Bimini Bon-Boulash: "Drag is political, it's an act of defiance"


Paisley Gilmour
Wed, March 17, 2021

Photo credit: BBC/World of Wonder

From Cosmopolitan

Ask any long-time RuPaul's Drag Race fan, and they'll tell you Drag Race UK season two has been the best, most joyous, uplifting and educational series of all time (US series included). Not an exaggeration, just a fact. While season one brought us The Vivienne's disturbingly accurate Donald Trump Snatch Game, season two is just in another league entirely. And why is that? I'd argue it's largely down to the mere existence of Bimini Bon-Boulash, the series' lovable, authentic, sharp, articulate, non-binary, East London queen.

Ahead of the series finale, I had the honour of sitting down with Tommy Hibbitts - aka Bimini - to chat about *that* perpetual earworm, what their favourite moments of the show have been so far, and why they're so inspired by female celebrities who've been vilified by the society and the press.

What's been your favourite moment of the show so far?

"I love the conversations we've been able to have, I think they've been really important. And being able to be that representation for people without even really intentionally meaning to do it. It's just been so lovely that people watching have resonated with that. And obviously, 'UK, HUN?' ..."

Did you know 'UK, HUN?' was going to be such a big banger?

"I didn’t know! We don't really have time to digest it. Like, we were filming Snatch Game the next day. It was an earworm, and we kept singing it the whole time. But you don't think it's going to have that impact. I remember thinking the other team did so well and that we wouldn't be able to match it..."

Why do you do drag?

"To me, drag is political, it’s an act of defiance in itself and no matter how mainstream it gets, people should always remember where drag came from, and what it was created in aid of. It’s always stood for people that were segregated, or minorities in society, or people that didn't have the same opportunities. Drag has allowed people escapism. We’re meant to mock and parody what’s going on in the world, and to me, that’s what drag is. Drag is now reaching more people than ever before, but that doesn’t mean we should dilute the original message of what it is."

Photo credit: BBC/World of Wonder  

Did you have any idea you'd become a role model for trans and non-binary people?

"No. I've always looked to other trans and non-binary role models for inspiration. It was never an intention. For me, I think it's been a weird one with gender identity. When I first moved to London, these words that we're using now weren't really accessible, and the discussions weren't there. But there was kind of no need for the discussion, almost. Because with the people that I work with, it was like gender really wasn't a thing. It wasn't an issue. There were no labels. And so as these conversations got better and better, I was like, ‘Okay, I think that word works for me, that resonates with me'.

"Non-binary can be for anyone that feels that way. But I also feel like I'm very fluid with my gender. And it's almost like having those labels is kind of restrictive. And it's something that I've always wanted to push away. And so going onto the show and having those conversations, and having them broadcast is phenomenal. I'm not like rewriting the books on gender theory. I'm talking from my point of view.

"Munroe Bergdorf said something on a podcast I listened to the other day. She spoke about how she stands on the shoulders of the trans activists who stood before her. And what she wants to do is fight for more rights for the trans people that come after her. I think that was such a good analogy, because all we can do is keep pushing for that acceptance and hope that the next generation is better, and the generation after that."
Why do you think the chat you had with Ginny Lemon resonated so much with the audience?

"It was quite a simple explanation. It broke it down in an easy way for people to digest. And it was also coming from two people who experience it, as opposed to someone debating it or giving opposing views. We spoke about being non-binary, but we spoke about also feeling not accepted, and feeling a bit in the middle, or left out. You don't have to be non-binary to feel that. You can go through life and not feel that you fit in or feel like you've been excluded. I think it was also obvious I was just being myself and not playing into a character or anything, so I think people saw the vulnerability there."

How do you "embrace the femme"?

"I've not always been as confident with it. Now, I really do have my head higher, and I don't really care. You have a light, and you have how you feel. And if you're walking down the road and someone says a comment, it's these like little daggers into you that kind of slowly start to dim your light. So many queer people experience that.

"When I was young, I wasn’t into football, I was into dancing and dressing up and things that were seen as feminine. When I was young, it was cute. But as I was getting older, it wasn't. You start to realise quite quickly how you have to act to be accepted in society. And people start to repress [their true selves]. Young kids are so susceptible to everything, and they're open, they're learning these behaviours. So as soon as these kids start learning that it's wrong to dress up, they start to think, ‘Oh, I'm, I'm a weirdo’.

"For me, high school was just... high school. Show me a queer person that had a good experience. While I was always quite confident, I did start losing it over the years, because you do just try to kind of fit in a bit. But when I moved to London, that was really when I was like, ‘Gender is so fluid and it's okay to not fit in. Because there are people for you’. I came here and I kind of blossomed."

It felt like after the season break you came back with renewed strength. Is that right?

"I didn't change a single outfit. [In the first episode] I walked in with the big blonde hair and the pink outfit, saying ‘I'm vegan’. I wanted people to have a certain view of me immediately, and then I wanted to change that. I'm inspired by a lot of non-conforming celebrity figures who people do judge on their looks, but who actually do amazing activism. People don't take you seriously when you look a certain way. So I walked in under the intention that I wanted everyone to think, ‘Oh, she's a bimbo. She's not going to have anything to say’. And then completely change that. And it almost backfired. I almost went home and I was like, ‘God, if I'd have gone home, I would have just been remembered as the bimbo airhead’."

Why do you take inspiration from pop culture icons like Pamela Anderson and Katie Price who have been vilified by the media and society?

"I don't think people think deep enough about [why this happens]. It comes down to society's perceptions of femininity, and seeing it as weaker. Also, it's fine for the male gaze. But if it challenges a man, or if a woman is successful, then they start to try and tear that down. It's subtle, and it happens to only women. Think about Britney Spears, Princess Diana, Caroline Flack, all of these strong women who were at the top of their game. And then they get torn down by the media who are run by a majority of men. It's just wrong on so many levels. And I'm always inspired by women that stand on their own and just go for it. That's why I like to take inspiration from them."

What do you want to see in future series of Drag Race UK?

"I want to see more conversations happening. We've had conversations around HIV stigma and gender identity. Drag Race is a great platform because it's kind of bridging the gap between drag and the mainstream. It allows people to access things that maybe they wouldn't normally access. Coming from my hometown [Norwich, Norfolk], there's not a lot of queer people on TV. And after that conversation around non-binary, so many people accepted it. Suddenly, people were like, ‘I get it’. I was getting messages from teachers, mothers and fathers, and just people that were blown away by it almost because it was first time they’ve got it. Drag is always political and Drag Race have a really important platform to get those messages across in a way that people can relate to."

Stoked By Trump, Paranoia About China Is Fueling Anti-Asian Racism

Akbar Shahid Ahmed
·Senior Foreign Affairs Reporter, HuffPost
Wed, March 17, 2021

Before a series of shootings in the Atlanta area this week that disproportionately targeted people of Asian descent, members of the Asian American community spent months expressing alarm that high-profile figures — including then-President Donald Trump — were inciting violence by telling Americans to blame China for the coronavirus pandemic.

Their warnings largely went unheeded. And despite Trump’s departure from office and evidence of rising violence against Asian Americans, influential voices from politicians to foreign policy experts are still speaking of an existential competition with Beijing in ways that could spur violence towards people perceived as being linked to China.

“Our community has been facing a [relentless] increase in attacks and harassment over the past year,” Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, tweeted on Wednesday. “As we wait for more details to emerge, I ask everyone to remember that hurtful words and rhetoric have real life consequences.”

After Tuesday’s attack, law enforcement said it was “too early” to determine whether the suspect, Robert Aaron Long, was motivated by race.

Members of the Asian-American community saw a clear link to a nationwide surge in violent discrimination that shows little sign of abating.

A man holds a sign that reads "Racism is a Virus" during the "We Are Not Silent" rally against anti-Asian hate in response to recent anti-Asian crime in the Chinatown-International District of Seattle, Washington, on March 13. (Photo: JASON REDMOND via Getty Images)

Between last March and Feb. 28, the watchdog group Stop AAPI Hate, which tracks incidents of attacks against Asian-Americans and Pacific Islander individuals, received 3,795 reports of harassment, including assaults that resulted in deaths. The Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino said 2020 saw a 150% increase in hate crimes against Asian-Americans in the U.S.’s largest cities.

Trump, who went from demonizing China on the campaign trail to blaming it for the COVID-19 pandemic during his last year as president, spent years perpetuating anti-Asian sentiments. President Joe Biden condemned anti-Asian racism in his first speech and signed an executive order directing federal agencies to combat it, to applause from civil rights groups.

But his administration continues to mostly describe China as a threat ― language that could be dangerous for Asian-Americans.

The Trump administration and political allies like Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) began calling the virus the “China virus” or the “Wuhan virus” a little over a year ago, and last summer the president began to use the racist term “kung flu.” In the days after Gosar and then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called the coronavirus the “China virus,” there was an 800% uptick in such rhetoric among conservative news outlets, according to research from the journal Health Education & Behavior.

The GOP’s strategy built on a wide array of Trump administration policies targeting China, from new limits on visas for Chinese students to a largely self-defeating trade war guided by Republicans’ view that China “has been ripping us off.”

At the time, Chu said Trump was simply seeking “to deflect anger about coronavirus away from himself and to have himself be thought as the war president with the enemy being very identified.”

Under Biden, the anti-Asian rhetoric from the White House has dissipated. Still, experts believe persistent bipartisan hawkishness toward China could do further damage.

In January, progressive activist Tobita Chow and researcher Jake Werner published an essay recommending a reset of U.S.-China relations along progressive lines ― spurred in part by their concern that newly empowered Democrats would be too adversarial.

“The Biden team broadly agrees with the aims of Trump’s confrontation with China and is primarily concerned that the administration’s tactics have been ineffective,” they wrote. “The danger is that the Biden administration will, indeed, be more successful at mobilizing American society and U.S. allies against China ... [which] could lead to a far more destructive confrontation.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is currently working on new legislation to limit China’s influence ― an effort that would complement Biden’s courting of American allies in Asia and plans to aggressively compete with China economically.

Chow and Werner argued that it’s foolish to say focusing on competition with China will not take a toll on Asian Americans and other minority communities, whether under a Democrat or a Republican. “As demonstrated by every prior case of foreign conflict in U.S. history, this is a fantasy. Escalating conflict with China will inevitably feed escalating racism within the U.S.,” they wrote.

Demonstrators wearing face masks and holding signs take part in a rally "Love Our Communities: Build Collective Power" to raise awareness of anti-Asian violence, at the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles, California, on March 13. (Photo: RINGO CHIU via Getty Images)

In 1982, as top officials and media outlets spread the idea that Japan was outpacing the U.S. because of its success in industries like automobile production, two auto workers in Detroit targeted and beat an Asian-American man named Vincent Chin; Chin eventually died of his injuries.

After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the U.S.’s launch of a “global war on terror” focused on the Muslim-majority world, Muslims and people perceived as Muslim across the country faced threats, boycotts, conspiracy theories and discriminatory government policies ― a toxic combination that had lasting effects, as demonstrated by a study showing worse birth outcomes for Arabic-named women in the six months after 9/11.

“If the months following the [2001] attacks are to teach us anything, it is that anti-Chinese racism and xenophobia will increase with time if we do not confront it head on now,” Sahar Aziz, a Rutgers University Law School professor, wrote last year.

Biden’s team has shown some flexibility on the issue. After they were accused of fear-mongering over China with an election ad, they issued a more restrained follow-up message avoiding generalizations about Chinese people and focusing on the authoritarian Chinese leadership.

Skeptics of an overly aggressive policy say Washington can critique China’s crackdowns on domestic dissent and its millions-strong Uyghur minority without promoting the idea of a face-off with the U.S., by describing those problems as part of broader global repression and noting that Beijing may be less likely to address them if it feels victimized.

And they note that without a nuanced approach, American policymakers could be undermining themselves. Jessica Lee of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft has said that anti-Asian rhetoric “risks driving away those Americans the U.S. national security apparatus needs the most right now,” and a coalition of foreign policy analysts argued last year that tolerating anti-Asian discrimination gives the Chinese government an opportunity to highlight and exploit American failures.

“Attacks against Asian individuals and members of the AAPI community, including immigrants, are unjust and at odds with our core values,” the group of dozens of experts wrote in USA Today. “Intolerance and stigmatization risk dividing our society and hurting the most vulnerable precisely when we must unite to confront the pandemic.”

This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.

'You bum, why did you hit me?'

 75-year-old Asian American 

woman beats attacker with stick 

in San Francisco

John Bacon, USA TODAY

Thu, March 18, 2021, 12:39 PM·3 min read

An elderly Asian American woman attacked and punched by a man on a San Francisco street fought back, leaving him battered, bloodied and hospitalized.

The clash came hours after city police announced increased patrols in Asian neighborhoods following a recent surge of attacks in the city and across the nation, including a shooting rampage in Georgia that left six Asian women and two other people dead.

Xiao Zhen Xie, 75, was "very traumatized, very scared" after the encounter, she told CBS San Francisco with her daughter, Dong-Mei Li, helping to translate. Xiao's face appeared swollen and she could not yet see in one eye, her daughter said.

Xiao said she was waiting at a traffic light when the suspect suddenly punched her in the eye. She picked up a stick and fought back, she said.

Video from the scene, shot after the attack, shows the woman holding the board in one hand and an ice bag in the other. The alleged attacker is seen, his face bloodied, being rolled away on a stretcher.

"You bum, why did you hit me?" the woman said in Chinese.

Latest on Atlanta-area spa shootings: Suspect charged with murder; killings inextricably tied to race, experts say

Police say the case is being investigated as a possible hate crime. The 39-year-old man accused in this case is also a suspect in another attack on an 83-year-old Asian man in the same area earlier Wednesday.

Dennis O'Donnell said he happened upon the scene during his morning run.

"There was a guy on a stretcher and a frustrated angry woman with a stick in her hand," O'Donnell, KPIX 5's sports director, told the station. "From what I could see, she wanted more of the guy on the stretcher and the police were holding her back."

Earlier Wednesday, Police Chief William Scott expressed condolences to the families and loved ones of the victims of the Georgia attacks. The suspect in that case, Robert Aaron Long, 21, has been charged with eight counts of murder.

San Francisco police also announced the arrests of three men in connection with a brazen attack on a 67-year-old man inside a laundromat in Chinatown last month. Scott pledged to do everything in his power to keep city resident safe.

"As you may know, the San Francisco Bay Area has been seeing an alarming spike in brazen anti-Asian violence in recent weeks," Scott said in a statement. "We are coordinating with our federal partners and local (Asian American) community organizations. ... Working together, we must prevent violence and hold perpetrators accountable."

VIDEO 'You bum, why did you hit me?' 75-year-old Asian American woman beats attacker with stick in San Francisco (yahoo.com)

What to do if you are a witness to anti-Asian racism

If you see anti-Asian racism, Stop AAPI Hate, a group that tracks acts of discrimination and xenophobia against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, recommends these five safety steps:

• Take action. Go to the targeted person and offer support.

• Actively listen. Before you do anything, ask – and then respect the targeted person's response. If need be, keep an eye on the situation.

• Ignore attacker. Try using your voice, body language or distractions to de-escalate the situation (though use your judgment).

• Accompany. Ask the targeted person to leave with you if whatever is going on escalates.

• Offer emotional support. Find out how the targeted person is feeling and help them determine what to do next.

There's been a rise in anti-Asian attacks. Here's how to be an ally to the community.

A hate crime? Georgia attacks that killed mostly Asian women raises questions

More: Atlanta spa shootings increase fear in Asian communities amid increase in violence, hate incidents

Contributing: David Oliver, USA TODAY; The Associated Press

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Asian American attacks: Elderly woman beats attacker in San Francisco

'Our community is bleeding': Asian American lawmakers say violence has reached 'crisis point'


Lauren Gambino in Washington

THE GUARDIAN
Thu, March 18, 2021, 


Photograph: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

Asian American lawmakers and leaders warned that violence and discrimination targeting their community have reached a “crisis point” following the shootings in Atlanta this week that killed eight people, including six women of Asian descent.

The hearing, the first to examine anti-Asian discrimination in more than three decades, had been scheduled weeks ago amid a surge in violence against the Asian community since the pandemic began. But it took on heightened urgency after the mass shooting that left Asian Americans in Atlanta and across the country shaken and afraid.

“What we know is that this day was coming,” Judy Chu, chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, told a subcommittee of the House judiciary committee on Thursday. “The Asian American community has reached a crisis point that cannot be ignored.”

Judy Chu, chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus. 

Photograph: AP

Grace Meng, a Democrat of New York, said: “Our community is bleeding. We are in pain. And for the last year, we’ve been screaming out for help.”

Meanwhile police in Atlanta revealed new details about the investigation. At a press conference, Charles Hampton, deputy chief of the Atlanta police, said “nothing was off the table”, including whether the killings were motivated, at least in part, by race or gender.

Related: FBI under pressure to tackle anti-Asian hate crime in wake of Atlanta shootings

“We are looking at everything to make sure that we discover and determine what the motive of our homicides were,” he said, adding that they were still determining whether the murders constituted a hate crime.

The suspect, Robert Aaron Long, 21, has been charged with eight counts of murder. Long, who is white, told police that he had a sex addiction and targeted the spas to eliminate “temptation”, denying any racist motivations.

Hampton said on Thursday that Long had “frequented” two of the spas where four women of Asian descent were killed. Four more people were killed at Youngs Asian Massage Parlor, on the outskirts of the city.

The Cherokee county sheriff’s department announced on Thursday that Capt Jay Baker had been replaced as the spokesman on the investigation.

Frank Reynolds, the sheriff, expressed regret amid widespread outrage over comments Baker had made a day earlier. Baker drew criticism for saying Long had had “a really bad day” and “this is what he did”. Reynolds released a statement on Thursday acknowledging that some of Baker’s comments stirred “much debate and anger” and said the agency regretted any “heartache” caused by his words.

“Inasmuch as his words were taken or construed as insensitive or inappropriate, they were not intended to disrespect any of the victims, the gravity of this tragedy or express empathy or sympathy for the suspect,” Reynolds said in a statement, adding that Baker “had a difficult task before him, and this was one of the hardest in his 28 years in law enforcement”.

In response to the shootings, the White House announced that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were canceling a political event in Atlanta on Friday as part of their Help is Here tour to promote the administration’s $1.9tn coronavirus relief package. Instead, they will spend their visit meeting with local leaders and elected officials from the city’s Asian American and Pacific Islander community.

Biden on Thursday ordered flags at the White House and all federal buildings to be flown at half-staff through sunset on Monday to honor the eight victims of the Atlanta spa shootings.

At the hearing on Capitol Hill, Meng was joined by experts and advocates who told the panel that the rising tide of anti-Asian bigotry was fueled in part by rhetoric from Donald Trump and his allies, who referred to Covid-19 as the “China virus” the “China plague” and the “kung flu”.

A student holds a sign at the We Are Not Silent rally organized by the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) Coalition Against Hate and Bias in Bellevue, Washington, on Thursday. Photograph: Jason Redmond/AFP/Getty Images

Nearly 3,800 hate incidents, spanning the spectrum of verbal harassment to physical assault, have been reported against Asian Americans nationwide since the start of the pandemic in March 2020, according to Stop AAPI Hate. Asian American women reported nearly twice as many incidents as men, at nearly 70%.

During the hearing, the subcommittee chairman, Steve Cohen, recounted a number of brutal incidents that included a Filipino man being slashed across the face with a box cutter and an 89-year-old Asian American woman being lit on fire.

“All the pandemic did was exacerbate latent anti-Asian prejudices that have a long, long and ugly history in America,” he said.

In a particularly impassioned exchange, Meng confronted one of the panel’s Republican members, the Texas congressman Chip Roy, who said, after a lengthy exhortation of China’s handling of the coronavirus, that he was concerned the hearing amounted to a “policing” of free speech.

“Your president and your party and your colleagues can talk about issues with any other country that you want,” Meng said through tears. “But you don’t have to do it by putting a bullseye on the back of Asian Americans across this country, on our grandparents, on our kids.”

“This hearing was to address the hurt and pain of our community, to find solutions – and we will not let you take our voice away from us,” she said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report

I'm 'afraid to leave my house': Asian women are living in fear

Sara M Moniuszko
USA TODAY

3/18/2021

Many Asian women are living in fear. They've been living in fear long before the shootings Tuesday night that showed America the brutality of anti-Asian violence.

Asian women are scared to leave the house, worried for their families and overwhelmed by the spate of recent attacks against the Asian community, including the three shootings at Atlanta-area spas Tuesday night that killed eight people, six of whom were women of Asian descent.

Jennifer Chung, a Korean-American living in Atlanta, said she felt "numb" when she heard the news. At least four of the victims were women of Korean descent.

"There's just been so much going on within our community all over, not just the U.S. but even the world," she said. "It's kinda morbid, but you're thinking it was just a matter of time for it to happen down the street from you. And it's devastating that it was an incident that took so many lives."

Christine Liwag Dixon, a Filipino-American living in the New York-metro area, said the killings on Tuesday left her "shocked but not surprised."

"I’ve spent the last year afraid to leave my house alone in this wave of violence against Asians. When I heard what had happened, it was overwhelming," Liwag Dixon, 31, said. "It seems like almost every day there’s a new incident, but this one was just so horrifying and so violent.”

Experts say witnessing violence – or personally experiencing violence or harassment – can lead to trauma, which can cause a range of debilitating mental and physical health effects. For Asian women, the trauma is complex as it is often layered with racism, sexism and hyper-sexualization.

 
'It's a shared trauma'

Michi Fu, a professor and licensed psychologist who specializes in cross-cultural and international mental health, said racial discrimination and hate incidents can be "very confusing and isolating."

“Even if I have personally not suffered an attack, just witnessing something on TV where I can relate to the person the incident occurred to, it can be just as traumatic,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be me working at a (spa) in Atlanta… I can experience what we call vicarious traumatization.”

Fu explained someone who experiences trauma can suffer from a range of issues, including diagnosable mental illnesses like anxiety, depression and post traumatic stress disorder as well as physiological issues such as prolonged lack of sleep, eating issues and high blood pressure.

Chung said she personally felt the impact of Tuesday's shootings.

"As minorities, we understand the perspective that is put upon us when white supremacy is the framework of how everything's built," she said. "So, it's a shared trauma and it's a shared burden."

The Atlanta-area attacks follow a rise in anti-Asian violence amid the coronavirus pandemic, which also signals a larger trend of violence against Asian women. From March 2020 to February 2021, Stop AAPI Hate, a group that tracks discrimination and xenophobia against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, received 3,800 reports of anti-Asian hate, with women reporting hate incidents 2.3 times more than men.

Stereotypes and hyper-sexualization of Asian women are factors in what drives harassment and violence against them.

In a 2008 paper, White Sexual Imperialsm: A Theory of Asian Feminist Jurisprudence, Sunny Woan wrote that "white sexual imperialism, through rape and war, created the hyper-sexualized stereotype of the Asian woman. This stereotype in turn fostered the overprevalence of Asian women in pornography, the mail-order bride phenomenon, the Asian fetish syndrome, and worst of all, sexual violence against Asian women."

Liwag Dixon said she's personally experienced targeted harassment.

It's "the sort of thing that can be passed off as a joke and as harmless, but it’s really not," she said. "A lot of these men have an Asian fetish and will say, ‘Oh I have yellow fever’ or ‘I’ve never been with an Asian woman before, you’re so exotic.'

"A lot of times it walks that line where it’s very uncomfortable and you feel targeted but you don’t feel like you’re in physical danger, but sometimes they get a little too close… and you wonder, am I going to end up murdered in a ditch? Are they going to try to rape me?”


Liwag Dixon recalled a specific incident when she was walking to get into an Uber and a crowd of college-aged men cornered her on the street and used racial slurs and sexually inappropriate language.

“I was very scared for my safety,” she said.

Chung, a singer, was bombarded with comments about her identity and appearance when she started posting videos to YouTube in 2007.

"There was a lot of messages and scary videos people would send me that had nothing to do with me personally, per se, but attacking me as an Asian or bringing up things that had to do with how I look, how I sounded," she explained.

Liwag Dixon said sometimes these stereotypes are viewed as "positive," which is harmful.

“They’ll say, ‘Well you should be flattered… for this attention that I’m giving you,' " Liwag Dixon said.

Chung said there's an element of dehumanization.

"The stereotypes that are put on like Asian women, especially with our bodies... we're seen more as products rather than people," Chung said.

The role of racism

In a statement Wednesday, Asian American Advancing Justice, a non-profit legal aid and civil rights organization, said the broader context of the recent shootings "cannot be ignored."

"The shootings happened under the trauma of increasing violence against Asian Americans nationwide, fueled by white supremacy and systemic racism," the statement read.

Georgia law enforcement indicated the crime was motivated by sex, not race. But Elizabeth Kim, the chief operating officer of Restore NYC, a nonprofit that works to provide housing and economic solutions for survivors of trafficking, said such determinations are premature.

“It’s not an either-or proposition. The racism and the misogyny and the violence are very much intertwined," she said. "I wouldn’t say we should pivot to say it is a crime only in sexual nature and not of a racial nature and vice-verse.”

The shootings "absolutely" make Chung fearful of her personal safety.

"You feel rage and you feel sadness and you think like, what can I do? And also, will it make a difference or will it make me a target?" she said. "You can't really relax

The US has a long history of discriminating against Asians and once banned Chinese people from becoming citizens for 60 years

John Haltiwanger
Thu, March 18, 2021

BUSINESS INSIDER

The first group of 82 Japanese-Americans arrive at the Manzanar internment camp (or 'War Relocation Center') carrying their belongings in suitcases and bags, Owens Valley, California, March 21, 1942. Getty Images

The US has seen a major rise in anti-Asian hate crimes and racism over the past year.

There's a long history of discrimination against Asians in the US.

Understanding this history could be crucial to combatting the rising tide of anti-Asian hate today.

The US has seen a wave of anti-Asian hate crimes over the past year, sparking calls for law enforcement and leaders in Washington to ramp up efforts to combat discrimination against the Asian community.

Congressional lawmakers met with prominent Asian Americans on Thursday as part of a hearing focused on the rising tide of anti-Asian discrimination nationwide, just two days after a series of shootings at three Atlanta-area massage parlors left eight people dead - including six Asian women.

Between March 2020 and late February 2021, there were roughly 3,800 anti-Asian racist incidents reported across the US, with 68% coming from women, according to new data released by reporting forum Stop AAPI Hate. Women reported hate incidents 2.3 times more than men, the report said.

Anti-Asian hate crimes increased by 150% in 2020 from the year prior, according to an analysis of hate crimes in 16 US cities recently released by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino

The COVID-19 pandemic has fueled much of this anti-Asian racism and xenophobia. Many Republican leaders, including former President Donald Trump, have poured gasoline on the fire by insisting on calling COVID-19 the "Chinese virus."

Though there's been a significant rise in discrimination against the Asian community in the past year, it's also nothing new. This brand of hatred is part of a long tradition in the US. Indeed, anti-Asian racism has played a major role in the American story.

In the 19th century, xenophobia and nativist sentiments drove the US to adopt what was effectively a whites-only immigration policy. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which barred Chinese workers from coming to the US and blocked Chinese nationals in the US from becoming citizens. The Chinese Exclusion Act was the first law in US history that explicitly prohibited immigration on the basis of race.

"Beginning in 1882, the United States stopped being a nation of immigrants that welcomed foreigners without restrictions, borders or gates," Erika Lee, a professor at the University of Minnesota, said in her book At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration During The Exclusion Era, 1882-1943. "In the process, the very definition of what it meant to be an 'American' became even more exclusionary." America became a "gatekeeping nation" with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, Lee said.

The law remained in force for six decades before it was replaced by the Magnuson Act in 1943, which was still quite restrictive and only permitted a quota of 105 Chinese immigrants annually. Immigration law in the US would continue to discriminate against Asians in major ways until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which abolished the national-origins quota system.

The Chinese Exclusion Act is just one example of the myriad forms of discrimination people of Asian descent have faced in the US. During World War II, for example, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, forcing over 100,000 people of Japanese descent into detention camps in the US.

The order was largely motivated by anti-Japanese sentiments after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Japanese Americans in the western US faced suspicion and rampant discrimination, even as many in the community served in the war - and in many cases were thrown into some of the most dangerous missions in Europe.

Of the people pushed into these internment camps during the war, roughly 80,000 were US citizens. The order also impacted some German and Italian Americans, but the vast majority of detainees were of Japanese descent.

The US government has made efforts to apologize for discriminatory actions against the Asian community, including the internment of Japanese Americans, but the hateful sentiments that contributed to these moves persist. Understanding this history could be crucial to thwarting the ongoing discrimination against Asians in the US.

Read the original article on Business Insider

Nearly 70% of Reported Anti-Asian Incidents in the Past Year Were Against Women

Wed, March 17, 2021

Two women holding signs that say stop Asian hate

Dia Dipasupil, Getty Images

Last night, March 16th, eight people were shot and killed at three Asian massage parlors around Atlanta, six of whom were Asian and all but one were women. Despite the shooter's claim this morning that the violence was not racially motivated, according to New York Magazine, these victims are now part of an alarmingly fast-growing statistic that has been on the rise since March of 2020. Nearly 3,800 reports of racist incidents targeting Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders in the U.S. were documented between March 2020 and February 2021, with over 500 of these hate incidents occurring in 2021 alone. That's a massive jump from the 2,800 incidents reported in 2019.

According to a February 2021 report from Stop AAPI Hate, a group that is dedicated to collecting data and raising awareness about hate incidents against AAPI communities, these hate incidents were reported across all 50 states and the District of Columbia, with businesses being the primary location for Asian-related hate crimes to occur.

The report also shared a staggering statistic that women are 2.3 times (68%) more likely to report Asian-targeted hate incidents than men.

The Stop AAPI Hate report includes anonymous victim testimony from verbal and physical assaults that occurred throughout the last year. Assailants used both racial and gender-based slurs, blamed their victims for the COVID-19 pandemic, and in many cases, coughed on them.

"There is an intersectional dynamic going on that others may perceive both Asians and women and Asian women as easier targets," San Francisco State University Professor of Asian-American studies Russell Jeung told NBC News. Jeung, who co-founded Stop AAPI Hate, believes that racism, sexism, and the stereotypical idea that Asian women are subservient and weak contributes to the higher percentage of women-reported hate incidents.

Though racism against Asians in the U.S. is not in any way a new phenomenon, this influx of AAPI-targeted hate incidents no doubt stems from the racist rhetoric used by former President Donald Trump when he spoke about the coronavirus pandemic. Because the virus was first detected in Wuhan, China, Trump often referred to it as "the China virus" and even more offensively as "the kung flu."





President Joe Biden, however, vilified those responsible for hate crimes against Asian-Americans and Asians in the U.S. in his national address earlier this month, calling the attacks "un-American." And in January 2021, he signed a memorandum denouncing AAPI discrimination, and as a result, Congress will reintroduce a bill to provide more support to law enforcement to investigate all reports of hate-related incidents.

To learn more about Asian-related hate and/or report an incident, head over to the Stop AAPI Hate website. Here you can also learn how to support your local AAPI community and where to donate funds to help the cause.

'A reckoning is near': America has a vast overseas military empire. Does it still need it?

The U.S. has enjoyed global military dominance for decades. But in the face of emerging threats, some say a new strategy is in order.

Kim Hjelmgaard, 

USA TODAY

Feb. 25, 2021

MANAMA, Bahrain – After weeks at sea, hundreds of young Americans shed their military uniforms for baseball caps and T-shirts and poured forth from the main gates of the heavily fortified U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet base, a major hub for U.S. naval forces in the Middle East.

The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln had just docked in Bahrain, a small Arab island nation on the southwestern coast of the Persian Gulf. The disembarking U.S. service members were intent on cutting loose for a respite from their national security mission patrolling one of the world's busiest and most volatile shipping lanes.

About 200 miles to the east, across a body of water that has seen many tense naval encounters and acts of sabotage, sat America's longtime adversary Iran.

It was November 2019.

A few months later, the U.S. and Iran would nearly enter into an open confrontation after Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps fired ballistic missiles at two Iraqi military bases housing U.S. soldiers. The attack was retaliation for the Pentagon's assassination of senior Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani.

For the sailors, Bahrain's "American Alley" was a taste of home: a thoroughfare of fast-food restaurants and shops catering to Westerners. The sailors clutched iPhones and Starbucks coffee and fended off attempts by locals to sell them watches and other trinkets.

For America's military planners back in Washington, the sailors represented a longstanding bedrock of U.S. national security: one of the Pentagon's hundreds of footholds all over the planet.

Sea change in security threats

For decades, the U.S. has enjoyed global military dominance, an achievement that has underpinned its influence, national security and efforts at promoting democracy.

The Department of Defense spends more than $700 billion a year on weaponry and combat preparedness – more than the next 10 countries combined, according to economic think tank the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.


INTERACTIVE: 3 maps show why the U.S. is the 'world's police'

The U.S. military's reach is vast and empire-like.

In Germany, about 45,000 Americans go to work each day around the Kaiserslautern Military Community, a network of U.S. Army and Air Force bases that accommodates schools, housing complexes, dental clinics, hospitals, community centers, sports clubs, food courts, military police and retail stores. About 60,000 American military and civilian personnel are stationed in Japan; another 30,000 in South Korea. More than 6,000 U.S. military personnel are spread across Africa, according to the Department of Defense.

Yet today, amid a sea change in security threats, America's military might overseas may be less relevant than it once was, say some security analysts, defense officials and former and active U.S. military service members.

The most urgent threats to the U.S., they say, are increasingly nonmilitary in nature. Among them: cyberattacks; disinformation; China's economic dominance; climate change; and disease outbreaks such as COVID-19, which ravaged the U.S. economy like no event since the Great Depression.

Trita Parsi, co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a Washington-based think tank that advocates for U.S. military restraint overseas, said maintaining a large fighting force thousands of miles from U.S. shores is expensive, unwieldy and anachronistic.

"It was designed for a world that still faced another military hegemon," Parsi said. "Now, pandemics, climate chaos, artificial intelligence and 5G are far more important for American national security than having 15 bases in the Indian Ocean."

It may also be counterproductive. Parsi said terrorism recruitment in the Middle East has correlated with U.S. base presence, for example.

Meanwhile, American white supremacists, not foreign terrorists, present the gravest terrorism threat to the U.S., according to a report from the Department of Homeland Security issued in October – three months before a violent mob stormed the Capitol.

Delivering his first major foreign policy speech as commander-in-chief, President Joe Biden said earlier this month that he instructed Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to lead a "Global Posture Review of our forces so that our military footprint is appropriately aligned with our foreign policy and national security priorities."

BIDEN: New twist on Trump's 'America First' foreign posturing[

How big is the US military investment?

At the end of World War II, the U.S. had fewer than 80 overseas military bases, the majority of them in the allies' vanquished foes Germany and Japan.

Today there are up to 800, according to data from the Pentagon and an outside expert, David Vine, an anthropology professor at American University in Washington. About 220,000 U.S. military and civilian personnel serve in more than 150 countries, the Defense Department says.

China, by contrast, the world's second-largest economy and by all accounts the United States' biggest competitor, has just a single official overseas military base, in Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa. (Camp Lemonnier, the largest U.S. base in Africa, is just miles away.) Britain, France and Russia have up to 60 overseas bases combined, according to Vine. At sea, the U.S. has 11 aircraft carriers. China has two. Russia has one.

The exact number of American bases is difficult to determine due to secrecy, bureaucracy and mixed definitions. The 800 bases figure is inflated, some argue, by the Pentagon's treatment of multiple base sites near one another as separate installations. USA TODAY has determined the dates for when more than 350 of these bases opened. It's not clear how many of the rest are actively used.

"They're counting every little patch, every antenna on the top of a mountain with an 8-foot fence around it," said Philip M. Breedlove, a retired four-star general in the U.S. Air Force who also served as NATO's Supreme Allied Commander for Europe. Breedlove estimated there are a few dozen "major" U.S. overseas bases indispensable to U.S. national security.

Yet there's no question that the U.S. investment in defense and its international military footprint has been expanding for decades.

When the Korean War came to an end in 1953, eight years before President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned in his farewell address of a growing military-industrial complex, the Pentagon was spending about 11% of GDP, or $300 billion, on the military, according to the Defense Department and a manual calculation by USA TODAY. Today the Pentagon easily allocates more than twice as much on defense spending each year, adjusted for inflation, even if the overall budgetary figure represents a far lower percentage of U.S. GDP at just 3%.

COVID-19 kills and costs more

Even as the U.S. spends more on defense, some experts say the U.S. military has been operating under a national security strategy that is remarkably unchanged since World War II and thus is ill-suited to newer, more dynamic threats.

"A lot of our military presence around the world is now really just out of habit," said Benjamin H. Friedman, policy director of Defense Priorities, a Washington think tank that advocates for a smaller world role for the U.S. military. "If at one point there was a strategic justification for it, often it no longer has it."
Benjamin H. Friedman, policy director of Defense Priorities
A lot of our military presence around the world is now really just out of habit. If at one point there was a strategic justification for it, often it no longer has it.


Retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. David Barno and political scientist Nora Bensahel recently suggested the Defense Department should prepare for smaller budgets as money is shifted to other priorities.

"The pandemic has suddenly and vividly demonstrated that a large, forward deployed military cannot effectively protect Americans from non-traditional threats to their personal security and the American way of life," they wrote on the foreign policy website War on the Rocks. "In a deeply interconnected world, geography matters far less, and the security afforded by America's far-flung military forces has been entirely irrelevant in this disastrous crisis."

One stark illustration of how U.S. national security priorities may be out of sync with the times: Since 9/11, wars and various American anti-terrorism raids and military activity around the world have taken the lives of more than 7,000 U.S. troops and cost the federal government $6.4 trillion, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project.

As bad as that is, in less than 5% of that time, the coronavirus pandemic has accounted for more than 70 times the human toll as the U.S. exceeds 500,000 dead – also with at least a $6 trillion price tag, according to an analysis of Congress and Federal Reserve allocations. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated that the pandemic has cost the U.S. at least $8 trillion.)



But preventing such deaths may not simply be a matter of taking money away from the Pentagon but shifting focus within it.

For instance, White House senior COVID-19 adviser Andy Slavitt announced Feb. 5 that more than 1,000 active-duty troops would begin supporting vaccination sites around the U.S.

Tom Spoehr, a retired Army lieutenant general and defense expert at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank, notes that the U.S. military has helped with international disease outbreaks in the past.

After an Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014, the Pentagon sent troops, supplies and contractors to help stem a disease that killed more than 11,000 people and cost the economies of Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia an estimated $53 billion.

"We don't have the luxury of just saying, 'OK, the military wasn't that useful last year so we're going to turn it in and get an army of doctors instead," Spoehr said.

Spoehr said it's important the U.S. takes a wide view of national security that encompasses conflict and terrorism as well as pandemics, climate change and cybersecurity and overseas bases and troops have a role to play.

Climate chaos leading to social chaos

In 2017, the Trump administration dropped the Obama administration's designation of climate change as a national security threat. The omission came even though many members of Congress, U.N. Security Council principals, U.S. allies and dozens of security think tanks and research institutes say climate poses a potentially "catastrophic" threat to national and global security. (In one of his first executive orders, Biden re-elevated climate change as a national security priority.)

The World Health Organization estimates that climate change – ranging from insidious heat to flooding – already contributes to about 150,000 global deaths each year. Mark Carney, United Nations envoy for climate action and finance, has warned that the world is heading for death rates equivalent to the COVID-19 pandemic every year by the middle of this century unless drastic action is taken.

Along with wildfires, hurricanes and droughts, these natural disasters destabilize countries, including the U.S., by causing disease, food shortages, social and political

FOR MORE CHARTS & VIDEOS

US military budget: What can global bases do vs. COVID, cyber attacks? (usatoday.com)

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