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At a time when we should be highlighting overlooked contributions of the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community, reports of bias and hate crimes against Asian Americans continue to rise, unabated.
And politics-as-usual appear to be making things worse.
Anti-China sentiment in political speech—everything from a sneering President Donald Trump addressing an Asian-American reporter to a worrisome ad from the Biden campaign—has further put the community on edge. “There’s a clear link between the rhetoric that’s being used and the increased harm to our community,” John Yang, president of Asian Americans Advancing Justice-AAJC tells The Intercept. “We are equally concerned about both parties. We are concerned that there will be a race to the bottom.”
And federal agencies have been uncharacteristically silent on the issue, according to a report from the Center for Public Integrity and NBC News.
“Neither the Justice Department nor the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have announced efforts to prevent the public targeting of Asians, which ranges from bias incidents to hate crimes,” they say. “Both agencies were quick to act in similar situations: the CDC during the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak and the Justice Department after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.”
Earlier this month, 16 Democratic senators—including Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Mazie K. Hirono of Hawaii, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Kamala Harris of California, and Cory Booker of New Jersey—sent a joint letter to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, asking them to immediately develop and implement a plan to address the increase in hate crimes.
“There are more than 20 million Americans of Asian descent, and 2 million AAPI individuals are working on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic, as health care workers, law enforcement agents, first responders, and other essential service providers,” the letter says. “It is critical that the Civil Rights Division ensure that the civil and constitutional rights of all Americans are protected during this pandemic.”
The business community has begun to address the issue, however.
Ascend, a non-profit Pan-Asian organization for business professionals in North America, along with 10 other organizations—including Catalyst, The Conference Board, National Congress of American Indians, National Organization on Disability, and Out & Equal—have signed off on #AscendTogether, a five-point plan to denounce bias and support members of the AAPI community, along with other demographics who are disproportionately affected by the coronavirus.
“Discrimination targeted at Pan-Asians in forms of shunning, harassment, and assaults impedes our ability to stem the spread of the pandemic. About 20% of U.S. health care workers are immigrants; 17% of doctors in the U.S. are of Asian descent, while people of all backgrounds work to save lives on the frontline,” they write. “Discriminatory threats against any first responders also put at risk the patients they serve and delay finding a cure for the disease. Pan-Asians and our diverse communities are an integral part of the solutions to this global crisis.”
Some 100 corporate stalwarts have signed on as well, including Accenture, American Express, Bank of America, IBM, Intel, P&G, and Walmart.
For those keeping track, the ADL, the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council (A3PCON), and the Chinese for Affirmative Action (CAA). Have been documenting and reporting instances of harassment and discrimination.
What have you been doing to help AAPI and other employees feel safe, and to curb potential hate speech? Let us know how you’re handling these tough conversations and we’ll amplify.
Ellen McGirt
@ellmcgirt
Ellen.McGirt@fortune.com
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On point
A new documentary focuses on the history of Asian Americans People of AAPI descent have been living in the U.S. for some 150 years, yet have struggled to have their experiences and contributions documented. “Asian Americans,” a new five-part series created by PBS and local broadcasting station WETA, aims to remedy this. “I think Asian Americans have been seen as the outsiders, sort of tangential to American culture, to American history,” says Renee Tajima-Peña, a filmmaker, professor, and showrunner for the series. The series takes on broad events in chronological order—Chinese Exclusion Act, the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, the role of Filipinos in the farmworker movement—and individual stories of note, like that of Bhagat Singh Thind, an Indian Sikh man who fought for U.S. citizenship in a Supreme Court case.
NBC News
Tribal nations in turmoil as casino revenues plunge and infection spreads The shutdown of some 500 tribally-owned casinos is roiling tribal economies as COVID-19 disease devastates local Native American communities, many of which are in rural areas without clean water or Internet. One shuttered casino is now a quarantine site in Wyoming; the Navajo Nation has a higher death rate than most U.S. states with no relief in sight. Some two-thirds of tribal employees are now out of work in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula tribal community. “Life and death,” their tribal chairman, Bryan Newland, told the New York Times. “We’re just going to write off 2020. There’s no sense in trying to work under the delusion that we’ll be able to claw back to normal life this year.”
New York Times
South Dakota’s governor in a stand-off with tribal nations At issue are the public health checkpoints placed on the Cheyenne River Sioux and Oglala Sioux tribal lands; Governor Kristi Noem wants them removed, and tribal authorities are not budging. Noem claims that the checkpoints are bottlenecks to essential travel, tribal authorities say they will reduce infection at a critical time. Noem has threatened legal action. I’ve linked to the West River Eagle which serves the Eagle Butte area of South Dakota—click around a bit, their coverage is thorough and eye-opening. (Note: raceAhead subscribed.)
West River Eagle
Rest in Wonder: Paul Vasquez, the man from the double rainbow viral video, has died Turns out, he was just as sweet and awestruck in person, though the world knew him as the man overcome with delight at the sight of a double rainbow over Yosemite Park. It was 2010, and the video he posted made him one of the first viral video stars. He died while seeking care in a California emergency room; cause is unknown, but he’d posted over the weekend that he’d fallen ill with COVID-19-like symptoms though he tested negative for the disease. His friends called him “Bear” or “Yosemite Bear.”
Buzzfeed News
Coronavirus in the community
- Texas health officials may be undercounting COVID-19 cases in prisons, as the disease sweeps through incarcerated populations and staff.
- Don’t have a mask? A klan hood works fine, if you’re in San Diego County.
- As the pandemic reveals already deep racial inequities, Phillip Picardi asks: Does white America have an empathy problem?
- Company founders who are womxn of color weren’t having an easy time raising capital before coronavirus. Now?
- Prison labor replaces New Orleans sanitation workers who were striking for better safety equipment, then fired.
On background
Paging Dr. Stress Dr. Bruce Rabin, the now retired director of immunopathology from the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center, has long been known as “Dr. Stress” for his lifelong dedication to using science to help people manage the damage stress can do to their health and wellbeing. The man is beloved. “For years he has spent his own time and dime helping city teachers, firefighters, students, doctors, and journalists, among many others, to adopt certain mental and physical practices to keep predatory stress at bay, as a tamer does tigers,” writes David Templeton in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. (Templeton also refers to Rabin as a “prophet of peacefulness.” Awww.) More on Dr. Rabin below, but I’ve got even better news: Eight of Dr. Rabin’s lectures—PowerPoint with audio—can be found for free here. The series helps illuminate physical mechanisms of stress and offers ways to reduce stress-related discomfort, illness, and disease.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Why did we need to see Ahmaud Arbery die? Sarah Sentilles revisits a fundamental question of the modern age: Whose death do we get to see and why? In Arbery’s case, seeing the video triggered an investigation, but the “debate” about what was on it also reinforces some deadly racist ideas. Sentilles, an author who has been studying violent imagery for some 15 years, deftly weaves in the coverage of the Ebola outbreak, in which images of dead Black bodies were common. In the middle of an arguably worse pandemic and which has impacted white populations, the dead are granted a privileged form of privacy, she says. “When the most visible dead are Black and Brown people killed by police in the United States or killed by war and disease in other countries, then those violent images—even when they help generate outrage that leads to arrests—become part of the armature of white supremacy, too.”
Vox
An arranged marriage thrives in quarantine Anu Prabhakar has written a sweetly poignant essay that pulls back the curtain on her already stable marriage, arranged some nine years ago. Six years in, they had a son. All normal, all fine. But while convening with other new mothers, she began to wonder if the pleasant routine that families fall into was, well, all there was to it. “Do all long marriages, after a point, revolve around everything except the actual marriage itself?” she asks. Then, deep into the day-to-dayness of their lives, the pair suddenly found themselves locked in together, and found that they hadn’t drifted apart, but they were drifting together. Delightful.
Arre
What losing Len Bias really meant The promising young athlete died of a cocaine overdose just two days after he was drafted by the Boston Celtics in 1986. It was a shocker at the time, and the grief among fans and friends was palpable. But, posits writer Chuck Modiano, his death also inspired the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which “helped usher in ‘The New Jim Crow’ of mass incarceration in America,” and disproportionately filled American prisons with Black people caught up in harsh mandatory minimum sentencing and an over-emphasis on crack versus powder cocaine. Modiano’s history of drug war efforts leaves no person or party unscathed.
New York Daily News
Today's mood board
