OneWorld | 13-Apr-2021 | By Andrew Korybko (American political analyst)
Everyone must unite in condemning racism irrespective of its manifestations against people of African, Asian, Caucasian, Hispanic, and other descents and do everything to stop it whenever they witness this crime against human dignity.
Anti-Asian racism is at the center of American attention after several terrible attacks against members of this community in recent weeks. Everyone must unite in condemning racism irrespective of its manifestations against people of African, Asian, Caucasian, Hispanic, and other descents and do everything to stop it whenever they witness this crime against human dignity. The Washington Post (WaPo) disingenuously attempted to do its part in this respect through the op-ed that it published last week, but the piece written by Tenzin Dorjee, senior researcher at Tibet Action Institute and a PhD candidate in the political science department at Columbia University, is chock-full of disinformation and therefore shamelessly exploits the topic for political gain.
His article is provocatively titled “Anti-China is not anti-Asian” and attempts to make the argument that economic, political, social, and other forms of discrimination against Chinese don’t have anything to do with anti-Asian racism. Dorjee is correct in writing that Asia is a cosmopolitan continent and that China itself is a very diverse country, the observations of which dispel the subtly racist notion pushed by some in equating the two, but he’s wrong in making it seem like anti-Chinese racism is somehow separate from anti-Asian racism. That’s the same as claiming that racism against an American of Nigerian descent somehow differs from racism against an American of Ethiopian descent, and that neither are instances of racism against African-Americans.
The second point to make is that racists by nature don’t distinguish between the ethnicities or nationalities of racially similar people. In their warped thinking, a Chinese and Vietnamese are the same Asian people, just like a Nigerian and an Ethiopian are the same African ones too. They target their victims based on how they look, which is driven by their racist hatred that at times can be provoked by political factors. In the current context of growing anti-Asian racism in America, this is arguably due to a combination of former President Trump’s racist description of the COVID-19 virus (“China virus”, “kung flu”, etc.), his administration’s factually incorrect blaming of China for the pandemic, and the US government’s hyper-nationalist aggression against China.
An American racist who’s been revved up by political propaganda to hate Hispanics for economic reasons, for example, might attack any Spanish-speaking individual under the mistaken belief that they’re an “illegal Mexican alien who’s stealing American jobs” even if the victim is a fellow American of Puerto Rican descent. To claim as Dorjee does that there’s no connection between the proliferation of hateful political narratives and racist attacks against people who physically appear to look like the intended victim (Mexican in the most recent example and Chinese in the larger one discussed in this article) in the minds of racist villains is to dangerously risk normalizing racist rhetoric and ignore its role in provoking racist attacks.
After downplaying the connection between hateful anti-Chinese political rhetoric and anti-Asian attacks, Dorjee then shockingly engaged in his own spewing of such rhetoric, perhaps having thought that he couldn’t be accused of anti-Asian racism since he himself is an ethnic Tibetan from China (albeit in self-described “exile” as he strangely sees it). He repeated Western information warfare narratives about his homeland almost word-for-word, especially the latest one falsely alleging a so-called “genocide” against the Uyghurs and other minorities in the country’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). Dorjee seems to support the weaponized intensification of comprehensive pressure against China on these disinformation-driven bases.
He then goes even further by implying that anti-Asian racist attacks in America are actually China’s fault because he wouldn’t be “afraid to ride the subway at night” “if China had contained covid-19 within its borders”. In his words, “Perpetrators’ combustible anger — at losing their jobs, homes and family members to the plague — is being unleashed on a scapegoat partly because China has not been held to account.” In other words, Dorjee ridiculously suggests that China should apologize for COVID-19 and even hints that the US should do more to “h[o]ld (it) to account” such as possibly sanctioning it for instance in order to stop anti-Asian racist attacks that he bizarrely blames on Beijing. This is nothing more than blaming the victim, which is totally wrong.
To return to the examples mentioned earlier in the article, an American racist might attack African- or Hispanic-Americans because they’re angry at rising crime rates that some in the media blame on the former or rising unemployment blamed on the latter, respectively. It’s actually the police and economic policymakers that are to blame for those troubles, not entire racial demographics, and African- and Hispanic-Americans would never be asked to apologize – let alone in a WaPo op-ed! – for what their racist villains wrongly think about them and people who some might think look like them. The same standard should be held for Asian-Americans, and not doing so is just as racist as refusing to do the same for African- and Hispanic-Americans.