Full text: The Report on Human Rights Violations in the United States in 2021

IV. INDULGING IN RACIAL DISCRIMINATION EXACERBATES SOCIAL INJUSTICE

The "virus" of deeply-entrenched racism in the United States is spreading along with the novel coronavirus, with anti-Asian hate crimes happening frequently, discrimination against Muslim communities increasing steadily, and racial persecution of indigenous populations still remaining, which has led to an even widening racial economic divide and growing racial inequality.

Asian Americans face increasingly severe discrimination and violent attacks. As a result of US politicians' manipulation over racial issue, the number of attacks targeting Asian Americans has drastically increased. According to a report published on Nov 18, 2021 by the national coalition Stop Asian American and Pacific Islander Hate, from March 19, 2020 to Sept 30, 2021, a total of 10,370 hate incidents against Asian American and Pacific Islander people were reported to the organization, and a majority of the incidents took place in spaces open to the public like public streets and businesses.

Statistics released by the New York Police Department on Dec 8, 2021 showed that anti-Asian hate crimes in the city rose by 361 percent from that of 2020. According to a report of The Washington Post on April 22, 2021, a Pew Research Center survey found that 81 percent of Asian adults said violence against the group was rising. The New York Times commented that "no vaccine for racism." It said that Asian New Yorkers live in fear of attacks, and the psychological effects of anti-Asian violence have scarred Asian communities in the United States. US broadcaster NPR reported on Oct 22, 2021 that one in four Asian Americans feared that members of their household would be attacked or threatened because of their race or ethnicity.

On March 16, 2021, 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long, a white male, launched gun attacks at three Asian-owned spas in Atlanta, killing eight people. Six of them are Asian women.

The deadly shooting epitomizes an escalation of discrimination and violent attacks against Asian-Americans in the country in recent years, sparking unprecedented anger and fear. Thousands of Asians and people of other ethic groups took to the streets in massive "Stop Asian Hate" rallies and marches.

On Jan 28, 2021, an 84-year-old man from Thailand was deliberately knocked down to the ground and then died in San Francisco.

On April 23, 2021, Ma Yaopan, a 61-year-old Chinese man, was attacked from behind and fell to the ground on a street in New York. He then was repeatedly kicked in the head, which caused facial fractures. After eight months in a coma, he eventually died in hospital.

On Nov 17, 2021, three Chinese high school students were violently assaulted on a subway train on their way home from school in Philadelphia. "It was clear that they were picked on because they were Asian," said a local police officer.

On April 3, 2021, a report of The New York Times documented more than 110 anti-Asian incidents in the past year with clear evidence of racial hatred. "Over the last year, in an unrelenting series of episodes with clear racial animus, people of Asian descent have been pushed, beaten, kicked, spit on and called slurs. Homes and businesses have been vandalized," said the report. That was just a tip of the iceberg of racist attacks on Asians in the United States.

BBC reported on July 22, 2021 that being regarded as a "permanent alien" is a painful experience shared by many Asian Americans, and under the combined effect of xenophobia and anti-communism, the US government has been suspicious of Chinese scientists for more than half a century.

Since the implementation of the so-called "China Initiative" in November 2018, Chinese scientists have frequently been subjected to gratuitous harassment, monitoring and crackdown by the US government. Vile and absurd acts of the US law enforcement authorities have been constantly exposed by the media.

The New York Times on Nov 29, 2021 reported on its website that about 2,000 academics at institutions including Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley and Princeton University have signed an open letter, expressing concerns that the initiative unduly targets researchers of Chinese descent.

The Yale Daily News reported on Dec 9, 2021 that nearly 100 Yale professors have jointly published an open letter condemning the China Initiative, saying that it is invasive and discriminatory, disproportionately targets researchers of Chinese origin, and poses threats to scientific inquiry and academic freedom. They called for an end to the initiative.

According to an investigation by MIT Technology Review, a majority of cases under the initiative have had charges dismissed or are largely inactive.

Several Asian-American civil rights groups in the United States said that investigation against Chinese under the initiative would lead to "discrimination and stigmatization."

Xi Xiaoxing, a Chinese scientist victimized by the initiative, said the current situation of scientists of Chinese origin is similar to that of Japanese-Americans sent to internment camps during World War II, almost like a return to the McCarthy era.

On July 28, 2021, Foreign Affairs published an article titled Rivalry Without Racism on its website, saying that "US foreign-policy makers' consistent overexaggeration of China's threat to the United States" is a vital element of the recent surge in anti-Asian incidents. Demonizing China leads to the demonization of Asians in the country, and "until policymakers stop using China as a punching bag for all of the United States' woes, Asian Americans will continue to be at risk," said the article.

Discrimination and attacks against Muslims are on the rise. Bloomberg reported on Sept 9, 2021 that over the past two decades since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, discrimination against Muslim Americans has surged.

The Associated Press reported on Sept 9, 2021 that a poll found 53 percent of Americans have unfavorable views toward Islam.

In a 2021 report, the Council on American-Islamic Relations said it receives more complaints of bullying and Islamophobic rhetoric every year. A report published by the council's California chapter on Oct 28, 2021 showed that more than half of the students surveyed across California said they do not feel safe at school because they are bullied for their Muslim heritage. That's the highest percentage the California chapter has documented since the survey started in 2013.

A survey released on Oct 29, 2021 by the Othering and Belonging Institute in University of California, Berkeley, found that 67.5 percent of the Muslim participants had experienced Islamophobia-related harms and that 93.7 percent of the respondents said they had been impacted by Islamophobia emotionally or physically.

The aborigines have long suffered cruel racial persecution. The United States has a long and dark history of violating the rights of indigenous people, including Indians, who have experienced bloody massacres, brutal expulsions and cultural genocide.

An article titled "The United States Must Reckon With Its Own Genocides" published on the website of Foreign Policy on Oct 11, 2021 noted that over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, more than 350 indigenous boarding schools were funded by the US government, which aimed to culturally assimilate indigenous children by forcibly separating them from their families and communities to distant residential facilities.

Until the 1970s, hundreds of thousands of indigenous children had been uprooted from their homes and many had been abused to death in those boarding schools where their American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian identities, languages, and beliefs were forcibly suppressed.

The United States is not just morally, but also legally responsible for the crime of genocide against its own people, said the article.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Navajo Nation, the Cherokee Nation, the Sioux Nation and other Native Americans have struggled with disease and poverty, which, however, has all been systematically ignored. The Navajo Nation, which stretches across Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, was once among the areas with the highest rates of COVID-19 infection across the country.

The Guardian reported on April 24, 2020 that early data indicated dramatically disproportionate rates of COVID-19 infection and death of Native Americans. Among about 80 percent of US state health departments that have released some racial demographic data on the impact of the coronavirus, almost half of them did not explicitly include Native Americans in their breakdowns and instead categorized them under the label "other." "We are a small population of people because of genocide," said Abigail Echo-Hawk, chief research officer of Seattle Indian Health Board. "If you eliminate us in the data, we don't exist."

Russian news network RT reported on Jan 8, 2022 that since the 1950s, among more than 1,000 clandestine nuclear tests the US government has conducted, 928 took place on lands of the Shoshone Aboriginal tribe, leaving 620,000 tons of radioactive dust. The amount of radioactive dust is nearly 48 times that of the nuclear explosion in Hiroshima, Japan in 1945. According to Ian Zabarte of the Shoshone Nation, more than 1,000 people of the Shoshone Aboriginal tribe have died directly from the nuclear explosion, and many people have consequently suffered from cancer.

The economic divide between races continues to widen. There has been a long-term and systematic economic inequality between ethnic minority groups and the white population in the United States, which is manifested in various aspects such as employment and entrepreneurship, wages, and financial loans.

USA Today reported on April 7, 2021 that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 48 percent of the Asian community's estimated 615,000 unemployed were without work for six months-plus through the first quarter of 2021. The figure surpassed the portion of long-term unemployed among jobless workers of other ethnic groups.

Alexandra Suh, executive director of the Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance in Los Angeles, said that Asians in the United States have been racialized, steered toward jobs and industries like catering, laundries and domestic work, nursing and personal care, which are devalued, underpaid and impacted hardest during the pandemic.

On July 30, 2021, USA Today reported on its website that a new Gallup poll showed that 59 percent Americans do not believe racial minorities have equal job opportunities.

The Hill reported on its website on Sept 11, 2021 that 27 percent of minority-owned small businesses remained closed, much higher than White-owned small businesses. White-owned startups are seven times more likely to obtain loans than Black-owned ones during their founding year. Throughout the pandemic, businesses owned by people of color did not receive equitable access to federal aid, being hit harder economically.

CNN reported on July 15, 2021 that around 17 percent of African American households lack basic financial services compared to 3 percent of white households.

On Dec 15, 2021, the Los Angeles Times reported on its website that despite representing 19 percent of the US population, Hispanic families hold just 2 percent of the nation's total wealth. The median net worth of white families is more than five times greater than Hispanic families.

Structural flaws in its system have led to increasing racial inequality in the United States. On Nov 22, 2021, UN Special Rapporteur on minority issues Fernand de Varennes said at the end of a 14-day visit to the United States that when it comes to human rights and minorities, the United States is a nation "where support for slavery led to one of the world's most brutal civil wars, where racial segregation persisted late into the 20th century, and where indigenous peoples' experiences have for centuries been one of dispossession, brutality and even genocide."

With a legal system that is structurally set up to advantage and forgive those who are wealthier, while penalizing those who are poorer, particularly minorities, minorities such as African Americans and Latino Americans in particular are crushed into a generational cycle of poverty, de Varennes said.