Monthly Archives: April 2021

The Colors of Politics, Religion, and Oppression

General, Social Justice, ,

Ever since I was little, I’ve thought colors were important. Colors help identify things in nature; colors help us identify which clothing belongs to us in a family’s dirty laundry pile; colors help us identify different buildings when traveling or when going for a job interview and finding the right place; colors draw us to the arresting eyes or hair or complexion of people; colors help remind us of what foods we are consuming; colors help us remember which color to wear if we wish to support a protest.

We need color!

I cannot imagine not being able to see and revel in the infinite varieties that surround us throughout our lives; I’m aware of the good fortune of being able to appreciate colors, an ability that some lack.

I’m drawn to bright, bold hues such as those displayed by tulips and other springtime flowers as well as icy, sparkly gold and silver of year-end holiday festivities. I even like the blinding white of snow (as long as I’m not caught in a blizzard).

Colors can dictate your mood – at least it does for me. Wearing black reminds me of funerals; I’ve attended so many since the age of five. No color there, to my mind; a room painted in black conveys claustrophobia and darkness to me, nothing else. I know black looks good on some people, perhaps giving them the aura of sophistication or the illusion of looking slimmer. Black is not for me.

RED is for me. I LOVE red! Red is passionate. Red symbolizes love on Valentine’s Day. Red symbolizes good luck and happiness in Asian cultures and is worn by brides in some countries. That’s how I prefer to think about red.

Red symbolizes political ideologies, too. Communism. America’s Republican party – thanks largely to mass media since the 2000 U.S. presidential election.

Red also symbolizes Canada’s “liberal red”. In the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland, red is also the colour of the labor movement and the Labour (spelled Labor in Australia) parties in those countries. All major socialist and communist alliances and organizations have used red as their official color; red was chosen to represent the blood of the workers who died in the struggle against capitalism.

Red is on the flags of countless countries around the globe representing governments of all political stripes that ebb and flow with time. The oldest symbol of socialism (and by extension communism) is the Red Flag, which dates back to the French Revolution in the 18th century and the revolutions of 1848.

Before this nascence, the colour red was generally associated with monarchy or the Church due to the symbolism and association of Christ’s blood.

GREEN is my second-favorite color. Earthy. I love most shades of green! Except when vegetables are overcooked and then become a sickly shade of green-gray. Red and green…Christmas colors, that’s for me, though I’m not a big Christmas person.

Green is also on many countries’ flags. Brides in some countries wear green. There is a political party called the Green Party, which is in many countries, including the USA and often used by environmental groups. Green has sometimes also been linked to agrarian movements, such as the Populist Party, in the U.S. in the 1890s and the current-day Nordic Agrarian parties, as well as the National Party of Australia, a conservative party traditionally representing regional and agricultural interests. Irish Nationalist and Irish Republican movements have used the color green.

Green, considered the holy colour of Islam, is used to represent Islamism such as Hamas, Saudi Arabia and Islamist parties. Green is a color used for protest, such as the Iranian Green Movement (or Persian Spring) in 2009.

In most of Latin America, green is associated with pro-choice movements, the colour started being used in Argentina as a symbol of third wave feminism and abortion rights, with a green scarf as a symbol.

BLUE is also a popular color. Not my favorite color; I don’t ever want to live in a blue house or have a room in my home painted blue, no matter how pretty the shade. Yes, that’s how strongly I feel about blue! I don’t mind wearing blue jeans, though. You just won’t find a lot of blue in my wardrobe; it doesn’t have high priority when I choose what I want to wear. And I do enjoy a clear blue sky on a sunny day and can admire other people’s blue homes or rooms…I just don’t want to be part of it; it will make me FEEL blue to be surrounded in blue.

Blue symbolizes political ideologies as well. People associate it with their country’s flag. Or the police (in America). Or the Democratic party (USA) – though blue was used briefly by President Grover Cleveland and President Benjamin Harrison to represent the Republican Party in the late 1880s and and used by Texas for similar color-coding to assist its Spanish-speaking and illiterate citizens during that same time period. Blue is the color of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada and British conservatives of the UK; “Tory blue” is associated with more right-wing, conservative political thought.

Globally, blue is used by left-leaning parties (Japan, South Africa, Belgium) and right-leaning parties (Romania, South Korea, Austria). In Brazil, both left and right like blue!

In the realm of religion, blue is of prime significance in Judaism.

In everyday life, blue can be the color of an ID card…which can translate into real world life and death situations if a person possesses one…or not.

To illustrate in stark terms the meaning of blue for many people in one part of the world, I share below an article with you by a Palestinian, Layal Hazboun, who writes of her father, who, like countless others, desired the blue ID card, which grants rights to Palestinians living in Israel.

These rights include having medical insurance, traveling via Israeli airports, and opening a bank account in Israel. But for a long while Hazboun’s father only had a green ID card.

According to Aljazeera’s The colour-coded Israeli ID system for Palestinians:

As Israel expanded its control and occupation over four territories in the aftermath of the Six Day War in 1967, it devised a system of population control that remains in place five decades later.

After the 1967 war, the Israeli military declared the occupied territories to be closed areas, making it mandatory for Palestinian residents to obtain permits to enter or leave. Palestinians who were abroad during that time missed out on the subsequent population census and were not granted identification papers.

The clear delineator that has separated and dictated the lives of these Palestinians is the colour-coded identification system issued by the Israeli military and reinforced in 1981 through its Civil Administration branch. Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip have green IDs – generally issued once they turn 16 – while Palestinians in East Jerusalem and Israel have blue IDs.

The cards affect everything from freedom of movement to family unity.

To me, the blue and green identification card system seems terribly complicated on the face of it. There seems to be many different layers of each card, depending on where one lives and what one needs it for. You can read more about this here and in the Aljazeera link above.

Read Layal Hazboun’s story, and learn how colors are used in the worst way: to dehumanize and divide Palestinians. In this light, blue and green symbolize suffering or limited freedom(s):

In Palestine, green and blue are more than colors

Is Israel’s decades-long use of the blue and green identification card system forced upon Palestinians much different than the Nazi leaders forcing Jews to wear the Jewish badge between 1939 and 1945?

In the parts of German-occupied Poland, Governor General Hans Frank ordered, on November 23, 1939, that all Jews over the age of ten wear a “Jewish Star”: a white armband affixed with a blue six-sided star, worn over the right upper sleeve of one’s outer garments. There were heavy penalties for those caught not wearing it.

Later, on September 1, 1941, Security Police Chief Reinhard Heydrich decreed that all Jews in the Reich six years of age or older were to wear a badge which consisted of a yellow Star of David on a black field to be worn on the chest, with the word “Jew” inscribed inside the star in German or in the local language of whichever region Germany had occupied.

On a historical note: over the course of more than ten centuries, Muslim caliphs, medieval bishops, and – eventually – Nazi leaders used an identifying badge to mark Jews. It’s horrible. Period.

The Nazis used the badge not only to stigmatize and humiliate Jews but also to segregate them and to watch and control their movements; so too has Israel forced Palestinians to have green or blue ID cards to control their movements and segregate them, which ultimately affects every aspect of their lives. For decades.

WHY has the world tolerated this for so long?

Just please remember: Palestinians are our fellow human beings and ought not to be ignored.

The naysayers who challenge Palestinians’ very existence and dignity deserve every criticism and pushback, particularly if they claim to be God-loving persons.

To my mind, I think you dehumanize yourself every time you dehumanize others – or support those who do.

I hope someday that Palestinians will not have to have their lives dictated by ID cards, no matter what color.

Sources

Harvard Gazette
Enchroma
We Are Not Numbers!
Wikipedia – Iranian Green Movement
HuffPost
Wikpedia – Green Party of the United States
Green Party US
Aljazeera
Palestinian Diary
United States Holocaust Museum
Metro UK
Learning in Palestine
Wikipedia – Political Colour
Color Combos

Impunity is Not an Option Here

General, Social Justice, , ,

Can you imagine how you would feel if a lunatic burst through the door of your workplace, accusing you and your coworkers of something you did not do, threatening you, and berating you with racially tinged words?

Last Tuesday, April 6, 2021, a 50-year-old woman identified as Sharon Williams by police, stormed into Good Choice for Nails Salon near Manhattan’s Chinatown, berating and threatening the workers. “You brought coronavirus to this country!” she yelled, according to police.

Then she went outside, continued her rampage, and spewed hateful remarks at an Asian pedestrian on the sidewalk.

When a male bystander intervened, she called him “a Chinese motherfucker,” according to police. But he wasn’t just any bystander: he was an undercover NYPD officer.

Hahahahahaha!! Serves you right, Ms. Williams.

The officer then called for backup, and Williams was arrested and charged with “harassment as a hate crime and aggravated harassment as a hate crime,” officials told the The Washington Post.

Sharon Williams may not have been armed with a lethal weapon, but her mouth spewed the sort of vitriol that has targed Asian Americans since the start of the pandemic. Sometimes resulting in physical harm – and death.

Data released by Stop AAPI [Asian American Pacific Islander] Hate showed that almost 3,800 incidents of anti-Asian hate were reported over the past year during the pandemic. The number only accounts for those reported, so the actual number of crimes is expected to be much higher. Additionally, of the 3,800 anti-hate incidents reported, 68% targeted women and over 500 occurred in 2021 alone, according to Stop AAPI Hate.

I wonder how Ms. Williams would feel if she were in a workplace where everyone looked like her and a lunatic burst through the door, spewing racist vitriol and accusing her and her coworkers of something she did not do nor had any control over?

Did she need her 15 minutes of fame?

Was Ms. Williams’ mind so embroiled in racist animosity toward Asian Americans that she just HAD TO give her piece of mind to anybody who appeared Asian – assuming perhaps that the people she harassed were Chinese just because she went to Chinatown? Did she assume that just because the virus supposedly started in China that every person she may perceive as Chinese is guilty? Did she think she’d get away with her very public racist harassment of people who don’t look like her?

Where the hell does she get her information about COVID-19 anyway? Has she drunk the former president’s racist rhetoric around the coronavirus referring to it as “kung flu” and “China virus”? (ethnicity is not a virus nor does a virus have an ethnicity, Ms. Williams!)

She isn’t someone I’d want to be in the presence of.

Last year, in an effort to stop the rise in attacks against Asian Americans, the NYPD created an 18-member Asian hate-crime task force. And last month NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea announced the department would increase its outreach to Asian communities and deploy plainclothes Asian American officers in Chinatown and other areas of the city with larger Asian American population. This announcement created immediate backlash from some reform advocates, who noted that the department had agreed last year to disband its plainclothes “anti-crime” units; those officers were involved in a disproportionate number of civilian complaints and shootings. However, this announcement sparked immediate backlash from some reform advocates, who noted that the department had agreed last year to disband its plainclothes “anti-crime” units that have long been involved in a disproportionate number of civilian complaints and shootings.

One critic, Joo-Hyun Kang, the director of Communities United for Police Reform, said the new initiative is “a toxic plan that’s being imposed on our communities for the NYPD’s public relations goals.”

She added,

The NYPD routinely protects white supremacy, has no track record of preventing hate violence in any community and in Asian communities regularly harasses and targets elders who collect bottles and cans, delivery workers, sex workers, youth and others.

Apparently, no plainclothes Asian American officer was present when an Asian-American man was attacked in Central Park in broad daylight while walking through the park with his wife and five-year-old son…likely because it isn’t an area with a heavily concentrated Asian American population. The attack reportedly took place around 1:00 p.m. on Saturday, March 27.

The assailant allegedly started whispering something in the man’s wife’s ear that was sexual in nature; when the Asian American man tried to reason with the attacker, he got sucker punched. His injuries were serious enough to land him in nearby Mount Sinai Hospital.

That attacker is still on the loose.

I lost count long ago of how many stupid racist comments, dirty looks, and harrassments I’ve received over the years and to the present day because of who I am and what I look like. I can only count ONE time (thankfully) when my life was threatened for that reason. So when I learn about people who are attacked (or worse) for who they are – especially those with whom I identify ethnically and culturally, it pains me. It makes me sad and it makes my blood boil.

Reading details about racist attacks on people is sometimes visceral for me because it brings back unpleasant memories which are all too relatable. I can empathize with them. And it can be news I don’t want to think about too much because it’s too close for comfort – I imagine the victim could have been one of my family members.

I’d likely be fit to be tied if that were to happen, which I hope it never will, of course.

I shall keep writing about this as long as anti-Asian hate crimes keep happening. Name the perpetrators and name their crimes. Why remain silent and sweep their misdeeds under the carpet?

This is not the 19th century, when the perpetrators of one of the worst mass lynchings in U.S. history in Los Angeles’ Chinatown in 1871 literally got away with murder. Nineteen Chinese immigrants were killed, 15 of whom were hanged by the mob in the course of the riot. According to the first Associated Press account, the mob consisted of at least 500 people, or 8 percent of the city’s population.

Authorities arrested and tried 10 people. Eight were convicted of manslaughter and sent to San Quentin prison. Their convictions were overturned on appeal due to a legal technicality.

So yes, the convicted got away with murder. Never mind the hundreds of other participants who committed goodness knows what else. The tragedy was quickly forgotten; the local newspapers made no mention of it in the year-end recap of major events of the year, according to the Los Angeles Public Library.

Go beyond Los Angeles to Rock Springs, Wyoming, where on September 2, 1885, 150 white miners in Rock Springs, Wyoming, brutally attacked their Chinese coworkers, killing 28, wounding 15 others, and driving several hundred more out of town. The massacre was defended in the local newspaper, and, to a lesser extent, in other western newspapers.

Or Seattle, Washington, where on February 6–9, 1886, anti-Chinese sentiment caused by intense labor competition – and in the context of an ongoing struggle between labor and capital – erupted in violence between the Knights of Labor rioters and federal troops ordered in by President Grover Cleveland. The incident resulted in the removal of over 200 Chinese civilians from Seattle and left two militia men and three rioters seriously injured. Congress paid $276,619.15 to the Chinese government in compensation for the rioting, but the actual victims never saw any such compensation. Though 13 men were tried in court in relation to the riot, not a single one was ever convicted of a crime.

Throughout the American West (and particularly in California) during the second half of the 19th century, countless Chinese immigrants were attacked: lynched, murdered, assaulted, and their homes and businesses were pillaged and burnt. No one was ever held accountable then.

So in this 21st century, whenever ignorant, hateful people choose to broadcast their racial animosity by harming others, let’s overwhelm them with bright sunshine for the whole world to see!

Impunity is not an option here.

I may have osteoporosis of the spine, but I’ll be damned if I become spineless about today’s anti-Asian hate crimes and other injustices by remaining silent. I hereby take this vow – to myself.

Sources

Daily Kos
Washington Post
Alternet.org
TMZ
Wikipedia – Anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States
History.com
Wikipedia – Rock Springs Massacre
Wikipedia – Seattle riot of 1886
Teaching Resources – University of Illinois
Today
Los Angeles Public Library
Orange County Register
China Underground
Wikipedia – Chinese massacre of 1871
LA Times – The racist massacre that killed 10% of L.A.’s Chinese population and brought shame to the city
My Central Oregon
LA Times – Column: Chinese immigrants helped build California, but they’ve been written out of its history
US Department of State – Office of the Historian
Wikipedia – History of Chinese Americans
Gothamist
Stop AAPI Hate

When Asian American Lives Don’t Matter

Social Justice, Women,

I have a story to tell you on this first day of April:

A 65-year-old Asian American woman fell on Monday, March 29, 2021, near Times Square in New York City because a man passed by in a hurry and accidentally knocked her over.

At least a few bystanders happened to witness her fall in the Heaven’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, according to police, who released the video in an appeal for help identifying the careless man.

The woman was headed to church when the man knocked her down. The witnesses – lobby staffers at the apartment building where the incident occurred outside its doors – stopped being bystanders and rushed out to help the woman. They sat her down in the lobby of the apartment building she was in front of, offered her tea. One even ran down the street to bring her flowers. They didn’t let her leave until they felt she was calm and well enough to walk on her on.

Ain’t that sweet of them?!

The Asian American woman went on her way to church and only suffered minor bruises and bumps.

The. End.

If you believe that story, then you’ve been living under a rock.

That was my brief fantasy version of an event this past Monday, March 29th.

No, the real story is that the 65-year-old Asian American woman, identified by police as Vilma Kari, was violently attacked in broad daylight near Times Square on Monday by a man who knocked her to the ground and started furiously kicking her head, allegedly shouting, “Fuck you, you don’t belong here” at her.

According to video released by the NYPD that showed the horrific attack, there were at least three bystanders in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan. Who did NOTHING. Nada. Just stood around. The video showed a few passing cars as well that did not stop. Two of those bystanders were building security personnel of the apartment building where Ms. Kari was attacked outside its doors.

So much for security, eh?

Three men versus one attacker…surely they had a chance to stop him? At least scare him away? But who wants to get involved in helping an Asian woman being brutally attacked?

Apparently, no one.

She could have been my mother, auntie, sister, or a friend.

Or yours.

Now the public finds out that the suspect, identified by police as Brandon Elliot, served 17 years in state prison for stabbing his mother to death in 2002 and that he was released on lifetime parole in November 2019. He’s been charged with “two counts of assault as a hate crime and one count each of attempted assault as a hate crime, assault and attempted assault,” according to local news.

Mr. Elliot looks to be a BIG man in the video. He. Kicked. Her. Head. Furiously and repeatedly.

Are there any words for this?! Yet another attack on the Asian American community.

And the “security” personnel didn’t do a damn thing. Just stood by and watched. Didn’t even try to help her, let alone call 911 for help. Did they enjoy watching Mr. Elliot viciously kick Ms. Kari in the head? Were they scared he’d beat the shit out of them if they got involved? What sticks out is that they made no effort whatsoever to intervene.

Cowards.

Ms. Kari was taken to the hospital, where doctors found she had a fractured pelvis and contusions to the head, according to WABC TV.

“The victim sustained a serious physical injury and was removed by EMS to NYU Langone Hospital,” and is stable, the police said.

I feel so bad for Ms. Kari and her family. I hope she will recover — physically and emotionally — and not suffer too badly from this horrible crime. She was attacked for being who she was. She did absolutely nothing wrong.

When will this anti-Asian hatred end?

I don’t know. But I say to the bullies like Mr. Elliot who scream “You don’t belong here”: take your poison to the nearest toxic waste dump where it belongs, please. Go to your local public library and read a history book about Asian Americans. Turn your brain back on instead of being a radioactive asshole. A fucking pariah to your community. To America.

Peace.

Sources

The Post Millennial
The New York Post
CNN
MSN
Independent
CBS