Thread by @WholePicture_

#Thread about #racism #BlackLivesMatter #AsianLivesMatter #AsiansAreHuman and #discrimination :
Attacks against Asians in the United States have also increased since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic.

nzz.ch/pro-global/usa…

This has to do with the remarks made by Donald Trump about the "China virus". But the racism against Asians goes back further.

It's difficult to quantify, but the sense of threat has grown so strong that vigilante groups have formed in the hardest-hit cities of New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland, patrolling Asian neighborhoods at night to protect residents .

In New York, police recorded 28 crimes against Asian Americans last year. The year before there were only three. There were nine such attacks in San Francisco in 2020, compared to six in 2019 and four in 2018. Some of these attacks were filmed and distributed online.

More precise information on the extent of the attacks is also difficult because most of the victims do not report to the police, as the “Stop AAPI Hate” group (AAPI stands for “Asian-American Pacific Islander”) has stated.

The organization gathered nearly three thousand cases of physical and verbal attacks against Asians last year. But many of them, especially the elderly, live relatively isolated in their own community, socialize almost exclusively among their own kind and speak little English.

In Chicago, for example, in addition to Chinatown, there is also a Vietnamese quarter, in which everything is written exclusively in Vietnamese and in which the residents not only find their grocery stores, but also Vietnamese dentists and lawyers.

There is hardly any need to go out of this ghetto.

It is noticeable that especially older people and women are attacked. The perpetrators presumably assume that there is little risk of these population groups reporting them.

As early as 1882, the United States passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was supposed to prevent Chinese workers from immigrating. Even then, there was talk of the “yellow danger” that supposedly threatened job security for Americans and their way of life in general.

These ideas rebounded in the wake of Pearl Harbor and then during the Vietnam and Korean Wars.
Mao and Chinese communism also gave new nourishment to the demonization of the population of Asian descent.

The Chinese immigrants were generally quite successful, but this did not earn them recognition, but rather envy and mistrust.

Tensions between African Americans and Asians also go back a long way.

In 1992, for example, riots broke out in Los Angeles after police officers brutally beat up the African American Rodney King and was released. Many Korean shops were looted and set on fire during the riot.

This increased the Asians' distrust of African-Americans, who in turn felt that they were not respected by the Asians.
Ultimately, it is probably a question of distribution battles between two marginalized groups who often compete for jobs in the same industries.

This situation has been made worse by Covid-19. Blacks lost their jobs more than average, but Asians with their shops also suffered severely from the lockdown.

In addition, especially in the course of the “Black Lives Matter” protests, Asians occasionally have the impression that racism against blacks is a much more frequent topic than that against them.

This also includes “relative discrimination”, for example when it comes to “affirmative action”, ie quota regulations for blacks at universities; Asians complain that they are not taken into account in such funding programs.

Many Asians complain that no one rushes to help them when they are attacked, that they are not heard, that they are not filmed when they are attacked, that they hardly appear in the media.

While blacks often have the feeling that they are reduced to their skin color, that they are given a negative image, that they are constantly being targeted by the police and, in a certain way, excessively exposed.

It is the other way around with Asians: they have the impression that they are invisible.