I was watching a YouTube Video about the Baltimore riots, and I just scrolled down to read some comments. Predictably, I saw racists calling black people names. It didn’t take long before one of the racists used the “Asian Attack” strategy, when someone brought up the social economic disparities in places like Baltimore.
For those who are not familiar, the conservative strategy that I call “Asian Attack” is a strategy where conservatives use Asian Americans as examples of how blacks should not complain about racism and economic hardship.
Conservatives often point to the success of many Asian communities in this country and how well educated Asians are as compared to Blacks. This is a surprisingly brilliant strategy, which even divides many blacks. People like Stacey Dash often point to these kinds of examples.
Here’s the racist’s comment. (warning there is coarse language)
+Guy Souriandt “lol shut the fuck up. Blacks were freed in the 1860s, how long does it take to get thier shit together? Japanese Americans were forced into internment camps in WW2, Chinese Americans were indentured to build the railroads, and countless others have fled murderous dictatorships to be in the U.S. But somehow they have their children outperforming whites…. ITS DAT RACISM DAWG!!!!!!!“
Here is the brilliant response to that diatribe.
+nintoolapcfloyd – “Stupid comparison. Aside from the fact that Asian-Americans have plenty of problems with poverty (14.5% of Asian-Americans are poor compared to only 8-9% of white Americans) and some Asian neighborhoods (particularly SE Asians) are infected with crime problems too (like the Tong and human trafficking, for example), the Asian-American experience is very different from the African-American one. For much of the 20th century Asians were not allowed to emigrate to the US due to the Chinese Exclusion Act.
The small Asian minority that was already here was pretty economically secluded and had higher rates of poverty than they do now. The majority of Asian-Americans came here AFTER the Civil Rights Acts had passed (the Chinese Exclusion Act was lifted around that same time), thus reaped the benefits of the Civil Rights Movement. Asian-Americans, particularly East Asians, tend to be from educated upper-middle class and upper class families and merchant families in their home countries. They take their business skills and education over here to the US and are able to apply for business loans and get all sorts of grants and financial aid for legal immigrants trying to get established.?
In contrast, most African-Americans are descendants of illiterate (since they weren’t allowed to be educated) slaves who were released from slavery with no money and no property. Right after slavery ended Jim Crow and the Black Codes were instated, which effectively banned black Americans from much of economic life and relegated most of them to sharecropping. In the late 19th and early 20th century many started moving to urban areas seeking better-paying industrial jobs (The Great Migration).
It wasn’t until the New Deal and Great Society era that black Americans started benefiting from the social programs that built the American Middle Class. Great Society and the expansion of the GI Bill helped bestow upon black Americans benefits they were denied during New Deal due to compromises made to white Southerners to exclude blacks from the benefits. Shortly after Great Society, deregulation, outsourcing and mass incarceration policies were put into effect which drove jobs out of urban areas and started treating poor neighborhoods as picking grounds for the Prison-Industrial Complex.
The two experiences don’t compare. It’s the same reason African immigrants are often better off than native-born white Americans: similar to Asian immigrants they tend to be the educated elite and merchant class from their countries who come here and are assisted by the government in starting businesses over here. Native-born blacks and poor whites are often denied business loans, denied grants, etc.”
I tip my hat to this person; it’s rare to find such brilliant, factual, and well reasoned comments anywhere on the internet. I’m sure most of this went right over the head of the Tea Party?racist fool to which the response was directed. However, enough of the right people will read it and take this knowledge and use this as a new weapon to fight conservative racist ignorance.
