Attacks on Asians Highlight New Racial Tensions (in the Bay area)

[pampango]

Just caught part of a show on KQED's Forum about this. I don't live there and hadn't heard about recent events.

http://www.kqed.org/epArchive/R201005051000

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/us/02sfcrime.html

The Chinese who had gathered at San Francisco’s City Hall — several hundred of them, chanting and waving bilingual placards under a persistent drizzle — were mad. Their words and signs said they felt under attack, vulnerable, unheard by the police, city officials and even their own community leaders.

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.

Tammy Tan, the executive director of the Asian Pacific American Community Center, watched as Chinese leaders took up the megaphone to vent their fury in lilting Cantonese tones. But something hung in midair, unspoken. “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.

The rapidly deteriorating climate has alarmed local leaders. The president of the Board of Supervisors, David Chiu, noted that on Wednesday, hundreds of Chinese lined up at a board meeting to tell stories of assaults and intimidation, sometimes without clear motivation, by young African-Americans.

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. “It’s not ‘this is an Asian person let’s get him,’ ” Mr. Emenike said. “It’s we thinking, ‘this Asian person is probably carrying a large amount of money. And this is our neighborhood, this is our home, why not?’ ”

But if the motivations were largely strategic, and not out of unadulterated racial hatred, they were also influenced by complex emotions and a wariness of change. “I wake up and I’m hungry, my stomach growling,” Ms. Blunt said. “Why am I just getting by when there’s this Asian walking out of the house with a laptop going to the cafe?”

Asian - Black tension in the Bay Area: Confront and Solve, Don't Bury It.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/yaki/detail??blogid=68&entry_id=62962

The recent press around the fatal attack on an elderly Chinese American at a Bayview bus stop, as well as other press accounts of violence against Asians in the Bay Area allegedly perpetrated by African American youth, has raised the profile of a long simmering and ugly truth about our melting pot -- that interethnic tension is a reality, and interethnic violence does and will happen again.

Tensions between immigrant populations and more established populations has been a recurring, if uncomfortable, part of the American narrative since the 1800s. Whether it was directed against the Irish, the Chinese, newly-freed black slaves, or, as Arizona has recently demonstrated, Latinos, resentment, paranoia and fear has been a part of our history. Violent outbursts manifesting these feelings is also, unfortunately, nothing new. But the fact that our country has repeatedly shown its resiliency in eventually overcoming these xenophobic tendencies is also part of the American story and what continues to draw economic and political refugees from around the world.

So the fact that there is interethnic tension between black and asian populations is not an isolated incident. That fact that interethnic violence occurs, and in this case, fatally, is just another tragic reminder that there is much in this country that remains to be addressed, that inequalities exist, stereotypes abound, and misunderstandings are perpetuated without correction. It doesn't help if politically correct politicians (and I'm not saying that is the case in San Francisco) run away from interethnic conflict for fear of favoring one group over another. Rather than being pc, leaders should be working actively to address both the short and long-term issues and solutions between groups to prevent a cycle of prejudice and violence from being embedded in the fabric between ethnic populations.

[Bitwit1234]

1. And these type of feelings are being pushed by Fox and Beck.