quote:Their grievances included these in March: An 83-year old Chinese man beaten to death by five boys on a Bayview street and a 57-year-old woman injured after being thrown off a Third Street Muni platform. On April 16, two teenagers in Oakland assaulted Tian Sheng Yu, a 59-year-old Chinese immigrant, in broad daylight. A punch knocked him to the ground; the fall killed him. ... “We recommend our staff not to say it,” Ms. Tan said, looking over the crowd. “We don’t want to escalate with African-Americans, so we don’t say it.” Then she turned and faced a reporter. “But it is racial,” she said. “That’s fact.”
It has been years since race relations in the Bay Area, where diversity and tolerance are pillars of the civic religion, have taken such a sharp turn for the worse.
The recent spate of highly publicized attacks on elderly Asians by black teenagers has abruptly enhanced a longstanding perception among Asians that they are disproportionately targets of racially motivated violence. ... Two days later, a young black man, Amanze Emenike, 21, said he was 12 when he heard older boys talking about why they singled out Asian and Latino immigrants: they would not report the crime and had no gangs to back them up. On Friday morning, on a Hunters Point hilltop with a breathtaking view of the Bay, Mr. Emenike and his sister, Sherry Blunt, 22, recounted their “spree” of crime against Asian and Latino immigrants several years ago.
quote:Federal investigators have informed the Philadelphia School District that they found merit in the claims of Asian students who said they were abused at South Philadelphia High School.
The school exploded in racial violence on Dec. 3, when 30 Asians were attacked during a daylong series of assaults carried out by groups of mostly African American classmates. ... The situation at South Philadelphia High has drawn parallels to Lafayette High School in Brooklyn, N.Y., where violence against Asians prompted a Justice Department investigation and, ultimately, a court order to fix the problem.
Federal officials found that Asian students faced "severe and pervasive" harassment at Lafayette, nicknamed "Horror High" after two dozen assaults in 2002, including the beating of the valedictorian.
quote:A teacher at South Philadelphia High School has filed a lawsuit claiming administrators retaliated against him for warning that Asian students were in danger - a warning that proved prophetic on Dec. 3. That day, 30 Asians were attacked in a series of assaults by groups of mostly African American classmates. The repercussions continue. ... Aitken became a teacher five years ago, after 20 years as a Philadelphia police officer. His record as an officer and a teacher was "impeccable," said his attorney, Marc Gelman.
Aitken alleges that under Brown, the school year started bad and got worse. On Sept. 1, 2009, she introduced herself to staff by expressing a desire to break up the "Asian dynasty," the lawsuit says. In such comments, "Brown contributed to, and tacitly approved of, the hostile environment."
Philadelphia, San Fransisco, New York, kind of a crappy situation all around, exacerbated by all sorts of things touched on in the articles, distrust/disengagement from government on the part of the Chinese-Americans, a very crappy situation among African-Americans where indeed black-on-black violence is still extremely serious, jealousy from those like Blunt that haven't achieved academic or monetary success but are in close quarters with it, and crappy if not malicious administration.
Posts: 7593 | Registered: Sep 2006
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Reminds me of race riots against Koreans when Rodney King was beaten. I think the perception that Asians won't report a crime, are smaller, own all the businesses and only hire Asians lead to the belief that they are safe to victimize, and that they deserve it.
I wouldn't say these are new racial tensions, but it's certainly a terrible uptick in violence. I'm going to do some research on whether Asians are disproportionately targeted for violence by African Americans.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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In many parts of the country, asians report many incidences of direct racially motivated hatred from blacks. Among the asian-american communities in places like LA it is well known, well documented. Among sociologists, there's a struggle to understand the underlying reasons without painting with too wide a brush.
It is a situation fostered by the fact that blacks and asians often live side by side in low income urban areas but rarely mix, and the asians become frequent targets for harassment and assault.
There's some theories and observations I could get into, but not here.
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Do the Asians target blacks as well? Of course there's some disproportionality because many of them are immigrants, but these reports make it sound extremely one sided, which is slightly surprising (I can think of reasons why, but they're not very well developed).
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Asian gangs aren't as common simply because there proportionally more blacks than asians in these areas. A lot of gangs also require new members to beat or kill somebody before they can join, and a since asians often live in the same neighborhoods, they become the obvious target.
I've read in a few books and articles on the LA riots that Asians were targeted because they were perceived to be making money off of black communities without giving anything back in return.
posted
I'd like to see these links as well, I don't think there's a problem with them being posted here.
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Okay, I could present the general thrust of it. There's three conceptual frameworks which can be (and are likely to some degree) complimentary in explaining black/asian racial tensions, which are very profound in many areas in the United States.
One: Going back a few decades you had a pattern of two generally disadvantaged racial minorities cohabitating in urban areas with very low social interaction or integration. This leads to a number of issues such as criminal opportunism; criminal elements of the larger black population would gravitate towards robbing or harassing people from an outwardly identifiable cultural subgroup that they could be fairly certain had nothing to do with their own social elements (you wouldn't have to worry you were 'robbing a friend of a friend' or otherwise getting in trouble with the same element you had to cohabitate with frequently).
Two: Black racism, which anecdotally (and in some studies) is most frequently described as a situation wherein there is bitterness and cultural antagonism resulting from unequal rise up the sociocultural ladder between two ethnic/racial groups that used to occupy the same generally disadvantaged state. Crudely defined, asian immigrants rose out of a disadvantaged sociocultural and socioeconomic state much faster than blacks due to various factors and starting advantages, and then there is resentment by the blacks 'left behind,' and you see a lot of antagonism over things like asian shopkeepers 'taking advantage of them,' hostility over a group immigrating here to where they were forced to live a much longer time ago and then surpassing them, etc.
Three: Asian racism, which is actually very strong against blacks for a number of reasons; first generation asian immigrants are usually very very racist and they have the worst stereotypes and the largest distaste for blacks, and it is usually very strongly bolstered by stereotypes. Subsequent generations of asian americans will carry the legacy and remnant fairweather racism instilled by their parents, and it will result in a greatly unequal comfort level from asians towards blacks and towards other races. One common impression (which has been backed by research) is that there is a startlingly high percentage of asians who, if they date outside their race, will only date whites, and the percentage who will date any race is vanishingly small next to the categories 'will only date whites,' 'will date outside their race, but only if they’re white' and 'will only date within their race.'
The way my girlfriend put it was to note that while she couldn't speak for all asians, at least in the case of the chinese, it was 'closeminded racial superiority bs' which drives a lot of this, and that it's fairly prevalent in most asian countries, and that elements of this bled easily into american minority cohabitation, which leads to ..
Four: when issues like these percolate, they create an environment of mutual racial antagonism between groups that feeds on itself and grows stronger and more divisive. Black kids and asian kids who start out with the fairweather and overt racist enculturations, and then have negative interactions across the racial divide, and then grow entrenched in that racial hostility, which then leads them to act in ways which entrench racial hostility against them, etc.
It is pushed back against by the gradual maturation of american culture, the aggressive fight against racism, and the teaching of tolerance for diversity, but it remains prevalent and problematic in many of the poorer urban regions of the nation, where socioeconomic strife often translates into racial harassment and divisiveness. Studies on the phenomenon are sure to grow but it is ground that has to be tread carefully on because there are a number of shallow interpretations on race equality that can be derived from a more cursory look into it by people with pre-existing agendas and conceptions about race.
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Point Three goes for South Asian immigrant communities as far as I've experienced/read/heard from others who have studied the subject. However, I believe that African-Americans and South Asians generally do not live in proximity to each other (see Indian-Americans as the new "model minority"), and so it's less of an immediate issue. Muslim intolerance, on the other hand...
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Sam, a lot of that fit my initial surmise, though I've never studied the subject in itself, only narratives of either the black or Asian experience in America. Essentially part of 2 and 3 seem to stem for a general American ethos of white racial superiority which pits two minorities against each other in the race to compete with or appeal to the image of economic and social success the US sells to its own people, that of the WASP.
But how much of this tension is due to white attitudes, and how much to black and Asian attitudes? What I mean is, how much is this affected by white Americans or just the overall culture's view of Asians and Blacks and their place in society, and how much is really due to plain old fashioned racism among blacks and Asians? Enmity and envy are one thing- blacks might feel duly slighted by the idea that Asian Americans are sometimes considered a model minority or even a necessity in representing what America is. TV shows and the news seem to *have* to have Asians, where as blacks might feel that they still get "token" roles rather than being included out of need for real authenticity. And have Asians in general assimilated more closely with whites in second, third and fourth generations than blacks have in two centuries? I can see why that could happen, but is that actually the case?
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quote:But how much of this tension is due to white attitudes, and how much to black and Asian attitudes? What I mean is, how much is this affected by white Americans or just the overall culture's view of Asians and Blacks and their place in society, and how much is really due to plain old fashioned racism among blacks and Asians?
To anyone who would attempt to find out which percentage is which, I wish good luck. But for most intents and purposes it's an interchangeable, comorbid mash of both. White majority cultural and racial influence will always set the tone and will always be an influence, and culturally ingrained biases that lead to minority on minority racial issues can create issues either within this or independent of this.
quote:And have Asians in general assimilated more closely with whites in second, third and fourth generations than blacks have in two centuries? I can see why that could happen, but is that actually the case?
To an extent. whether or not they have, the perceptions of one group greatly surpassing the other on the socioeconomic ladder and gaining an 'acceptance' they lack, especially in economic terms, is all you need at play.
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Have Asian Americans experienced better acceptance than Black Americans? Yes. Without a doubt, yes. The hard-working submissive stereotype gives Asian Americans glorified model minority status, and that alone gives us a lead against Black Americans. People would be biased in favor of Asian Americans, and we would be given more opportunities than Black Americans.
Simple as that.
And, as Sam said, I can't speak for other Asians, but the Chinese are so very sinocentric, it follows easily that they are also racist.
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