Morning Belz, March 19
Asian-Americans.
Here’s the video from Rainsville, up on YouTube. Please bless me with an upvote on Reddit if you know how to do that. Here’s the Reddit link.
I went out and interviewed a handful of Asian shopkeepers in Chattanooga yesterday, asking them about the wave of hate they are reportedly experiencing in America today. I’m going to be as dispassionate as possible about this, I promise, but I have to admit I was skeptical of the narrative. It has all the hallmarks of the low-hanging, superficial follow-up news story ordered in the 10 a.m. meeting in the wake of a major news event (the shooting of eight people, six of them Asian, by a white man at Atlanta-area spas on Tuesday).
I got three interviews, one each with a Lao grocery store owner, a Vietnamese nail salon owner, and a Filipina grocery store owner. The Lao man has lived in Lafayette, which is a redneck north Georgia town, for 35 years, and he said he got yelled at by a young guy at a gas station a couple months ago. The offender (the Lao man guessed he was 20 or 21, and definitely a “hick”) told him to go back to his country, and blamed him for COVID-19.
What sounded like a failing of the Georgia public education system to me was, obviously, not a laughing matter to the man I was interviewing. That kind of thing scares him and makes him very angry, and his hands were shaking as he told me about it. He told me he’s never even gotten a traffic ticket since he came to the U.S. He wants no trouble. He says “thank you” when he faces any sort of animosity, and ducks away. The angry white guy at the gas station said “fuck you” to him, so he said “thank you” and moved on. So that was discouraging to hear, and blasted my preconceived notions. Part of me writes it off because it was Lafayette, which is deep in Marjorie Taylor Greene territory, but hey, that’s America too. Can’t be written off.
The other two interviews, both with women, were more in line with what I expected. They both live in Chattanooga, which is quite a bit more cosmopolitan than Lafayette, and they said they’ve never experienced racism in 20 and 30 years, respectively. Not since the start of the pandemic either. The Filipina grocery store owner, pictured above, told me she thinks people call too many things racism these days. She said there’s been a “rush to judgment” to call what happened at the spas in Atlanta a hate crime. (The front pages of the Post and the Times both have the word “hate” in headlines about the shootings today, which strictly-speaking, you can’t argue with. Hate is involved when you kill eight people. The question is, was it racially-motivated hate?)
“Now it looks like everything is racism. You cannot say anything anymore,” the Filipina grocery store owner said. “I think the news media is too much. I feel like somebody is instigating that word.”
She said, “I don’t feel that way. I don’t believe that way.”
I’ll go back out on Monday and get a few more interviews, and hopefully publish something by Wednesday. I’m not gonna try to push a certain narrative! The interview subjects will be randomly selected and I’m going to push people on whether they’ve experienced harassment or feel under siege. It did actually take a bit of work to tease the above anecdote out of the Lao grocery store owner.
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Volunteer patrols protect elderly Asians in Oakland — LA Times
U.S. will share 4 million vaccines with Canada, Mexico — Reuters
A look at the EU’s bungled vaccine rollout — Alex Tabarrok
Dispatch from Ethiopia, where civil conflict simmers — NYT
Incredibly detailed, nuanced dating profile — Dropbox
“Sensational” details redacted for Lady Ghislaine — Law and Crime
Facebook building Instagram for kids under 13 — Buzzfeed
Quote
“In the case of Britain and the EU, each side needs the other to struggle (even if neither side will admit this). For Europe, Britain must be demonstrably worse off as a result of leaving the bloc. In exchange for following all its strictures, the EU promises prosperity. The prospect of a large, successful economy with a different worldview just off its north-west coast is an uncomfortable one. For the British government, the pain of leaving the EU must be seen to be worth it. This is easier to claim if the EU fails to become a beacon of transnational bliss.” — Charlemagne, The Economist (rigorously paywalled)
About: I was a newspaper reporter for 14 years, most recently at the Minneapolis Star Tribune. I explained why my family left Minneapolis here. Now we live just outside Chattanooga and I work on Scuffed News, a project that either succeeds by July or will have to be abandoned. This is my newsletter. Please share it with anyone you think might enjoy it. And please consider supporting this work with your money on Patreon.