#Anti-Asian

[xtruss]

An illustration from the November 20, 1880, issue of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper depicts an anti-Chinese riot in Denver, Colorado. Violence against Chinese immigrants was widespread in the American West. Courtesy of The Chinese American Museum/Dylan and Phoenix Wong

Race in America: The Bloody History of Anti-Asian Violence in The West

One of the Largest Mass Lynchings in the United States Targeted Chinese Immigrants in Los Angeles.

— By Kevin Waite | Published May 10, 2021

This year marks the 150th anniversary of one of the largest mass lynchings in American history. The carnage erupted in Los Angeles on October 24, 1871, when a frenzied mob of 500 people stormed into the city’s Chinese quarter. Some victims were shot and stabbed; others were hanged from makeshift gallows. By the end of the night, 19 mangled bodies lay in the streets of Los Angeles.

Lynching is a term most often associated with violence against African Americans in the post-Civil War South. But racial hatred has never been quarantined to one American region or confined to a single ethnic group. In Los Angeles in 1871, the victims were Chinese immigrants. Their deaths were part of a wave of anti-Asian violence that swept across the 19th-century American West—and reverberates to this day.

In the early days of Chinese immigration, many new arrivals performed hard manual labor, often for the railroads or as prospectors. Photograph By Photo By George Rinhart, Corbis/Getty Images (Left) and Photograph Via Alamy (Right)

Chinese immigrants became the targets of abuse almost as soon as they set foot on American soil, beginning in 1850 with the California Gold Rush. White prospectors routinely drove Chinese miners from their claims, while state lawmakers slapped them with an onerous foreign miners’ tax. Along with Black Americans and Native Americans, they were barred from testifying against whites in California’s courts. As a result, assaults on Chinese people in California generally went unpunished.

A perceived labor threat lay at the root of this Sinophobia. By 1870, Chinese immigrants accounted for roughly 10 percent of California’s population and a full quarter of the workforce in the state. Wherever Chinese immigrants congregated in large numbers, white workers saw a risk to their livelihoods. The threat posed by Chinese immigration never represented the existential threat to white employment that some agitators claimed. Nevertheless, they mobilized against employers, including railroad corporations and wealthy ranchers, who had Chinese immigrants on their payrolls.

Created in 1847, the earliest known drawing of Los Angeles comes from the brief period in the city's history when there weren't Chinese residents. The first recorded Chinese immigrant to Los Angeles arrived in 1852.

In 1882, more than a decade after the attack, Calle de Los Negros��the heart of Los Angeles's original Chinatown and the site of the massacre—is bustling. Photograph Via USC Digital Library, California Historical Society Collection

The campaigns against Chinese immigrants were well organized. In the immediate post-Civil War years, so-called anti-coolie clubs arose. The Central Pacific Anti-Coolie Association, among others, advocated for a ban on Chinese immigration and even defended white vigilantes. In 1867, a mob of white laborers drove Chinese laborers from their San Francisco worksite, injuring 12 and killing one. The Anti-Coolie Association rallied to the mob’s defense and won the release of all 10 perpetrators. This would become a recurring theme: injury and death for Chinese immigrants, exoneration for their assailants.

In the Reconstruction-era South, the Ku Klux Klan targeted African Americans and their white allies; in the West, Klansmen assaulted the Chinese. I’ve uncovered more than a dozen attacks on Chinese workers between 1868 and 1870 attributed to the KKK in California, as well as a smaller number in Utah and Oregon.

Klan activity in California ranged from violent threats to assault to arson. In the spring of 1868, white rioters raided a series of ranches in Northern California, savagely beating the Chinese workers there. When a Methodist minister opened a Sunday school for Chinese immigrants in 1869, vigilantes burned down his church and threatened his life. Klan-affiliated arsonists torched a second church, this one in Sacramento, for the sin of serving the Chinese community. They also burned down a brandy distillery near San Jose that employed Chinese workers.

In the South, the Ku Klux Klan targeted African Americans. In the West, the white supremacist organization attacked Chinese immigrants. Illustration Via Alamy

The Ku Klux Klan was just one manifestation of an anti-Chinese fervor that reached into the highest echelons of power within California. In his 1867 inaugural address, Governor Henry Haight warned that an “influx” of Chinese immigrants would “inflict a curse upon posterity for all time.” State lawmakers campaigned against the two major civil rights measures of the era, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, by claiming that the amendments would grant citizenship and voting rights to Chinese immigrants. Spurred by Sinophobia, California rejected both measures outright—the only free state to do so. Not until 1959 and 1962, respectively, would the California legislature offer a token ratification of the amendments.

Newspapers amplified anti-Chinese sentiment and normalized hooliganism. The editor of the Los Angeles News, Andrew Jackson King, filled his columns with vitriolic abuse of the small local Chinese population. They were, he wrote, “an alien, an inferior and idolatrous race;” “hideous and repulsive;” “a curse to our country, and a foul blot upon our civilization.” (While he publicly thundered against these immigrants and the threat they posed to white workers, King employed a Chinese cook in his own home.) A spike in assaults on Chinese workers followed from his editorials.

Map

The assault that took place in Los Angeles on October 24, 1871, was the largest and deadliest of the attacks. Roughly 500 rioters—Anglo-Americans and Hispanic residents alike—charged into the city’s Chinese district after a shootout between suspected Chinese gang members and local authorities resulted in the death of a white former saloonkeeper and the wounding of a policeman. As the mob closed in, petrified Chinese residents took shelter in a long adobe building at the heart of Chinatown.

Two hours of indiscriminate killing followed. The mob smashed through the doors of the building and seized Chinese men and boys hiding inside—only one of whom had participated in the earlier gunfight. Rioters mutilated and murdered virtually any Chinese person they could find. When the mob ran out of hanging ropes, they used clotheslines to string up their victims.

The mob ultimately claimed 19 lives, including a respected doctor and an adolescent boy. All but two of the bodies were moved to the city’s jail yard, where frantic friends and family members searched for their loved ones among the rows of dead. The death toll represented 10 percent of the city’s Chinese population.

Although eight rioters were convicted of manslaughter, they all walked free a year later on a technicality.

Although legal discriminatory measures were taken against the Chinese, including the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 depicted above, Chinese immigrants took steps to settle into their new country, including learning English. Photographs Via MPI/Getty Images

This October, Los Angeles will commemorate the 150th anniversary of the massacre amid a national uptick in anti-Asian violence. Leaders in the Chinese American community are planning a weeklong series of events to reflect on the tragedy and its resonance today. That programming accompanies a campaign to erect a permanent memorial to the 19 victims. Together, these commemorations will be a somber remembrance of the atrocity and the enduring challenges that Chinese Americans face.

But they will also be a celebration of survival. Within a year of the massacre, Chinese immigrants moved back into some of the same quarters that had been ravaged by the mob. They rebuilt much of what had been lost and resisted repeated calls for their removal. Their very presence sent an indelible message: The mob had failed, and they would remain.

That’s a key message for Gay Yuen, president of the Friends of the Chinese American Museum in Los Angeles, as she prepares for this year’s anniversary commemorations. “Chinese American history is U.S. history; it’s California history; it’s Los Angeles history,” she told me. “We are Americans and we helped build this country. We’re not others and we’re not foreigners.”

Discrimination did not deter Chinese immigrants from coming to the United States, including these students, who arrived in Seattle in 1925. Photograph Via Bettmann/Getty Images

[cranialgunk]

Bitter Tea

Recently Turner Classic Movies played The Good Earth and The Bitter Tea of General Yen back to back. I caught the former as the locusts descended upon the crops and continued to the latter as a “Chinked up” Nils Asther rode away in “Yellow Face” without care or concern for the rickshaw driver his car had just hit. I grimaced as I watched Nils Asther’s exaggerated Yellow Face – painfully narrowed…

[newsfromstolenland]

In one private chat group conversation, a Mountie was accused of saying a new female employee "was overweight and insinuating that the shape of her vagina was visible through her clothing."

In another, a second RCMP officer allegedly bragged about "Tasering unarmed Black people" and called a sexual assault investigation "stupid" — drawing comments from other members of the online group who "made fun of the victim" and said, "she's a dumb Mexican c--t."

An investigator with the RCMP's professional standards unit detailed those allegations and many more in a search warrant sworn to obtain evidence now being used to call for the firing of three Coquitlam Mounties for violating the force's code of conduct.

The CBC has obtained a copy of the search warrant — which recounts behaviour which led the officer who sparked the investigation to complain to RCMP brass about what he saw as "atrocious" and "racist and horrible" activity in a private group operating on the Signal messaging app.

Full article

Tagging: @allthecanadianpolitics

More from this article below the cut, because I think it's important to understand just how much fucked up shit they were saying:

(tw misogyny, domestic violence, racial profiling, anti-Indigenous racism, racism)

The documents reveal that investigators also reviewed 600,000 messages posted to the RCMP's internal mobile data chat logs — finding evidence of "frequently offensive" usage by the three officers facing termination of "homophobic and racist slurs."

"The reviewers had identified a variety of comments that were 'chauvinist in nature, with a strong air of superiority, and include flippant or insulting remarks about clients (including objectifying women), supervisors, colleagues, policy and the RCMP as a whole,'" the warrant says.

Code of conduct hearings against Const. Philip Dick, Const. Ian Solven and Const. Mersad Mesbah had been slated to begin in Surrey this week but have been adjourned until March of next year. All three officers have been suspended since June 2021.

Although Dick, Solven and Mesbah appear to be the only Mounties currently facing code-of-conduct hearings, the court documents say seven other officers were also part of the private chat group — including two supervisors.

Among the details contained in the search warrant are allegations one of the officers facing discipline joked about a domestic violence victim, calling the victim "a dumb f--king bitch, should've worn a mouth guard."

The whistleblower — Const. Sam Sodhi — claimed that outside of the private chat group, members of the group also "belittled Indigenous people, talking about how they were 'stupid' or 'drunk' and saying they have 'unfortunate bodies' and all have fetal alcohol syndrome."

"They would say, 'We're not going to the reserve,'" the search warrant claims Sodhi told investigators.

"We're not going there because we're not going to help those people."

According to the court documents, Sodhi was posted to Coquitlam in 2019.

"As part of that process, he wrote a letter about wanting to work in an urban centre and help at-risk youth that didn't have role models," the warrant claims.

But Sodhi claimed that on his second day at work, Dick — his trainer — asked him: "Are you a cool brown guy, or are you a Surrey brown guy? Because in that letter, you're whiny, like, 'Ooh, I want to help brown people.'"

Sodhi claimed there were two chat groups for members of the Coquitlam detachment assigned to Port Coquitlam — one for all members of the watch and a second private group that began on WhatsApp but then moved to Signal. He said he was told once he was "worthy" of the private chat group, "we'll add you to it."

The officer claimed he was admitted to the private chat group in March 2021 but left after a few days because of the "constant negativity." He said he was then accused of "not being a team member" and encouraged to return.

According to the search warrant, Sodhi complained to his superiors in May 2021, and a chief superintendent mandated an investigation into five Mounties — including a corporal who was accused of failing to take measures to prevent misconduct.

The probe initially focused on text communications between the RCMP's own laptops — known as Mobile Data Terminals. Investigators reviewed messages between the five men from January 2019 until May 2021.

"When members of the [Signal] chat group realized there was an investigation, they opined that the investigation was probably about 'MDT chats' ... since the private chat group was kept 'amongst the trusted' and 'there's no way this got out,'" the warrant says.

Examples cited from the RCMP computers include statements like, "Why do brown guys have unusually high pitched voices." "As an idiot woman would say ... 'toxic,'" and, "I just racially profile pulled over a car."

A review of the chat logs also allegedly found the three officers facing termination "appeared to use 'goldfish' as a slur for Asian people."

"For example, they talked about how 'goldfish' have 'bulging eyes' that 'can't see anything,' how a Korean church in the detachment was a 'goldfish church' and how 'goldfish' were bad drivers (a common Asian stereotype)," the warrant says.

[icedsodapop]

One of my biggest frustrations is how (mostly) white pple often wilfully misunderstand the concept of cultural appropriation becos they want to wear the "pretty (ethnic) dress".

Like, take the cheongsam/qipao for instance. To the average lay White person, it's a "pretty dress", a costume to wear for a party. But the dress itself comes with centuries of history, marking the evolution of fashion for Chinese women and how it's shaped by war, colonialism, globalisation and political revolution.

And White women can wear the cheongsam/qipao without having to worry about the cultural, socio-historical baggage that comes with it. On the white body, which is seen as the default, these White women get to be seen as beautiful without having to worry about being dehumanized as a result of racial fetishization and sinophobia.

As Jenny Zhang writes in RACKED:

What I wanted to say was how it felt to grow up in a country that indicated to me everything from the country I was born in looked good on anyone but me. This trap made me think the classmate in the hallway making fun of my Chinese last name while sporting a Chinese character tattoo above her ass, was the person I had to defeat, when, in reality, we belonged to the same world — a world that said that Chinese culture looked best as an accessory on a white person. In this world, a qipao was a garish costume on me, but a polyester cheongsam mini-dress on a white girl was adorable.

[peridot-tears]

Hey MDZS fandom. I want you guys to be careful interacting with this person.

If you don't already know, Chinese people have had a long history with cultural erasure when it comes to taking on English-language names. It started with imperialism, and continues as a way to "assimilate" and avoid mockery of our language in western countries.

For Chinese diaspora like myself, it's another form of racism we face, to the point where some of us are reclaiming our names in everyday life. Here's an article about this movement happening across Asian diasporas in the United States -- just to name one instance out of many.

The responses to this post reflect that:

You can see that my comment assumed "good faith." However, OP deleted these comments and blocked me. (That didn't stop other people from calling it out as well, though I have to assume that if OP was so offended by my comment, the next few people will receive the same treatment.)

I honestly didn't like whipping up the diaspora statement -- that I wrote with multiple Chinese diaspora fans of MDZS, all of us hailing from multiple different countries and backgrounds, our ancestry coming from completely different regions of China -- because it meant that we were encountering another microaggression.

If you ever wonder why MDZS and danmei fandoms in general seem to be so bereft of Chinese diaspora voices, that's absolutely because of these microaggressions: Someone makes a joke, writes a story, writes some meta, that is culturally ignorant at best, offensive and harmful at worst, and when we gently correct them, explaining why it's racist, the person in question shuts us down, dismisses us, gets defensive, or worse.

Regardless of where you are -- fandom, social media, on the street, at work, at school -- as long as you are interacting with other people, your words matter and affect other people. That includes being racially offensive, even if you didn't intend to be. It's how you respond to the people you've insulted that reveals your character, how willing you are to be complicit in their mistreatment.

My rule of thumb has always been this -- if multiple people, including those of the culture you've just made a microaggressive joke about, find it unfunny, racist, or harmful, then you listen. Dismiss or ignore them, then yes -- you absolutely are racist.

[edenfenixblogs]

Kinda crazy how any post I make about my experience of antisemitism — whether or not it mentions Israel — immediately becomes inundated with comments about Palestinian pain and suffering. Do you really not see how inappropriate that is, people?

When Black People post about their experience of racism, it’s not OK to come in to that space and talk about, idk, war in Sudan.

When Asian People talk about their experience of racism, it’s not appropriate to come into that space and start talking about China’s treatment of Uyghur people or North Korean aggression.

When Muslim people talk about their experience of Islamophobia, it’s not OK to come into that space and start talking about all the horrible things Isis or Al Qaeda have done.

When a trans person starts talking about their experience of transphobia, it’s not OK to come into that space and start talking about the latest horrible thing Caitlyn Jenner said.

Why are you able to understand this when it comes to every other group, but posts about Jewish pain are always filled with arguments about Palestine that blatantly imply that actually—my group, Jews—actually deserve the hatred we receive?

Spoiler alert: It’s because you’re antisemitic and will double down on your beliefs 100000 times to prove to yourself that you’re not, because actually confronting that you have hateful beliefs is too scary for you.

I’m sorry if it messes with your sense of self righteous inherent goodness, but you have and perpetuate systemic antisemitism just like you have all other forms of systemic bigotry. And if you don’t address it, that makes you a bigot on purpose. Deal with your hatred and stop being horrible to Jews.

[heretherebedork]

I may have cackled a little bit.

Gotta catch 'em all? Apparently?

[stellawilsonx]

Best feeling ever😍

[alwaysbewoke]

On March 16, 1991 Latasha Harlin’s short life came to a violent end in the midst of racial tensions in LA, and became a major spark for the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. By the late 1980s, racial tensions were high in South Los Angeles. After the change in national immigration laws in 1965 a large number of Korean immigrants arrived in Los Angeles and by 1968 the first Korean-owned market opened in South Central LA. Longtime African American residents in the area at first welcomed the Koreans but eventually grew angry with them because they refused to hire black employees and often treated their customers poorly. By 1990, 65% of South Central businesses were Korean-owned and a 1992 survey of these storeowners revealed considerable racial prejudice against black customers and black people in general. Koreans in response argued that their attitudes evolved from high crime rates in the area and shop owner fears of shootings and burglaries. Latasha Harlins became a victim of these racial tensions on the morning of Saturday, March 16, 1991. She entered a store owned by a Korean family, to purchase a bottle of orange juice. As she approached the counter, Soon Ja Du, accused her of stealing after seeing her place the bottle in her backpack, despite her holding the $2 payment approaching the counter to pay. Du grabbed the bag and the two women had a violent scuffle. Harlins threw the juice bottle back on the counter and turned to leave the store when Du pulled a .38-caliber handgun and shot 15-year-old Harlins in the back of the head. Du was arrested and her trial was held on November 15, 1991. Security-camera footage which showed Harlins’ attempt to pay for the juice and the subsequent scuffle between the two women convinced a jury to find Du guilty of voluntary manslaughter. The Judge, Joyce Karlin, rejected the jury’s recommendation and instead sentenced Du to five years probation, 400 hours of community service, and a $500 fine.

One of the many reasons black people don't f*** with Asians like that and we should collectively drive them out of our neighborhoods

[thisisalljustkink]

[ecstasaxblog]

Hello 👋

Y’all what do you think about my 🤗

[solitaireships]

I feel like I should say since there's been a recent uptick in a lot of communities I'm in/see stuff from a lot of white people pretending to be Asian, but you are not welcome here if you are in anyway stealing from Asian cultures for clout or the aesthetics of it

This includes if you're white and you give your self inserts Asian names, I truly do not care if your f/o is from an anime, you should not be using an Asian name under any circumstances. I hate that whenever I see someone using an Asian name online, I feel like I have to start searching their account to see if they're actually Asian or just a white person who likes the aesthetic of it bcs far too many white people will use Asian names here just bcs it sounds cool, with no regard for the actual cultural meaning behind it. Meanwhile actual Asian people will be mocked for their names, or treated like their names are too hard to learn to pronounce, or discriminated against based on their names

Asian cultures are not a fun little costume for people to dress up with. They aren't just a nice aesthetic, they aren't just a thing you can borrow from bcs you think it sounds cool

[asthedeathoflight]

Yk I keep circling the issue of like how Armand gets talked about in the fandom because he does do some bad shit but at the end of the day nobody has to put a fucking disclaimer on their Lestat posts do they so I'm pretty confident in saying its just fucking racism. Every time anyone mentions Armand in the broader context of the whole show they have to do an aside about how hes an irredeemable monster who we are only discussing in the context of fiction but everyones favorite mediocre white guy doesnt need a disclaimer because everyone just magically understands that this is the choose your favorite war criminal show when the war criminal is blonde.

[icedsodapop]

There's something about seeing 2 White Québécois Canadian entrepreneurs acting as if they are so innovative to utilise popping boba in their bubble tea (lmao, pls come to Singapore), talking about how unhealthy bubble tea is and how they are "improving" it, and claiming how their "improvements" no longer make their bubble tea an ethnic product.

Source: Tiktok

Simu Liu has since made a Tiktok in the reflection of what had happened since, giving the entrepreneurs some grace and saying that the online harassment they have been receiving does nothing to further the discussion on cultural appropriation.

I agree Simu Liu to a certain extent, since individualizing a societal issue isn't helpful at all. At the same time, I'm wary about trying to give White pple the benefit of doubt whenever they are being racist becos they won't do the same for people of colour.

[ansburg]

not to soapbox but like. diasporic asians growing up the in the west were constantly told we were uncool, ugly, unfit for leading roles, and just so generally other that many of us still struggle with that self-hatred and deal with the material discrimination that comes with looking "different" from the default. so many diasporic asians have stories about how our creative accomplishments or potential were discounted because we were told we didn’t have enough “personality” – a judgment call that can’t be divorced from how racial triangulation has worked to alienate asian people from dominant cultures in the diaspora.

you know how asian people have been treated by western fantasy? we’re either

ugly and monstrous

exotified beyond recognition

or we don’t exist.

(thanks david. it’s not like thedas is the only continent the player can explore or anything. or that boats exist. where does solas get his tea btw? where do the silks in orlais originate from? why are there always asian aesthetics present without asian faces?)

when a game like bg3 comes along and the studio makes a decision to make an asian companion, it’s huge for us. that’s our crumb of representation. karlach is very obviously not “eurocentric” in her features – if anything, westernized beauty standards would have her face redone to comply with market demands.

she has monolids. she has a flat nose bridge. her cheeks are full and round, buccal fat very much in attendance. whatever she may have arguably been in previous patches, that is not what she is now. and pretending like her face – a face that, newsflash, asian people can relate to – is just a toy you can pop features out of because they don’t have enough “personality” to you, or because they’re too “soft," or because you don’t think a face like hers is “warrior-like” (whatever the fuck that means), is insensitive at best and willfully ignorant at worst. her asianness isn’t a setting to opt out of any more than wyll’s blackness is.

lastly, i’m exhausted that it even needs to be said, but being a person of color does not absolve somebody of intercommunity harm. minority status isn’t an excuse to get out of self-reflecting. it’s okay to step back and say, “wow, i didn’t think about how i’d affect members of this community,” without digging your heels in like one mistake on the internet is an extinction-level event.

studies: