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Friday, March 26, 2021

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Myanmar Junta Threatens to Shoot Protesters as Security Forces Kill Six

The death toll reaches 328, with more than 3,000 arrested since Feb. 1 coup.

This photo taken and received from an anonymous source via Facebook on March 25, 2021 shows security forces holding weapons on a street in Taunggyi in Myanmar's Shan state, during a crackdown on protests against the military coup.

AFP

Myanmar’s military junta broadcast a threat Friday that anti-regime protesters would be “shot in the head,” as security forces killed six demonstrators in a southern coastal city, pushing the death toll since the Feb. 1 to more than 320, witnesses told RFA.

The junta’s warning, broadcast on state-run MRTV News prior to its 8 p.m. news program, said the protesters should learn that they “can be in danger of getting shot in the head and back,” and urged the people not to fall into a “colonialist propaganda trap.”

The warning came just hours before Saturday, Armed Forces Day, on which the junta is planning a show of force, including a military parade, and activists are calling for more protests across the nation of 54 million people.

Earlier in the day, police opened fire on a crowd of protesters in the southern coastal city of Myeik, killing six.

Among the dead were 19-year-old Min Myat Paing, an unidentified 32-year-old Muslim woman and mother of three, and four others who have yet to be identified.

Min Myat Paing was shot in the head and died immediately according to his brother’s Facebook page.

Pictures and posts on Facebook showed police and soldiers shooting from the inside of an ambulance. A Myanmar Now report, quoting the man who donated the ambulance, said security forces took it away after dragging four firemen out of the vehicle.

In Khin Oo township in the northern Sagaing region, two men who were shot on Thursday passed away in the hospital.

“The two dead are Toe Zaw Aung of Kanthit village and Zaw Win Maung of MyaKanthar ward, both 19 years old. We are now at Shwebo Civil Hospital to retrieve Toe Zaw Aung’s body and will hold a funeral service this afternoon,” a source close to the two men, who requested anonymity for safety reasons, told RFA’s Myanmar Service Friday.

“There is no one to claim Zaw Win Maung’s body yet because his wife is in hiding because she was also part of the protests. I have contacted the Free Funeral Service on his behalf. During the fighting yesterday 21 people were arrested,” said the source.

2021-03-26T131958Z_205997090_RC2ZIM900TY6_RTRMADP_3_MYANMAR-POLITICS-PROTESTS.JPG — Demonstrators sitting on motorcycles display flags during a protest in Launglone, Dawei district, Myanmar March 26, 2021. Credit: Reuters

Protests in many parts of the country on Thursday continued into the evening, with security forces killing and wounding several protesters as clashes continued into the night.

In Sagaing’s Tamu township, bordering India, police and soldiers killed at least two and wounded seven Thursday, eyewitnesses told RFA.

The two men had sustained injuries while protesting and were in the process of being rushed to Kalemyo General Hospital, when police stopped the car they were riding in. They died shortly after.

Local residents told RFA that four others were in critical condition after they were shot in the head and chest. Several others were undergoing treatment at a makeshift first aid camp.

Sources said the shooting in Tamu started when local residents surrounded policemen and soldiers as they approached two jewelry shops in the town.

About a dozen Myanmar nationals from Tamu crossed the border into India Thursday and three in the group were admitted to the hospital with serious bullet wounds, the Associated Press reported. The hospitalized were allowed to stay in India on humanitarian grounds, while the others were repatriated.

Yangon raid

Meanwhile in the commercial center Yangon, police and soldiers raided residential quarters in South Dagon township at about 10 p.m. Thursday, killing a man on the spot, witnesses told RFA through a messenger app. They said 10 other people were injured in gunfire and 15 youths were also beaten up and taken from their homes.

Police and soldiers arrived in North Dagon on about 15 trucks and began firing automatic weapons indiscriminately, shooting people with rubber bullets, teargas and slingshots.

“There was a lot of shooting and many were wounded. Three people are now in critical condition,” an eyewitness told RFA.

“There is now a large police and soldier presence in wards 70, 71, and 72. They forced people nearby to remove the makeshift barriers in the streets,” the eyewitness said.

Elsewhere in the city, at about 4 a.m., a Molotov cocktail was thrown at the headquarters of the National League for Democracy, the party ousted by the Feb. 1 military takeover. The incident was caught on nearby security cameras and posted to Facebook.

Local residents told RFA they had to break down the entrance gate to put out the fire themselves after the local fire department failed to respond despite several calls. Not much damage was reported, with the exception of only the front entrance.

Anti-coup protesters gesture during a march in Yangon, Myanmar, Friday, March 26, 2021. Credit: AP

In the nearby Bago region’s Pyu township, a 20-year-old man died after police fired at crowds descending on the police station to demand the release of several protesters that had been arrested. The fate of another man who was shot is not yet known.

In Monywa, the largest city in Sagaing, security forces broke into houses and arrested 20 people, residents told RFA.

Authorities “kicked down doors and arrested about 15 men,” a woman who insisted on remaining anonymous told RFA.

“They were searching for one man by name at one house, and they ended up taking away a woman and her six-year-old son because they couldn’t find her husband. They also arrested maybe six or seven men sitting at the Shwe Ohnthee Teashop, as well as the owner and an employee of the shop,” she said.

According to a tally verified by RFA, more than 270 civilians were killed by the junta’s security forces since Feb. 1.

The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, an NGO based in Thailand, reported that at least 328 people have been killed in the crackdown as of Friday, and more than 3,000 arrested, charged, or sentenced.

Reported by RFA’s Myanmar Service. Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

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Should Solar Geoengineering Be a Tool to Slow Global Warming, or is Manipulating the Atmosphere Too Dangerous?

A new National Academies report is focusing attention on the controversial possibility of cooling the climate by reflecting sunlight away from Earth.

By Bob Berwyn
March 26, 2021

GREAT YARMOUTH, ENGLAND - JULY 19: The sun starts to rise behind Britain's largest offshore wind farm off the Great Yarmouth coastline on July 19, 2006 in Norfolk, England. The 30 turbines cost GBP75million and can generate enough power for 41,000 homes are seen by supporters as a clean and green way to generate electricity and a way of cutting down on harmful green house gas emmissions. (Photo by Matt Cardy/Getty Images)

The risks of the climate crisis are so urgent that the United States, in cooperation with other countries and under strict rules, should study the possibility of temporarily cooling the planet through solar geoengineering, a report released Thursday by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine says.

The report focuses on adding reflective particles to the upper atmosphere to bounce the sun’s heat back to space, brightening low-altitude clouds over the ocean to make them more reflective or thinning wispy cirrus clouds so that they trap less heat on the surface of the planet.

Supporting research into those possibilities shouldn’t be equated with actually implementing them, the NAS committee members involved with the report emphasized, adding that such studies should not detract from the need to cut greenhouse gas emissions. And scientists “need to be open to terminating” geoengineering research if findings indicate that such manipulations of the atmosphere would carry undue risk of dangerous consequences, they said.

“It’s kind of surreal to even be talking about this,” said Ambuj Sagar, who studies science and technology policy at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and was part of the committee that compiled the report. “You can’t be doing climate policy without thinking about geoengineering, and the more you get into it, the more complex it is. It raises all kinds of issues with international politics and governance.”

But if greenhouse gas emissions don’t start dropping fast, people in 10 or 20 years will need sound science to decide if they want to pull the solar engineering emergency brake,” said Peter Irvine, who studies solar geoengineering at University College London and was not involved in the new report.

The Academies’ report recommends a research budget of $100 million to $200 million for the next five years, as a “minor part of the overall U.S. research portfolio related to climate change.” For now, it says, research should not be focused on a path toward deployment, but on understanding how solar geoengineering fits with all the options for responding to climate change.

Solar geoengineering only makes sense in tandem with cutting emissions, because solar geoengineering doesn’t actually address the buildup of greenhouse gases that warms the climate. It only masks some of the symptoms for as long as the measures are active. Temperatures would rebound dangerously fast when atmospheric manipulation ends. A 2015 report from the Academies concluded that geoengineering is no substitute for emissions reductions, and that none of the proposed interventions are ready for deployment.

“Even the question of whether to do research is complex,” Sagar said. “Who has the right to decide how to move on this?”

Since any implementation of solar geoengineering could have unintended consequences, it’s critical that everyone who could be affected has a seat at the table where its use is discussed, he said.

Doing research on solar radiation management isn’t advocating for it, said Helene Muri, who studies geoengineering with the Industrial Ecology Programme at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Oslo.

“A lot of people who are doing the research aren’t endorsing it,” she said. A recent study she worked on, published March 11 in Earth System Dynamics, showed that solar radiation management could have potentially unexpected effects on the way soils and plants process carbon dioxide, partly because plants and microbes respond differently to direct and filtered light.

Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences, said that, when it comes to solar geoengineering, researchers need to engage with the public “to ask not just can we, but should we,” in a way similar to the ongoing discussions in fields such as artificial intelligence or gene editing. Basic questions about governance, like who is involved in making decisions, are just as important as scientific and technical information when it comes to deciding if, when, where and for how long geoengineering might ultimately be used “to mask global warming,” she said.

The report suggests that the U.S. Global Change Research Program should guide the effort. Its focus should be the context and goals of the research, including strategies for decision-making and engaging all countries on the issue; impacts and technical dimensions, such as how the reflective particles act in the atmosphere and affect ecological systems; and social aspects, including public perceptions and engagement, along with justice, ethics and equity considerations.
Last Chance, or Icarus Moment?

The topic of geoengineering has surfaced with increasing frequency in recent years. A few months ago, scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said their latest budget included $4 million to study what they called a “Plan B” for climate change. In 2013, NBC and others reported that U.S. intelligence agencies helped fund a previous National Academy of Sciences study assessing geoengineering risks.

Most recently, an experiment called SCoPEx, led by the Keutsch Group at Harvard and planned for June in the sky above Sweden, has been portrayed both as a crucial step toward better understanding solar geoengineering, or as a dangerous slip down a slope leading to a potential Icarus moment for humanity, with the illusion of control over nature ending in a fiery crash.

The first step of SCoPEx is to launch a balloon to test instruments that could be used to measure how reflective particles work in a small area and affect the adjacent atmosphere.

Even that small step is worrisome, said Linda Schneider, of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, a nonprofit group with ties to the German Green Party.

“What civil society currently is worried about is that the new NAS report will be used to legitimize Harvard’s SCoPEx project,” she said. “It’s notable how the first thing they highlight is the need for a massive expansion of research. We maintain that it is an untestable technology and the real impacts and consequences would only be felt once the technology would actually be deployed, and then there is no going back.”

Last week, the Saami Council, representing Indigenous communities in Sweden, Finland, Russia and Norway, wrote a letter to the SCoPEx advisory committee demanding cancellation of the balloon experiment because there was a lack of transparency, inclusivity and engagement in the planning process.

Approving research incrementally could create unjustified legitimacy for geoengineering and make the technology seem palatable, Schneider cautioned, enabling a slide from “small, seemingly benign equipment testing to larger-scale experimentation with particle release.”

“We think that solar radiation management comes with so many known and unknown existential risks for communities and ecosystems that it is too dangerous to ever be developed, and should instead be banned outright,” she said.

Tinkering with the reflectivity of the atmosphere is a “bad idea whose time has come,” Oxford physics Professor Raymond Pierrehumbert wrote for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists back in 2017, commenting on ideas like brightening clouds to save the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. The new report from the Academies could be used as a “crutch for polluters” to further delay climate action, said Penn State climate researcher Michael Mann.

A broad global coalition of civic groups called for a geoengineering ban in 2019 during a meeting of the United Nations Environmental Programme, when an early Swiss proposal to consider global governance of such interventions was rejected based in part on objections from the United States and Saudi Arabia.

Globally, environmental groups track climate hacking efforts via the geoengineering monitor, which provides valuable information on relatively unknown geoengineering ideas like covering big tracts of land in Africa with plastic to reflect heat, and oundation-funded solar geoengineering research in Africa.
Could Small Experiments Bring a Cascade of Climate Interventions?

Some of the skepticism is warranted, said Harvard climate economist Gernot Wagner, the founding co-director of Harvard’s solar geoengineering research program, which launched the SCoPEx project.

Wagner, who left the geoengineering program in 2019, said that, as a social scientist, he understands that the complexity of geoengineering can “lead to hesitation, which is understandable and laudable.” The focus on research and the regulation of the research, rather than deployment, is “where the conversation should be,” he said, adding that, “if anything, there should be a firm moratorium” on deployment.

The level of funding proposed in the National Academies report is about equal to the total current global spending on geoengineering research, and not much compared to overall spending on climate science, on which the United States Global Change Research Program spends about $3 billion annually, he said.

“It concludes, in very reasonable language, that careful outdoor small-scale experiments are OK. A lot of learning can happen from those experiments. The SCoPEx seems to meet these criteria,” he said, explaining that the project’s advisory committee is still deliberating on whether to give it the final go-ahead.

Small geoengineering research projects and experiments should also be considered in the context of related research, including efforts to understand how emissions from volcanoes, wildfires and diesel-burning ships affect the climate, he said. A second stage of the SCoPEx experiment would involve fewer particles than those emitted by a plane’s jet engines during one minute of commercial flight, he said.

Irvine, the University College London researcher, said the new report echoes similar recommendations made by the United Kingdom’s Royal Academy in 2009.

“It’s deliberately not about how do we go about building the equipment,” he said, but focused on “foundational science, including the social and ethical dimensions, as well as promoting an international governance structure.”

Focusing on internationally regulated and government-financed research could dispel the “James Bond-villainesque” perception of geoengineering, especially since most of the current funding comes from billionaire philanthropists, he added.

Emissions are rising at a rate that would push the global average temperature up by between 4.5 degrees and 5.5 degrees Fahrenheit, which will result in serious impacts to people and ecosystems.

“The possibility of minimizing some of those harms (with solar geoengineering) might seem new, radical and tempting, but should not distract from the urgency of cutting greenhouse gas emissions,” he said.

One of the fears of not researching and establishing governance for geoengineering is that “growing and powerful nations like Indonesia or India, nations that are at the sharper end of climate change,” might resort to geoengineering unilaterally, potentially provoking regional impacts or even conflict, he added.

Irvine said that, based on the science of the past decade, he thinks it’s likely that solar geoengineering, especially at the stratospheric level, could substantially reduce some climate risks in some areas, while potentially increasing them elsewhere in unexpected ways. That could lead down a path requiring constant human attempts to manipulate the climate system.

“Is this a world we want, where we have to alter the Earth’s energy budget for decades?” he asked.

France Has ‘Overwhelming’ Responsibility for Rwanda Genocide, Report Says

The report, commissioned by President Emmanuel Macron, found that France’s colonial mind-set had blinded it to the atrocity. The authors, though, cleared France of complicity.

The Flame of Remembrance at the Kigali Genocide Memorial in Rwanda.Credit...Yasuyoshi Chiba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

By Norimitsu Onishi
March 26, 2021

PARIS — Blinded by its fears of losing influence in Africa and by a colonial view of the continent’s people, France remained close to the “racist, corrupt and violent regime’’ responsible for the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, and bears “serious and overwhelming” responsibilities, according to a report released Friday.

But the report — commissioned by President Emmanuel Macron in 2019 and put together by 15 historians with unprecedented access to French government archives — cleared France of complicity in the genocide that led to the deaths of 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and contributed to decades of conflicts and instability in Central Africa.

“Is France an accomplice to the genocide of the Tutsi? If by this we mean a willingness to join a genocidal operation, nothing in the archives that were examined demonstrates this,’’ said the report, which was presented to Mr. Macron on Friday afternoon.

But the commission said that France had long been involved with Rwanda’s Hutu-led government even as that government prepared the genocide of the Tutsis, regarding the country’s leadership as a crucial ally in a French sphere of influence in the region.

For decades, France’s actions during the genocide have been the source of intense debate in Africa and in Europe, with critics accusing France of not having done enough to prevent the killings or of having actively supported the Hutu-led government behind the genocide. The unresolved history has long poisoned relations between France and the government of President Paul Kagame, the Tutsi leader who has controlled Rwanda for nearly a quarter century.

Mr. Macron, who has spoken of his desire to reset France’s relations with a continent where it was a colonial power, is believed to have commissioned the report to try to improve relations with Rwanda.

Though the 992-page report presents fresh information from the French government archives, it is unlikely to resolve the debate over France’s role during the genocide, said Filip Reyntjens, a Belgian expert on the genocide.

“This will not be good enough for one side, and it won’t be good enough for the other side,’’ Mr. Reyntjens said. “So my guess is that this will not settle the issue.’’

According to the report, François Mitterrand, the French president at the time, maintained a “strong, personal and direct relationship’’ with Juvenal Habyarimana, the longtime Hutu president of Rwanda, despite his “racist, corrupt and violent regime.’’

Mr. Mitterrand and members of his inner circle believed that Mr. Habyarimana and the Hutus were key allies in a French-speaking bloc that also included Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, known then as Zaire.

The French saw Mr. Kagame and other Tutsi leaders — who had spent years in exile in neighboring Anglophone Uganda — as allies in an American push into the region.

“The principal interest of this country for France is that it be francophone,’’ a high-ranking military official wrote in 1990, according to the report, which concluded: “France’s interpretation of the Rwandan situation can be viewed through the prism of defending la Francophonie.’’

French leaders at the time viewed the Hutus and Tutsis through a colonial lens, ascribing to each group stereotypical physical traits and behavior, compounding their misinterpretation of the events that led to the genocide, according to the report.

In one of the report’s most damning conclusions, its authors wrote, “The failure of France in Rwanda, the causes of which are not all its own, can be likened in this respect to a final imperial defeat, all the more significant because it was neither expressed nor acknowledged.’’

Rwandan Genocide

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March 2, 2021

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May 16, 2020

Rwanda Marks 25 Years Since the Genocide. The Country Is Still Grappling With Its Legacy.
April 6, 2019

Norimitsu Onishi is a foreign correspondent on the International Desk, covering France out of the Paris bureau. He previously served as bureau chief for The Times in Johannesburg, Jakarta, Tokyo and Abidjan, Ivory Coast.

African elephants inch closer to extinction as poaching and habitat loss hit hard

Situation is bleak but some conservation efforts are working well

by Fermin Koop
March 26, 2021
in Animals, Environment, News, Science

The African forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis) is now listed as Critically Endangered and the African savanna elephant (Loxodonta africana) as Endangered on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species. They’re more in danger than they have ever been, and it’s mostly due to habitat reduction and ivory trade.

Image credit: Flickr / S.Imeon

They are the world’s largest land animals, measuring up to 7.5 meters long and weighing over six tons. The emblematic savannah elephant roams grassy plants and woodlands, while the forest elephant lives in the equatorial forest of central and western Africa. Their trunk is used for communication and handling objects, including food. They’re also team players — not just among their own species, but across the entire ecosystem.

“They play key roles in ecosystems, economies, and in our collective imagination all over the world. The new IUCN Red List assessments underline the persistent pressures faced by these iconic animals,” Bruno Oberle, IUCN Director-General, said in a statement. “We must urgently put an end to poaching and ensure that sufficient suitable habitat is conserved.”

Before the new update, African elephants were treated as a single species, listed as Vulnerable by IUCN. This is the first time the two species have been assessed separately for the Red List – the result of a consensus that emerged among experts following new research into the genetics of the elephant populations.

Only 415,000 elephants remain in Africa but the number has fallen drastically during the past three decades, IUCN said. The number of African forest elephants fell by more than 86% over a period of 31 years, while the population of African savanna elephants decreased by at least 60% over the last 50 years, according to the most recent assessments — and the numbers continue to drop.

Both species have suffered declines due to an increase in poaching, which peaked in 2011 but continues to threaten populations. This adds up with the ongoing conversion of their habitats to agriculture. The situation changes from country to country. Botswana has too many elephants for its ecosystem, for example, while on a continent-scale they are declining.

“With persistent demand for ivory and escalating human pressures on Africa’s wildlands, concern for Africa’s elephants is high, and the need to creatively conserve and wisely manage these animals and their habitats are more acute than ever,” Kathleen Gobush, lead assessor of the African elephants at IUCN, said in a statement.

The IUCN assessment also highlighted the impact of successful conservation efforts, such as anti-poaching measures, more supportive legislation, and land-use planning. Some forest elephants have stabilized in conservation areas in Gabon and Congo, while savanna elephant numbers have been stable or growing in the Kavango-Zambezi conservation area.

Isla Duporge from the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit at the University of Oxford told the BBC that “while on the surface this looks bleak, the fact it’s being flagged is actually positive.” She highlighted the work done by conservation organization “on the ground in Africa” and said they are the most crucial players in the effort to protect the elephants.

Fermin Koop

Fermin Koop is a reporter from Buenos Aires, Argentina. He holds an MSc from Reading University (UK) on Environment and Development and is specialized in environment and climate change news.

The scapegoating of Asian Americans

Protesters during a rally held to support Stop Asian Hate

in Newton, Mass., on March 21. INTERNATONAL DAY AGAINST RACISM
AP Photo/Steven Senne

BY Liz Mineo

Harvard Staff Writer
March 24, 2021

The Atlanta shootings that killed eight people, six of them Asian women, took place amid an upsurge in anti-Asian violence during the pandemic. Authorities say the suspect, a 21-year-old white man, has confessed to the attacks and blames a sex addiction for his actions. They have not yet charged him with hate crimes, and legal experts say such a case may be difficult to establish.

But for Courtney Sato, a postdoctoral fellow in The Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, the general rise in hostility that serves as the tragedy’s backdrop is part of the nation’s long history of brutal bigotry against Asian Americans.

“The important thing to remember is that this is really not an exceptional moment by any means,” said Sato. “But it’s really part of a much longer genealogy of anti-Asian violence that reaches as far back as the 19th century.”

Sato pointed to the Chinese massacre of 1871, when a mob in Los Angeles’ Chinatown attacked and murdered 19 Chinese residents, including a 15-year-old boy, a reflection of the growing anti-Asian sentiment that came to its climax with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The act banned the immigration of Chinese laborers, much as the Page Exclusion Act of 1875, the nation’s first restrictive immigration law, had prohibited the entry of Chinese women.

Sato said the Page Exclusion Act is a precursor to the dehumanizing narratives and tropes that render Asian woman as objects of sexual fetishization and unworthy of being part of the national consciousness.

“In the 1875 Act, we see the ways in which race and gender are beginning to be entangled and codified in the law, and how Asian women were deemed to be bringing in sexual deviancy,” said Sato. “That far back, we can see how racism and sexism were being conflated.”

Japanese American detainees in front of poster with internment orders in 1942.
Photo by Dorthea Lange/Records of War Relocation Authority, Record Group 210; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD

In modern American history, Asian Americans have been regularly scapegoated during periods of national duress. World War II saw the forced internment of about 120,000 Japanese Americans on the West Coast — an estimated 62 percent of whom were U.S. citizens — in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor. After the Vietnam War, refugees from Southeast Asia faced routine discrimination and hate, including attacks by Ku Klux Klan members on shrimpers in Texas. And in 1982, Vincent Chin, a Chinese American, was beaten to death by two Detroit autoworkers who thought he was Japanese. The killing took place during a recession that was partly blamed on the rise of the Japanese auto industry.

In a letter to the Harvard community, President Larry Bacow condemned the Atlanta shootings and stressed that the University stands against anti-Asian racism and all kinds of hate and bigotry.

“For the past year, Asians, Asian Americans, and Pacific Islanders have been blamed for the pandemic — slander born of xenophobia and ignorance,” wrote Bacow. “Harvard must stand as a bulwark against hatred and bigotry. We welcome and embrace individuals from every background because it makes us a better community, a stronger community. An attack on any group of us is an attack on all of us — and on everything we represent as an institution.

“To Asians, Asian Americans, and Pacific Islanders in our community: We stand together with you today and every day going forward,” Bacow wrote.

President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, whose mother is a South Asian immigrant, also condemned the attacks. “Racism is real in America, and it has always been,” said Harris before meeting with community leaders and the families of the victims in Atlanta. “Xenophobia is real in America and always has been. Sexism, too.”

Between March 2020 and February 2021, Stop AAPI Hate, an initiative supporting Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander communities led by several Asian American advocacy groups and the Asian American Studies Department of San Francisco State University, reported nearly 3,800 anti-Asian hate incidents in the U.S.

Asian Americans have been physically attacked, verbally harassed, spat upon, and subjected to racial slurs. In February, an 84-yeard old Thai man died after he was shoved to the ground in Oakland, California’s Chinatown. Since the start of the pandemic, Asian Americans have become the target of xenophobic attacks, much like Muslims were blamed and scapegoated after the 9/11 attacks.

In a survey from the Pew Research Center, three in 10 Asian Americans reported having been subjected to racist slurs or jokes since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. A recent study found that former President Donald Trump’s description of COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus” led to a rise in anti-Asian hate online. Trump also used the racist term “Kung Flu” at a youth rally in Arizona.

Last spring, Jason Beckfield (pictured) and Vivian Shaw launched a project to study the pandemic’s impact on AAPI communities. Rose Lincoln/Harvard file photo

Last March, Vivian Shaw, a College Fellow in the Department of Sociology, and Jason Beckfield, professor of sociology, launched the AAPI COVID-19 Project to examine the pandemic’s impact on the AAPI communities. UNESCO is now a partner in the research project. The project’s latest report, based on interviews conducted between June and October of 2020, found that Asian Americans are dealing with multiple forms of risk, including the threat of anti-Asian violence, in their daily lives. Some Asian American grocery-store owners reported being conflicted about forcing customers to wear face masks because they were afraid of violent reactions, despite their fear of exposure to the virus. The pandemic has also exacerbated social inequities as some Asian Americans — many of them immigrants — work in the underground economy, can’t access unemployment benefits, lack health insurance, and may be subjected to police harassment.

“This pandemic has affected the most vulnerable of the vulnerable,” said Shaw, the lead researcher for the project. “When we talk about anti-Asian racism, it’s not within a vacuum. It’s within the context of these broader structures: race, gender, immigration status, socio-economic condition. All of that impacts people.”

Beckfield said that while the project’s goal is to study the pandemic’s effects on the Asian American community at large, it also looks to elevate their voices and find recommendations to fight anti-Asian racism and all xenophobia.

“We have to recognize that anti-racism is not just the burden or the project of the people who are being targeted by those in power,” said Beckfield. “It ought to be the project of people who are in power too.”

On March 18, after the Atlanta killings, the Harvard-Radcliffe Asian American Association, along with other Harvard affinity groups, conducted a vigil and started a fundraiser to support Asian American advocacy groups in Boston and Atlanta, and two nationwide organizations.

Sun-Jung Yum ’23 and Racheal Lama ’23, co-presidents of the Harvard-Radcliffe Asian American Association, said the Atlanta killings have shaken the community, but that they have found strength in joining forces and working together.
“This pandemic has affected the most vulnerable of the vulnerable. When we talk about anti-Asian racism, it’s not within a vacuum.”
— Vivian Shaw

“It’s taking a toll on our Asian and Asian American peers in a way that people don’t realize,” said Lama. “But it’s amazing seeing how this younger generation is coming together and standing up for their parents and their older family members.”

Yum hopes that the Harvard community seizes the opportunity to continue the conversation about anti-Asian racism and not let it slip away. “It’s really important that not only do we donate now, but that we also keep on talking about this,” said Yum. “This is a great opportunity for us to not let it slide this time. I really hope that the Harvard community really continues to push advocacy and activism in this area.”

For Sato, the expert in Asian American Studies who is a postdoctoral fellow in the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, it’s a critical moment for Americans to learn about the history of anti-Asian violence in the country and realize how it’s connected to the mistreatment of other ethnic minorities.

“Once again, this is really not an exceptional case,” said Sato, “but it’s deeply linked to the broader conversation we have been having in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement. This is a very much connected history, and we need to really think about how this violence is not only impacting the Asian American community, but also Blacks, Indigenous, Latinx and other vulnerable communities.”

A long history of bigotry against Asian Americans – Harvard Gazette

‘Indian Sex Life’ and the control of women

Photo courtesy of Durba Mitra

Research, personal story frame professor’s new book

BY Jill Radsken

Harvard Staff Writer

June 11, 2020

The intellectual questions Durba Mitra asks are formed as much from her archival research as from her conversations with women on their experiences of social judgment and subordination and their efforts to challenge strict social norms. Perhaps no one has influenced her more than her own mother, who was open with Mitra, assistant professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and Carol K. Pforzheimer Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute, about the unique challenges of being an independent woman in a world that, too often, has little space for independent women.

“Many communities have all sorts of expectations about women and young girls, about looks, about how one is supposed to comport oneself in a room, about how to be appropriate, about how deferential we are supposed to be. My mother was always very clear to me. There’s no deference to be had,” said Mitra, who recently published “Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought.”

Q&A

Durba Mitra

GAZETTE: You conceived this book from an academic place as well as a personal one. Can you speak about both?

MITRA: I was pre-med in college, but also a history major, and I was interested in the history of science and medicine. For my senior thesis, I wrote about the history of prostitution and women’s sexuality, and I found there was a feminist literature that could help me understand how to think about women’s sexuality historically. When I decided not to go to medical school I went to graduate school thinking that I would study this history of science and medicine, but ended up doing interdisciplinary feminist and queer studies. In the introduction to “Indian Sex Life,” I narrate how I went into archives thinking that I was looking for one kind of history: the social history of the many kinds of women who became prostitutes. What I found, instead, was that the word “prostitute” appeared across diverse archives that seemingly had nothing to do with prostitution, whether it was about laws around abortion and infanticide or sociological theories about social evolution and the conceptual visions of men who sought to create an ideal society based on patriarchal monogamy. I realized that my project and questions had to look different than I had initially imagined them. So that’s how I came to the book as an intellectual history of sexuality, a history of how ideas of women’s sexuality have been foundational to how we study modern society. The questions were rooted in the thinking about science and epistemology, but really the burning question was: How do we think about the ubiquity of women’s sexuality in the study of the past and futures of our societies? How have often deeply troubling ideas about the control and erasure of women’s sexuality shaped modern social theory?

The more personal story in this project comes from my experience growing up in a household with a single mother. I’m of South Asian descent and am first generation in the U.S. My experience of having a mother who was divorced made me realize that many of my intellectual questions come from experiences observing women who do not fit into socially normative roles, including my mother, who is this amazingly defiant person. She has accomplished a huge amount, a single mother to two children who got her Ph.D. while working full time as a professor for years. She moved her family across the world and eventually settled in Fargo, N.D. She often had more than one job to make ends meet. That early experience transformed me and made me deeply committed to thinking with women about their perspectives and shared forms of knowledge. I remember when I did my first year of fieldwork, standing with a woman in a kitchen, and she was talking about the kinds of herbs women commonly used to prevent pregnancy. These knowledges and practices, or remedies, were exchanged to create a shared knowledge about how to have control over their own reproduction. It’s the kind of shared knowledge that exists only between women. I realized that even though I would look at a document in an archive that told me one type of story, that through these kinds of conversations I could ask other kinds of historical questions and use historical methods of reading. So when I later read colonial textbook after colonial textbook that used condemnatory language to describe women’s health practices, I had these other structures of knowledge that helped me critically read outside the logic of deeply patriarchal, and often racist colonial ideas of Indian women.

This project is very much centered in the colonial period. It ends at the end of colonialism in the 1940s, but the reach of the project is much broader, and I feel it resonates with urgent issues today. What does it mean to write a history of the present conditions of sexual control and violence that endure, where the erasure of women’s desires and sexuality continues to be seen as a natural and inevitable fact of everyday life in postcolonial societies? Over diverse archives, from studies of ancient society to criminal law to forensic medicine, a wide range of women from all walks of life were classified as prostitutes. The idea of the prostitute was everywhere. Its ubiquity made me realize that something systematic was occurring, something that we had not yet accounted for. I had to shift my work to study intellectual concepts that shaped these ideas, not just particular women who were marginalized. There was a systemic issue at play. And I found in interdisciplinary feminist and queer studies the innovative methods of reading and analysis that I needed to write this urgent history.

GAZETTE: How did you come to find your way intellectually from your mother?
“As a woman, I was constantly asked why I was conducting research on such ‘distasteful topics,’ and limited access to archives made my experience of telling this story fragmented, with sudden starts and stops.”

MITRA: I’m very much shaped by her intellectually. She’s a statistician. Interestingly, I find that the principles of her discipline have shaped so much of what I study, how we write about and study modern societies. So, in my own work, I look at how modern social theory studies social deviation, how correlation is a key concern in the comparative study of civilizations, and how modern societies create social norms around sexuality and marriage.

It took a lot of defiance on my mother’s part for her to live the life that she does, but also to let me be the person that I am. Many communities have all sorts of expectations about women and young girls, about looks, about how one is supposed to comport oneself in a room, about how to be appropriate, how deferential we are supposed to be. My mother was always very clear to me. There’s no deference to be had. Your job is to be a leader. Your job is to be an ethical person, to ask critical questions, to challenge social expectations that see you as secondary to men. That is what she was doing every day. But she is also deeply informed by her own history, her own training, her own life experiences. She is a great chef of Bengali cuisine. She practices very intricate forms of embroidery and artwork that she has learned since she was a little girl. So she also exceled at more gendered, less socially recognized forms of labor and artistic practice. The other side of this life was that I saw her experience very painful acts of social exclusion. It was quite unusual to be a divorced woman in the South Asian diaspora in the 1970s and 1980s. That experience of social exclusion made me defiant. As a prominent scholar once said to me, “You almost have to be outside inside to be able to write a book that critiques society for the kind of foundational exclusions that are part of the way it imagines itself.” I believe my work is deeply informed by that insider-outsider perspective.

GAZETTE: Can you talk about the women you found in your archival discoveries?

MITRA: It took a long time to resolve how to tell this story, because what I thought would be individual stories of women turned into a much more abstract, much more conceptual history about the ubiquity of ideas of female sexuality that have organized how we study society. For example, in the chapter “Circularity” on the forensics of abortion, I start with a story from an official colonial archive, a coroner’s report, which tells us about a woman — a girl, really — who was widowed in adolescence, who dies of an alleged abortion after getting pregnant despite being unmarried. What I play out for the reader in the telling of that story is that there was no way to reassemble her life except from a report that was about her death. What does it mean to narrate a life from a report that was about death? What can we know about her life from a deeply sanitized report about a woman’s body at the time of her death? How can we think about the social exclusion that woman may have experienced, imagine a world that left her to be alone in her death, but also account for the structures of knowledge that only recorded women when they died, but had no interest in documenting them when they were alive?

This is the work of feminist and queer scholarship. I didn’t ever fully know how to tell this story until really after I completed my Ph.D., and I realized that the story I wanted to tell wasn’t simply about the individual fragment of this life, but about the ubiquity of a concept of deviant female sexuality that allowed for this archive to record this death, not as one of compassion, but through the language of a woman’s criminal intent. I wanted to account for how this archive organized how we understood society, and the limits of the histories we can tell from these official perspectives.
“Many communities have all sorts of expectations about women and young girls… My mother was always very clear to me. There’s no deference to be had.”

While my book “Indian Sex Life” is based on the empirical study of India, I don’t think it is unique to Indian society, or solely a study of one region of the world. As a scholar trained in gender and sexuality in South Asia and the comparative colonial and postcolonial world, what I am interested in is how the colonial world has been critical to how we study modern society across the world, how histories of colonial gender and sexuality have more broadly informed modern disciplines of social science.

GAZETTE: What were the challenges and what did it mean emotionally to confront these archival stories as such fragmented puzzles? What kind of feelings of responsibility come with that?

MITRA: It is a challenging project, one where I feel a deep sense of ethical responsibility to the histories I am telling.The death certificate of this woman’s life, the story of her body that is dissected, that is the only version of the story that I get of her. What does it mean to narrate this document? What are the ethics of confronting such an archive? Emotionally, this is where, in my view, feminist and queer studies do critical work to think of the limits of such archives. These fields offer powerful, essential forms of knowledge, because scholars of gender and sexuality ask questions about the affective dimensions of social and political life while also challenging ideologies that have made social exclusion seem natural and normal. I am influenced by these fields of study, including postcolonial and transnational feminisms, black feminist studies, and queer studies, which ask questions about how we deal with these fragmented archives and write fragmented lives.

For me, as a researcher, I think of this fragmentation in a few ways. First, my archives are not only fragmented in terms of the lives of people and how they appear in archives, but they are quite literally fragmented and scattered across the world as a result of the unequal project of the acquisition of knowledge that results from colonialism. This kind of project requires research in spaces you don’t anticipate you will go to find the materials you hope to find. So a lot of my materials about India were moved out of Indian libraries or archives to other places as a result of colonial structures of knowledge of where people and libraries in the metropole moved documents thousands of miles. Anyone working on India’s colonial period has to go to the British Library. You spend a lot of time in London, as well as in national and local archives across South Asia, but you may also end up in the Netherlands, or in Washington, D.C., at the Library of Congress. For my book, Widener Library has perhaps the most extraordinary collection of sources, including first editions of colonial ethnographies. There are these amazing books because of the preservation conditions. These materials are often better-preserved here than they might be elsewhere. But for me, there are ethical questions we must ask. What does it mean to find an account of an Indian woman’s autopsy in a medical library in London or New York, totally moved from the place of its production? Sometimes it means that we can only read the source out of context, far from the place it describes. When an undergraduate student checks that same book out from Widener, they don’t know why it is there. It bears no material marking of its long history of travel across the world as part of colonial circulation of documents, as part of state-sponsored programs of knowledge acquisition. Indeed, the title of my book comes from dozens of books that were circulated across the globe from the colonial and postcolonial world. They carry titles like “Indian Sex Life” and “Sex Life and Prostitution in India.”

The other key issue in this history of fragmentation is the particular challenges of being a woman researcher. There are always challenges to doing research alone, and I am very cognizant of it. It certainly shaped my experiences traveling across archives and geographies to gain access to critical sources that form the foundation of my book. I was often refused access to libraries and archives. As a woman, I was constantly asked why I was conducting research on such “distasteful topics,” and limited access to archives made my experience of telling this story fragmented, with sudden starts and stops. As a teacher and adviser, I try to advise my own students, including women, students of color, women of color, and queer students, about the unique challenges marginalized people face conducting archival and ethnographic research. There are starting to be more conversations about how we conduct research safely and effectively as minorities, women, queer people, transgender people, but we need to talk about it more, and we need programming that creates a sustained conversation about these issues to help train students.

GAZETTE: How does this all translate to the classroom, and what you are teaching?

MITRA: This semester I taught a course directly on my research from my first book called “The Sexual Life of Colonialism.” This course is based in the colonial/postcolonial world. It focuses on diverse geographies, including South Asia, Southeast Asia, Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa, and it looks at questions of same-sex sexuality, interracial sexuality, queer sexuality, transgender politics, and rights in those spaces and questions of disability. The other course I taught was “Solidarity: Transnational Women’s Rights from Suffrage to NGOs,” which is based on my book project that I’m working on now. My first book is about erasure and control of female sexuality in the making of modern social theory, while my second book moves forward in time to the later part of the 20th century to ask what happens when women take up intellectual life and systematically start to account for the conditions of women’s lives in the decolonizing world. In many ways, this project again circles back to my mother. Women of her generation and one generation before her were the first set of women to get Ph.D.s in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. So, unlike the colonial period, modern social theory is no longer just men studying women. Instead, with the writings of Third World women, I ask: What kind of radical imaginations do women have for the future of their societies that are more equitable for women?

My “Solidarity” class is part of the Long 19th Amendment Project, which is a Mellon-funded project at the Schlesinger Library. It was meant to be entirely taught in the library as a workshop or laboratory, with discussions and also work with primary materials. After our classroom went remote due to COVID-19, the course moved online, and we used the extraordinary digitized collections of the Schlesinger Library to work together in an online lab setting. I think, despite the challenges of moving to remote teaching, the course was a success because every class we came together to learn together through an encounter with archival objects and think critically about women’s issues, including issues exacerbated by COVID-19, from issues of unequal gendered distribution of housework to the dramatic increase in domestic violence as people stayed at home. The course was experimental, in an exciting way, and really showed how critically important it is to continue to study and teach women’s lives and struggles during this uncertain time.

Interview was lightly edited for clarity and length.

Research, personal story frame professor’s new book – Harvard Gazette

Finding a way forward on climate change

Rebecca Henderson (clockwise from upper left), Peter Huybers, Daniel Schrag, Jennifer Leaning, and Jim Stock discuss the way forward to fight climate change.

Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer

Interdisciplinary panel untangles various global perspectives, solutions

BY Clea Simon

Harvard Correspondent
March 26, 2021

If the causes and problems of climate change are entwined, then the solutions must be as well. That was the consensus as Harvard faculty from a range of fields came together for “Confronting Climate Change: Diverse Perspectives on the Path Forward,” an online discussion co-sponsored by the Office of the Vice Provost for Advancement in Learning and the Harvard University Center for the Environment.

Moderator Daniel Schrag, Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology and professor of environmental science and engineering, opened Thursday evening’s session by asking about the interconnections between climate change and the pandemic, arguably the two most urgent global crises of the time.

“We know it’s going to get warmer,” said Peter Huybers, professor of Earth and planetary sciences and of environmental science and engineering. Citing “the underlying pressure due to climate change, droughts, seasonal floods,” he noted that “since 2015, the number of people who are undernourished has been increasing, and that has accelerated under COVID 19.”

Speaking about her experience in Africa, Jennifer Leaning, Harvard Medical School associate professor of emergency medicine, talked about how the pandemic has interrupted international cooperation at a critical time. “In Chad, in the semi-Sahel, which is verging with the Sahara, sources of water are disappearing,” said Leaning, an emergency room doctor by training. “They have always had a precarious income stream from trade, and trade has really dropped. The options for livelihood have diminished.”

The tipping point, they all agreed, has arrived. This past year, Schrag, who also serves as director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment, said, “We saw fires and the melting of sea ice.” Leaning spoke about “distress migration,” movement of individuals and communities forced by climate change. “If people get really hungry, they’re going to move,” she said. “They’re going to be heading north.”

This crisis, however, may also be an opportunity. “For a long time, we couldn’t imagine something other than business as usual,” said Huybers. “This is an incredibly opportune time to engage around major international issues. We ought to try to capitalize on it.” Citing the principle of enlightened self-interest, he noted, “We have to contend with the welfare of others on this planet if we want to ensure our own welfare.”

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Leadership and sustainability scholar Rebecca Henderson, the John and Natty McArthur University Professor at Harvard Business School, reported hopeful signs from the business community. “We’re seeing firms really beginning to change,” she said. However, industry continues to look for policy to lead the way. “One of the two major political parties in the U.S. still has not accepted the reality of climate change.” With the Democrats’ slim majority in the House at risk, she said, “If you’re a business, you don’t want to alienate the political party that might be regulating you soon.”

To make progress, the panel agreed, developed countries need to take the lead. James H. Stock, Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy and a member of the Harvard Kennedy School faculty, urged a three-pronged approach. “Get the power sector on board for a deep de-carbonization,” urged Stock, suggesting a series of policy initiatives, such as carbon taxes. He also proposed a push to build more charging stations and other infrastructure to help speed the transition to electric vehicles. Finally, he cited the need to develop more green technologies to deal with tougher challenges. “We don’t know what to do about steel, about cement,” he said. The production of these ubiquitous building products is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions.

Leaning also brought up the economic realities of addressing climate change on a global scale, stressing that less-developed countries need viable options. “You need some kind of fuel or stove that can be more green,” she said. “For the jitney bus, that is the way to get to market to be electric.”

“What the developed countries need to do is make it easy and cheap for the rest of the world to be green,” agreed Stock. Business, said Henderson, would follow. “We need to build a stronger collective sense that it is in our interests. Building the political will is as important as the policy.”

Ultimately, the panelists agreed, there are reasons to hope. Leaning referred to Mediterranean and European movements to create a “rescue service” for the many economic migrants who risk their lives at sea. “We’re seeing a collective action around the Mediterranean that is essentially a humane one as well as a legal one,” she said.

Henderson sees a larger role for industry: “Having the great corporations talk about climate change is a help,” she said. “People trust their own company. To have your firm say, ‘We have to change the lightbulbs; we need to change the supply chain’ will help.”

Stock, who worked in the Obama administration, applauded the goals of the new Biden administration but found more optimism in “the youth movement.” He called actions by Greta Thunberg and the Sunrise Movement “transformative.”

“We’re going to see great things happen,” he said.

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