MESSAGE FROM PRESIDENT GLORIA MIDDLETON
As we continue to listen to the news and scroll through our social media accounts, we continually see story after story about hate crimes being committed. Most recently, there have been disgusting and deplorable hate crimes against Asian and Pacific Asian Americans.
This country was founded on a class system that has evolved through centuries of existence where one group of people has consistently been deemed less than another. Through it all, the white male has always been the top of the class structure.
The Constitution was written for the rights of white, European males. Women were not included. Indigenous people were not included. The slaves taken from various countries of Africa and the Caribbean certainly were not included.
Throughout centuries of fighting for the rights of women and Black Americans, as well as some restitution to the Indigenous people, amendments to the Constitution were made so there would be a more inclusive union and more equality.
Well, that equality just has not happened. Our country’s class system is just as bad as ever, and bigotry, antisemitism, and hate abound. The implicit bias that exists, whether on purpose or by a natural order, of hate for certain groups of people is because this country has failed to tell the true history of the diversity that makes up America.
When our former president spews nonstop that the coronavirus came from China, and condemns that country as the sole source and reason for the pandemic, he is psychologically telling people to blame Asians for the world- wide crisis. Is it any wonder that hate crimes against Asian Americans have escalated during the pandemic?
There is a long history of hate against Asians, going back to the attack on Pearl Harbor. While the coronavirus did start in China, that is no reason to blame every Asian American for causing the pandemic, just as we cannot blame an entire Black community for the wrong-doing of one Black American, and we cannot hold accountable the entire Jewish community because one sect broke mandated COVID social gathering restrictions.
This continual hate is a way to divide the minorities of this country. As we witnessed the George Floyd murder in the middle of a pandemic, we saw people of all races, creeds, and sexual orientations standing together around the world in a sign of unity and solidarity against hate crimes. As a collective whole, we found our humanity for a short while. It gave us hope at a time when the world had stopped and people had been in lockdown for months. We came together in the streets, marching and chanting “Black Lives Matter”, calling for a change in policing and how arrests of Black people are conducted. While laws were introduced immediately to invoke change on how law enforcement should handle arrests, we are still waiting unfortunately for the Senate to take action.
In the meantime, crimes against Asian Americans are escalating by the minute, part of a surge in abuse since the start of the pandemic more than a year ago. Asian Americans are spit on, verbally harassed, and physically beaten for no other reason than being Asian. Thousands of cases of hate crimes against Asians have been reported since the start of the coronavirus outbreak.
In fact, at the end of last year, the United Nations issued a report showing racially motivated violence and other hate incidents against Asian Americans are at “an alarming level”. Another report said that the New York City hate crimes task force investigated 27 incidents against Asian Americans in 2020, nine times more than the year prior.
But that isn’t the only group under attack. The Jewish community is constantly berated for simply being Jewish. When a young Hasidic couple and their baby were strolling through lower Manhattan in early April, they were heinously attacked because of anti-Semitic hatred, and all three required stitches.
A report released by the FBI in Nov. 2020 shows there was an almost 7% increase in religion-based hate crimes, with 953 reports of crimes targeting Jews and Jewish institutions, up from 835 the year before.
Of course, we can’t talk about hate crimes and not include those targeted at Mexicans and other Hispanic groups. For that, we can clearly blame our previous president as he was determined to build a wall on the border of Mexico and the United States to keep Mexicans from entering our country. “Mexicans are bad,” he said, which led to far too many Americans to take out their anger in the form of hate crimes.
The same FBI report indicated that hate crimes in the U.S. have now risen to the highest level in more than a decade, with federal officials recording the highest number of hate-motivated killings since the FBI began collecting that data in the early 1990s.
The real threat, according to statistics, is that in another 20 or so years, white Americans will be the minority in this country. The generations following the baby boomers are much more accepting of the diversity amongst us and are evolving and co-existing in this country like never before. This is a threat to 1% that have been controlling the “media noise” we so often hear.
It’s all about divide and conquer. If we can be taught to hate one another then the 1% keep us divided and distracted while they continue to take this country backward by giant leaps. Promoting divisiveness will get us nowhere. Attempts at voter suppression are a way to return us to the Jim Crow era. Controversial topics like a woman’s right to choose and gun laws are further attempts to return our country to a time that should remain the past. We need to improve relationships, become a more tolerant nation, invoke an understanding of other cultures, religions, and ethnicities. We have to become more politically active so that together we can create the sound bites that disavow the negativity we witness every day.
If this pandemic taught us anything, it should be that life is precious, that hating someone for no good reason is meaningless, that every day is a gift. Bearing witness to all that has happened in the last 14 months should make us understand that hate in any form is not only unacceptable, but it is a plan to keep us divided.
Let’s become a country that embraces the differences among us because after all, each one of us contributes to the melting pot that is America