Im-Politic: Race-Mongering and the Hell of No Intentions

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Asian-Americans, Biden, Capitol riots, critical race theory, Donald McNeil, hate crimes, Im-Politic, Jay Caspian Kang, Kamala Harris, race relations, racism, The New York Times, white privilege

It’s bad enough when self-appointed – and then government- and/or business- and university-endorsed – experts on racism spread the claim that intentions don’t matter at all when it comes to identifying the forms of bigotry that have harmed various American minorities throughout the country’s history, and that continue holding them back today.

It’s that much worse when they and the nation’s leaders casually throw around terms like “white privilege” – which insist, inter alia, that the very denial of bigoted beliefs is proof of their existence – and even turn them into firing offenses. And it’s worse still when the President and Vice President explicitly agree that actions should be treated as proof of racism in the absent any evidence of racial motivation.

That’s why the weekend comments on the recent Atlanta spa killings by President Biden and Vice President Harris are so dangerously divisive for a country that isn’t exactly short of dangerous divisions these days. I’m talking about the former’s statement that

“Whatever the motivation [for the Atlanta killings], we know this: Too many Asian Americans have been walking up and down the streets worrying. They’ve been attacked, blamed, scapegoated and harassed”;

and the latter’s more detailed declaration that

“Whatever the killer’s motive, these facts are clear. Six out of the eight people killed on Tuesday night were of Asian descent. Seven were women. The shootings took place in business owned by Asian-Americans. The shootings took place as violent hate crimes and discrimination against Asian-Americans has risen dramatically over the last year or more.”

The only possible silver lining could be their prompting of some serious national attention to the real relationship between intentions and events before the situation gets completely out of hand. So here’s an initial effort.

Let’s start off with what’s presumably still common ground. I trust that every thinking person understands that good intentions alone don’t guarantee results that would widely be recognized as positive, either in terms of public policy or private behavior. Well-meaning words or deeds can easily overreach or backfire in all sorts of ways, especially if not well-informed or carefully thought through. They can also easily – and often rightly – be deemed offensive, especially when the well-intentioned hold more power than the the objects of their supposed largesse. And let’s not forget that good intentions per se can be difficult to distinguish from cynical, narcissistic, or simply hollow virtue-signalling.

Every thinking person surely also agrees on condemning well-meaning words that clash with deeds – that is, hypocrisy. When public officials are guilty, that’s legitimate news and they should pay a price. In both the public and private sectors, the same goes for deeds that violate the law, whether they’re inconsistent with any words spoken or written by the perpetrator or not. And when public and influential private sector individuals may be involved, certainly journalistic or other investigation and presentation of any relevant information is warranted.

Nor should it be overly difficult to recognize what’s right and wrong in more complicated circumstances – like those involving insistence that significant and/or official racism has vanished in America because segregation laws have been eliminated, or because affirmative action programs have been in place for decades, or because an African-American has been elected President, and that ignore the lingering effects of government-produced or government-tolerated discrimination. (Basing public school funding heavily on property taxes is a glaring example of the former; housing red-lining is an example of the former turning into the latter.)

Whether such ignorance is willful or genuine, it’s certainly never admirable. At the same time, should such holding beliefs result in careers being damaged, or personal reputations being trashed in public – with innocent family members being victimized in the process? That strikes me as opening the door to the totalitarian practice of prosecuting thought crimes – which all too easily lead to conviction because by definition no tangible or visible evidence would be required to establish guilt. And who actually wants America to turn into a society that would, therefore, inevitably be dominated and psychologically paralyzed or worse by fear of indictment? And who actually wants to hand unscrupulous individuals such extraordinary power to intimidate and injure, an outcome that also seems entirely plausible. Unless you believe that all men and women are angels?

The Biden and Harris Atlanta comments go even further toward severing the link between words and thoughts on the one hand, and deeds and results on the other. And don’t underestimate the impact of presidential versions of the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. In particular, they threaten to boost the likelihood that evidence-free claims will suffice to produce actionable findings of racism or other forms of bigotry, to make the sensibilities of even the most fragile personality or prejudice-mongering individual the determinant of guilt, and to trigger all the aforementioned consequences and increased fear and self-censorship.

If you’re skeptical, check out what happened to a veteran New York Times reporter who was forced to leave his job because students that he led on a Times-organized educational tour of Peru complained that he used both the N-word and other racially insensitive language in their presence. The reporter, Donald McNeil, claimed that the context of these comments revealed no bigoted tendencies whatever, and according to his detailed account of the episode – which hasn’t been challenged – he has the facts on his side.

But what’s most important is that when the paper announced McNeil’s departure to the staff, it specificied that these facts – including the context – didn’t matter. “We do not,” the Times said, “tolerate racist language regardless of intent.”  (See here for the full story.)

Such troubling disregard for the facts themselves – as opposed to how they bear on issues of intent – is also clear from the Biden and Harris remarks. In the first place, despite all the press coverage they’ve received, it’s far from clear that any surge in hate crimes against Asian-Americans has even taken place. As pointed out by – Asian-American writer – Jay Caspian Kang, an at-large contributor to the magazine section of that same New York Times, these claims

“largely rely on self-reported data from organizations like Stop AAPI Hate that popped up after the start of the pandemic. These resources are valuable, but they also use as their comparison point spotty and famously unreliable official hate crime statistics from law enforcement. If we cannot really tell how many hate crimes took place before, can we really argue that there has been a surge?

“There have also been reports that suggest that these attacks be placed within the context of rising crime nationwide, especially in large cities. What initially appears to be a crime wave targeting Asians might just be a few data points in a more raceless story.”

So it’s entirely reasonable to worry that the slighting of intent issues by the nation’s two top elected leaders could also encourage the rapid proliferation of all encompassing and never-ending searches for racial or other bigotry-related dimensions of any events involving different categories of people – even normal, every day life interactions.

I can’t imagine a more effective formula for encouraging much of the nation to walk on eggshells in understandable fear of retaliation from all manner of racial justice vigilantes armed with the unprecedented naming and shaming power of social media – and for stoking countervailing variants similar to those that reared their own ugly head on January 6. 

Im-Politic: Why Biden Can’t Run Even as a Fake China Hawk

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Asian-Americans, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, China, Code Pink, Democrats, election 2020, Elizabeth Warren, Im-Politic, Jeet Heer, Joe Biden, Judy Chu, labor unions, Larry Summers, progressives, racism, Rashida Tlaib, Sherrod Brown, The Nation, Trade, Trump

I know I just wrote about how dreadful Joe Biden’s China policy record has been for decades. But the former Vice President is the presumptive Democratic Party nominee for President, and he could well be sitting in the Oval Office next January. So it’s eminently newsworthy to report that any hopes that a President Biden would recognize these disastrous mistakes, and generally speaking try to continue President Trump’s policy of reversing them, are now lying in ruins.

Specifically, it’s become clear in recent days that any Biden effort to keep his newly made promise in a political ad to “hold China accountable” for its role in unleashing the CCP Virus on the world is going to prove totally unacceptable to his party’s progressive wing – whose support he’s acting like he needs desperately to win in order to defeat Mr. Trump.

Moreover, it’s been reported that one of the campaign advisers chosen by Biden is Larry Summers, a former Clinton Treasury Secretary and Obama administration chief White House economic aide who has always championed reckless trade and broader economic expansion with the People’s Republic. Worse, during the Obama years, Summers was a major obstacle opposing ideas like sanctioning China for its protectionist currency policies – which would have gone far toward stemming the extraordinary increase in Beijing’s economic and therefore military power that took place while Barack Obama occupied the White House. In other words, the Biden campaign will be powerfully shaped by the Democrats’ centrist wing – and its own long record of enabling China.

If you doubt that Summers still backs coddling China, check out this 2018 post – which shows him turning intellectual backflips trying to excuse Beijing’s massive theft and extortion of American intellectual property, and to claim that the Obama policies succeeded spectacularly in bringing China to heel.

The stances of Democratic progressives are less well appreciated – but at least as important given this faction’s success in pulling Biden and other Democratic centrists to the Left this year on a host of issues. Moreover, don’t forget how if they’re unhappy enough with Biden, many of them will stay at home on election day and, as in 2016, help hand victory to Mr. Trump. At the same time, the progressives’ story it’s a more complicated story than the centrists’.

It’s more complicated because two of the progressives’ favorites – Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont – are definitely supporters of tougher and, more important, smarter U.S. China policies. That’s especially true of Sanders, who has voted against every U.S. effort to integrate the American and Chinese economies more widely and deeply during his long career on Capitol Hill. Nonetheless, it’s also true that neither Senator made China a major issue during their presidential campaigns this year.

And one main reason is surely that none of the progressives’ other leading (and younger) lights seems especially interested in China. Commendably, they have condemned China’s horrific repression of its Muslim Uighur minority. But ask yourself – when’s the last time Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, condemned the People’s Republic for the trade and intellectual property and investment policies that have stripped the United States of much of its manufacturing base and hammered the wages of manufacturing workers? I couldn’t find any such statements.

Ditto for Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib – and she represents a Detroit area district whose economic distress owes significantly on China-related and other trade policy failures. But you won’t even find these words on her website.

But although much of the Democratic Left has had little to say lately about China and trade, signs have abounded that it’s royally ticked off about Biden’s CCP Virus ad – in some cases because of their alleged potential to stoke anti-Chinese bigotry at home, but also because they supposedly blame China for U.S. virus-related losses that they insist are really President Trump’s fault.

Most of this pushback so far has come from Asian-American activists in Democratic ranks who don’t hold political office. But it’s also come from California House Democrat Judy Chu, Chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus. Does anyone believe she’ll face much resistance here from the rest of her party?

And non-Asian American progressives have ripped the Biden ad, too – including influential pundit Jeet Heer (national political correspondent for one of the progressives’ flagship magazines, The Nation); Sanders campaign surrogate Josh Fox; and Code Pink, the women-led progressive grass-roots group.

In theory, the Democrats’ still-powerful labor union base could prod Biden to lay out a credible plan to combat China’s many threats to American interests. But its representatives, at least, have been quiet about the virus and its implications. In fact, judging from this recent op-ed piece, its spokespeople seem at least as determined to blame Trump administration blunders for the country’s CCP Virus woes as they are to blame pre-Trump China-coddling and enabling trade policies. Indeed, one of the labor Democrats’ Congressional leaders, Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, seems to adopted a “Biden uber alles” position during this campaign, even on China policy.

Yet although both Democratic centrists and progressives will be strongly pushing Biden to soft-pedal criticisms of China for the rest of this presidential campaign, this approach is likely to flop so badly with the American electorate in general (as shown in a post earlier this week) that it’s a natural for President Trump to exploit. And if a Trump campaign hammering China themes creates even more incentive and/or pressure for the President to maintain his hard and smart line against Beijing, it won’t just be his political career that benefits. It will be the entire nation as well. Maybe even the Democrats will start opening their eyes.