.

After leaving the Clinton administration in 1998, Emanuel made a quick $18 million in two and a half years as managing director of the Wall Street investment bank Wasserstein Perella, working out of its Chicago office.

Elected to Congress in November 2002, Emanuel supported George W. Bush’s disastrous Iraq invasion, and defended the war after most Democrats in Congress and most of the public had turned against it. As head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2006, Emanuel seemed oblivious to the change in public opinion. While he took credit for Democrats regaining the House majority, his selection of right-leaning candidates, including Iraq war supporters like himself and former Republicans, ultimately led to GOP gains.

While serving as President Obama’s chief of staff in 2009 and 2010, Emanuel argued for mollifying healthcare reform opponents by significantly weakening Obamacare. (He acknowledged years later it was a good thing Obama didn’t listen to him.) In a 2010 meeting with liberal leaders who planned to publicly pressure the Democratic Party’s conservative wing into supporting healthcare reform, Emanuel famously called them “fucking retarded.”

Emanuel was known in D.C. for hyper-combativeness (earning him the nickname “Rahmbo”) and his ability to gain positive spin from corporate media: “He is on a first-name basis with every political reporter in Washington,” a Washington Post columnist asserted.

After being elected mayor of Chicago in 2011, Emanuel’s administration faced a series of scandals that included concerted warfare against the teachers’ union and the closing of 49 public schools, many in black neighborhoods.

In his 2015 bid for re-election, he was forced into a runoff by progressive challenger Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, a contest that would be decided largely by African American voters. Emanuel very likely would have lost the election except for the fact that for 13 months, through the duration of the campaign, his administration suppressed a horrific dashcam video showing the death of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, an African American who’d been shot 16 times by a police officer as he walked away from the officer. (The city had paid $5 million to McDonald’s family without a lawsuit having been filed.)

Soon after a judge ordered the city of Chicago to release the video, polls found that only 17 percent of Chicagoans believed Emanuel when he said he’d never seen the video and that most city residents wanted him to resign as mayor.

When it was reported last November that Biden was considering him for a cabinet post, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted: “Rahm Emanuel helped cover up the murder of Laquan McDonald. Covering up a murder is disqualifying for public leadership.” Then-Congressman-elect Mondaire Jones added: “That he's being considered for a cabinet position is completely outrageous and, honestly, very hurtful.”

Emanuel’s 30-year campaign against pro-working-class policy reforms is unending. Asked last August how he would advise the Biden administration, he told CNBC: “Two things I would say if I was advising an administration. One is there’s no new Green Deal, there’s no Medicare for All.”

If Rahm Emanuel becomes the ambassador to China or Japan – countries with the world’s second- and third-largest economies – he will gain new leverage in a region bristling with ethnic and military tensions. Everything about his record indicates that such power would be vested in the wrong hands.

Days after Biden’s election, AOC told The New York Times that Emanuel’s inclusion in the Biden administration “would signal, I think, a hostile approach to the grassroots and the progressive wing of the party.”

We’ll soon find out whether Biden is willing to send such a signal.

Jeff Cohen is an activist, author and co-founder of RootsAction.org. He was an associate professor of journalism and the director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College and founder of the media watch group FAIR. In 2002-2003, he was a producer and pundit at MSNBC. He is the author of Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.

Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the author of many books, including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions. Solomon is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.