Resource Links Tagged with "Asian"

Racism and Health: Racism is a Serious Threat to the Public’s Health

CDC Website | Date Unknown
Racism is a system consisting of structures, policies, practices, and norms—that assigns value and determines opportunity based on the way people look or the color of their skin. This results in conditions that unfairly advantage some and disadvantage others throughout society. Racism — both interpersonal and structural – negatively affects the mental and physical health of millions of people preventing them from attaining their highest level of health, and consequently, affecting the health of our nation. A growing body of research shows that centuries of racism in this country has had a profound and negative impact on communities of color. The impact is pervasive and deeply embedded in our society—affecting where one lives, learns, works, worships and plays and creating inequities in access to a range of social and economic benefits—such as housing, education, wealth, and employment. These conditions—often referred to as social determinants of health—are key drivers of health inequities within communities of color, placing those within these populations at greater risk for poor health outcomes.
TAGS: [Strategies] [Health Disparities] [Economics] [Systemic Racism] [Housing] [Employment] [Social Justice] [Politics] [Black Lives Matter] [Indigenous] [Asian] [Latino/a]

“Kill Every Buffalo You Can!” On the Cruelties of Colonial Power

by Rupa Marya and Raj Patel | August 2021
In the war on the Indigenous people of the Great Plains, the United States explicitly targeted the buffalo, their spiritual cornerstone and staple of food, medicine, shelter, and clothing. Toward the end of the 19th century, the US military sponsored the killing of millions of buffalo, inflicting starvation and dependency on the tribes. While it was never officially announced as the army’s policy, the Montana land baron Granville Stuart noted in his journal in 1879 that “slaughtering the buffaloes is a government measure to subjugate the Indians.” Colonel Richard Irving Dodge summed up the spirit of the massacre: “Kill every buffalo you can! Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.” Before 1800, an estimated 30 to 60 million buffalo ranged the Great Plains. By 1900, only a few hundred remained, the survivors of the most violent genocide of any mammal ever documented. With the buffalo gone, Plains Indians’ bodies suffered trauma, cultural erasure, and starvation. Depression, diabetes, and drug dependency became endemic—all diseases characterized by chronic inflammation.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2020’s] [Indigenous] [Silencing POC] [Systemic Racism] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [History] [Asian] [Health Disparities] [Economics]

History of Institutional Racism in U.S. Public Schools

by Matthew Lynch | October 2019
Racial biases are not unknown to the history of the U.S. education system. Dating back to the 1800s, Native American children were taken from their homes and forced into boarding schools where they were pushed to abandon their native language and adopt a foreign religion. Education was used to assimilate these Native American children to White culture forcibly. This institutional racism created a belief that White culture was far better than the Native American Way. These racial biases expressed themselves with the Chinese in a different manner. Instead of forcing them to assimilate into the prescribed White educational system, Chinese-American children were barred completely from going to school. Later legislation stated they had a right to public education but segregated them into Chinese-only schools. Latinos faced the same fate as the Chinese in being methodically shut out from education. Latinos were later granted access to education under the ruling of a judge with a particular belief; the judge asserted that Latinos were of White descent and therefore above other minorities. In the American South, laws against African-Americans completely obstructed their ability to get an education. By law, it was illegal for an African-American to learn how to read and write. African-American communities had to turn to schools established by Quakers and Christians in order to get an education. But turmoil and violence would always find their white allies, forcing these schools to close their doors. Fear of uprising was palpable in these plantation states, and illiteracy became a weapon used against African-Americans. If African-Americans remained uneducated, plantation owners and Southern Whites believed, they would not revolt, maintaining the status quo of slavery.
TAGS: [Collective Action] [2010’s] [History] [Implicit Bias] [Indigenous] [White Culture] [Asian] [Black Lives Matter] [Quaker] [Faith-Based/Spiritual] [Slavery] [Social Justice] [White Privilege] [Teachers]

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

*Paywall Alert
by Kevin Waite | May 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.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2020’s] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [History] [Asian] [Systemic Racism] [White Privilege] [Silencing POC]

8 Ways People of Color are Tokenized in Nonprofits

by Helen Kim Ho | September 2017
There’s a type of racism in the workplace many of us have personally witnessed, perpetrated or experienced: tokenism. Nowhere have I seen this play out more than in the nonprofit space. Tokenism is, simply, covert racism. Racism requires those in power to maintain their privilege by exercising social, economic and/or political muscle against people of color (POC). Tokenism achieves the same while giving those in power the appearance of being non-racist and even champions of diversity
TAGS: [Strategies] [2010’s] [White Privilege] [White Culture] [Systemic Racism] [Economics] [History] [Tips-Dos/Don’ts] [Social Justice] [Accountability] [White Supremacy] [White Blindness] [Black Lives Matter] [Asian] [Politics] [White Fragility/Tears] [Employment]

The Cost of Doing Nothing; Georgetown University Researchers Estimate in a New Report that the United States Loses Billions of Dollars Annually Because of Inequities in Higher Education

by Sara Weissman | May 2021
The United States loses out on hundreds of billions of dollars each year because of racial and socioeconomic inequities in higher education attainment, according to a new report by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.
The report, conducted in partnership with the Postsecondary Value Commission, an initiative of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and managed by the Institute for Higher Education Policy, found that it would take $3.97 trillion to close racial and socioeconomic gaps in college degree completion in the country. But after that initial investment, the United States would gain $956 billion per year in increased in tax revenues and GDP and cost savings on social assistance programs.
TAGS: [Strategies] [Collective Action] [2020’s] [Economics] [Social Justice] [Black Lives Matter] [Latino/a] [Asian] [Systemic Racism] [History]

‘Nomadland’ and the Supremacy of White People Problems; What’s the Strongest Liquid on Earth (and in Hollywood)? White Girl Tears

by Jeremy Helligar | January 2021
My 15-year-old niece recently floored her mother with some Black, bruising teen spirit: “What is the strongest liquid on earth?” she asked. Answer: “White girl tears.” It’s a revelation that has haunted me since my sister-in-law shared it with me. They live minutes away from Hollywood, a place on earth where hallowed White women have been crying themselves to Oscars for nearly a century. In 92 years of Academy Awards, Halle Berry remains the only Black woman whose tears have been strong enough to score a gong for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role. Only 11 others have been nominated in the category, none more than once.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2020’s] [White Fragility/Tears] [Art & Culture] [Asian] [Politics] [White Culture] [White Blindness] [White Privilege] [Black Lives Matter] [Latino/a] [Economics]

Racism and Health; Racism is a Serious Threat to the Public’s Health

CDC Website | Date Unknown
Racism is a system consisting of structures, policies, practices, and norms—that assigns value and determines opportunity based on the way people look or the color of their skin. This results in conditions that unfairly advantage some and disadvantage others throughout society. Racism — both interpersonal and structural – negatively affects the mental and physical health of millions of people preventing them from attaining their highest level of health, and consequently, affecting the health of our nation. A growing body of research shows that centuries of racism in this country has had a profound and negative impact on communities of color. The impact is pervasive and deeply embedded in our society—affecting where one lives, learns, works, worships and plays and creating inequities in access to a range of social and economic benefits—such as housing, education, wealth, and employment. These conditions—often referred to as social determinants of health—are key drivers of health inequities within communities of color, placing those within these populations at greater risk for poor health outcomes.
TAGS: [Strategies] [Health Disparities] [Economics] [Systemic Racism] [Housing] [Employment] [Social Justice] [Politics] [Black Lives Matter] [Indigenous] [Asian] [Latino/a]

How Black People Can Be Strong Allies to Asian Americans Right Now

by Char Adams | March 2021
“A big part of how to be allies in this moment is advocating with us,” said Alvina Wong, of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network. Thousands of hate incidents against Asian people across the country have been documented by advocacy groups in the last year, ranging in severity from spitting to the unprovoked push of an 84-year-old Thai American man in San Francisco who died of his injuries a few days later. These incidents have prompted the renewal of conversations about security in Asian American neighborhoods, privilege, solidarity and even anti-Blackness in response to the violence. That last element, activists say, devalues the decades of coalition building and allyship between Asian American and Black communities. But Russell Jeung, a professor of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University and co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate, notes that efforts to create a racial wedge between such groups only empowers the white supremacy that makes racist violence possible.
TAGS: [Collective Action] [2020’s] [Asian] [Advocacy] [White Supremacy] [Myths] [Tips-Dos/Don’ts] [Policing] [Social Justice] [Anti-Racism] [Accountability] [Bystander Intervention]

‘An Unbelievable Chain of Oppression’: America’s History of Racism was a Preexisting Condition for COVID-19

by Alan Gomez, Wyatte Grantham-Philips, Trevor Hughes, Rick Jervis, Rebecca Plevin, Kameel Stanley, Dennis Wagner, Marco della Cava, Deborah Barfield Berry, and Mark Nichols | October 2020
As the country cries out for a vaccine and a return to normal, lost in the policy debates is the reality that COVID-19 kills far more people of color than white Americans. This isn’t a matter of coincidence, poor choices or bad luck — it’s by design. A team of USA TODAY reporters explored how the policies of the past and present have made Black, Asian, Hispanic and Indigenous Americans prime targets for COVID-19. They found: America’s education and economic systems are still unequal, disproportionately leaving people of color out of higher-wage jobs. When COVID-19 struck, more people of color were serving as essential workers directly in the path of the virus.
TAGS: [Collective Action] [Health Disparities] [2020’s] [Black Lives Matter] [Indigenous] [Asian] [Latino/a] [Economics] [Employment] [Systemic Racism] [Denial] [History] [Social Justice] [Politics] [Justice System] [White Privilege] [White Culture] [White Blindness] [Housing] [Slavery] [Racial Covenants] [Environment] [Silencing POC]

Field Correction: Race-Based Medicine, Deeply Embedded in Clinical Decision Making, is Being Scrutinized and Challenged

by Stephanie Dutchen | December 2020
A young Black man arrives in the emergency room, doubled over in pain from a sickle cell crisis. “It’s an act,” says the attending physician dismissively. “I think he just wants drugs.” The attending refuses to prescribe the opioids he might give to a white patient in similar straits. Andrea Reid, MD ’88, associate dean for student and multicultural affairs for the Program in Medical Education and director of the Office of Recruitment and Multicultural Affairs at Harvard Medical School, witnessed too many such scenes as a trainee in Boston-area hospitals in the 1980s and ’90s. “It was awful,” she says. “There was bias that reflected in the management of some patients, especially those who didn’t look like they were in pain.” After watching this scenario play out in the emergency department and on the wards, Reid quietly began to direct some of the sickle cell patients toward her outpatient clinic for continuity care. … Many clinicians have heard or been formally taught that Black people don’t feel pain as acutely as white people because they have different biology. Black bodies have fewer nerve endings than white bodies, they’ve been told. Black skin is thicker than white skin, they’ve learned. Digging deeper reveals that these notions, as old as transatlantic slavery, have no evidence behind them. Yet a 2016 survey in PNAS of white medical students and residents found that half of the respondents still believe and act on them.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [Systemic Racism] [Health Disparities] [Myths] [Implicit Bias] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Blindness] [Denial] [History] [Indigenous] [Asian] [Latino/a] [White Privilege]

PWB: Preaching While Black! Ten Indicators of Racism in Predominantly White Church Bodies and What You Can Do To Address Them; The Unholy Union of Racism and Christianity

by Rev. Dr. Jack Sullivan, Jr. | August 2015
Racism and Christianity are no strangers to each other. While no theologically and biblically alert and informed person of our day would dare to defend racism as a legitimate, holy expression of Christianity, it is important to note that United States church bodies were on both sides of the matter of the enslavement of Africans, with some “Christian” ministers and theologians taking the time to bend some biblical texts while remaining silent on others, in order to offer heretical justification of the evil practice of slavery while crafting the doctrine of White supremacy and Black inferiority to provide a perverse platform on which it was placed. Of course, segregation, discrimination, and White privilege as hallmarks of societal racism, were found in organized church bodies as well. Several predominantly White church bodies continue to struggle with racism in both society and their organizational bodies. Some have made defeating racism a priority, while other church organizations have gone so far as to call racism a sin and to issue apologies for their historic and contemporary silence and complicity with racist orientations, laws, and church practices. Still, a large number of church bodies choose to remain silent on the matter perhaps while not realizing that this option actually emboldens racist practices.
TAGS: [Collective Action] [Individual Change] [2010’s] [Systemic Racism] [Faith-Based/Spiritual] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [-ing While Black] [Employment] [Policing] [Slavery] [Latino/a] [Asian] [Indigenous] [Black Lives Matter] [Social Justice] [Tips-Dos/Don’ts]

Supreme Court Upholds Law Banning Chinese Americans from White Schools

by Equal Justice Initative | Date Unknown
On November 21, 1927, in Gong Lum v. Rice, the United States Supreme Court ruled against the Chinese-American Lum family and upheld Mississippi’s power to force nine-year old Martha Lum to attend a “colored school: outside the district where she lived. …When the Mississippi Supreme Court held that Martha Lum could not insist on being educated with white students because she was of the “Mongolian or yellow race,” her father appealed to the United States Supreme Court. In its decision siding with the state of Mississippi, the U.S. Supreme Court reasoned that Mississippi’s decision to bar Martha from attending the local white high school did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment because she was entitled to attend a colored school. This decision extended the reach of segregation laws and policies in Mississippi and throughout the nation by classifying all non-white individuals as “colored.”
TAGS: [Collective Action] [Asian] [Systemic Racism] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [Justice System] [White Blindness]

12 Facts about Japanese Internment in the United States

by Scott Beggs | February 2019
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which sanctioned the removal of Japanese immigrants and Americans of Japanese heritage from their homes to be imprisoned in internment camps throughout the country. At the time, the move was sold to the public as a strategic military necessity. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the government argued that it was impossible to know where the loyalties of Japanese-Americans rested. Between 110,000 and 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were relocated to internment camps along the West Coast and as far east as Louisiana. Here are 12 facts about what former first lady Laura Bush has described as “one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history.”
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [Assumptions] [2010’s] [Systemic Racism] [Asian] [History] [Accountability] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [White Defensiveness] [Economics]

As Nation Reckons with Race, Poll Finds White Americans Least Engaged

by Adrian Florido and Marisz Penaloza | August 2020
Collins sympathized with the people marching in the protests but felt “I’m not that type of person.” So instead, he called and wrote his representatives in Congress and asked what they were doing to address racism in the country. He didn’t hear back, “but I still thought it was important to do.” As the nation navigates its most consequential racial justice movement in a half-century, some people have responded to the calls for action to remedy the country’s racist past and present by protesting in the streets or doing something as simple as reading a book about race. But a new NPR/Ipsos poll finds that these people remain a minority.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2020’s] [Anti-Racism] [Systemic Racism] [Policing] [Collective Action] [Latino/a] [Asian] [White Culture] [Black Lives Matter] [Reparations] [-ing While Black]

Black Scholars Confront White Supremacy in Classical Music; The Field Must Acknowledge a History of Systemic Racism While Also Giving New Weight to Black Composers, Musicians, and Listeners.

by Alex Ross | September 2020
This spring, the journal Music Theory Online published “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame,” an article by Philip Ewell, who teaches at Hunter College. It begins with the sentence “Music theory is white,” and goes on to argue that the whiteness of the discipline is manifest not only in the lack of diversity in its membership but also in a deep-seated ideology of white supremacy, one that insidiously affects how music is analyzed and taught. The main target of Ewell’s critique is the early-twentieth-century Austrian theorist Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935), who parsed musical structures in terms of foreground, middle-ground, and background levels, teasing out the tonal formulas that underpin large-scale movements. Schenker held racist views, particularly with regard to Black people, and according to Ewell those views seeped into the seemingly abstract principles of his theoretical work.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [Art & Culture] [Systemic Racism] [History] [White Supremacy] [Myths] [-ing While Black] [White Culture] [White Blindness] [Immigration] [Slavery] [Civil War] [Asian]

The Racist History of Abortion and Midwifery Bans; Today’s attacks on abortion access have a long history rooted in white supremacy.

by Michele Goodwin | July 2020
Just like slavery, anti-abortion efforts are rooted in white supremacy, the exploitation of Black women, and placing women’s bodies in service to men. Just like slavery, maximizing wealth and consolidating power motivated the anti-abortion enterprise. Then, just as now, anti-abortion efforts have nothing to do with saving women’s lives or protecting the interests of children. Today, a person is 14 times more likely to die by carrying a pregnancy to term than by having an abortion, and medical evidence has shown for decades that an abortion is as safe as a penicillin shot—and yet abortion remains heavily restricted in states across the country. Prior to the Civil War, abortion and contraceptives were legal in the U.S., used by Indigenous women as well as those who sailed to these lands from Europe. For the most part, the persons who performed all manner of reproductive health care were women — female midwives. Midwifery was interracial; half of the women who provided reproductive health care were Black women. Other midwives were Indigenous and white.
TAGS: [Collective Action] [2020’s] [Indigenous] [History] [Slavery] [Black Lives Matter] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [Politics] [Civil War] [Asian]

Accounting for Race; A New Way to Compare the Financial Health of Households in States

by Prosperity Now | January 2019
Headlines of national economic strength belie the reality that millions in the US are living in financial precarity. Even worse, families that are still recovering from the last recession will be the first to suffer from the next recession, which many analysts warn is around the corner. Because people of color, particularly Black, Latino, Native American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander people, live in a different economic reality than what oft-cited national data shows, we need to be honest about the impacts race and ethnicity have on economic outcomes. The exploration and acknowledgement of racial and ethnic disparities and their origins make our data clearer and our local, state and federal policies stronger. Solutions to our collective economic peril will remain elusive if we do not center the impact of race and racism.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2010’s] [Systemic Racism] [Economics] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [Indigenous] [Asian] [Latino/a] [History] [Housing] [Denial] [Politics] [Employment]

Huxley’s Adoption Story is Part of a Much Larger Narrative about Race, Disability and Abuse

by Lydia X. Z. Brown | May 2020
By now, you’ve probably heard about the YouTube influencers who made international news for abandoning their autistic child after adopting him from China almost three years ago. Huxley, originally adopted by the Stauffers, is one of thousands of children, many children of colour in the Global South who are adopted each year by predominantly white families in the Global North. Since his adoption – which was documented for YouTube in meticulous detail, including the fact that Huxley was disabled, the Stauffers have filmed numerous videos of him for their YouTube channel that they monetised and gained major corporate sponsors for producing. They filmed and posted videos that showed Huxley having meltdowns, which are terrifying, vulnerable moments. They are extremely emotionally, cognitively and physically draining for autistic people. They filmed and posted videos that showed Huxley with duct tape on his hands because his mother wanted to stop him from sucking his thumb. All of this is painfully familiar for autistic people, who routinely see nonautistic parents of autistic children exploiting and monetising their children for internet fame with no regard for their children’s autonomy, dignity, or privacy.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [Systemic Racism] [White Supremacy] [Asian] [White Privilege] [White Defensiveness] [White Blindness] [Accountability]

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Resource Links Tagged with "Asian"