Julianne Hing of Colorlines summarizes a newly released report on Asian American, Pacific Islander and AMEMSA (Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim and South Asian) male youths. Among the findings:

-Racial profiling is a routine part of life for Southeast Asian and Pacific Islander boys. In 2006 in Oakland, Calif., those of Samoan descent had the highest arrest rate of any racial or ethnic group, coming out to 140 arrests for every 1,000 Samoans in Oakland.  

-Asian-American, Pacific Islander and AMEMSA youth are the most frequent targets of school bullying. More than half of Asian-American teens are bullied in school. At 54 percent, the rate far exceeds the rates reported by white teens (31 percent), Latino teens (34 percent) and black teens (38 pecent). And yet, youth rarely report the incidents of harassment, fearing retaliation or because they lack the linguistic capability to voice their needs.

-The rates of bullying are higher for turbaned boys. For South Asian boys who wear turbans, nearly three-quarters, or 74 percent, report facing some religious or racial bullying. It’s common for turbaned youth to be called terrorists.

-Asian-American LGBTQ youth in particular deal with homophobia, transphobia and racism in school. Nearly one-third of Asian-American LGBTQ youth reported dealing with harassment based on their race. And in a California report of LGBTQ youth, Asian-American youth reported the highest incidence of bullying of any group of students of color.

-More than 40 percent of Hmong youth live in poverty. Rates for other Southeast Asian youth are similarly high. Thirty-one percent of Cambodian youth live in poverty, compared to 27 percent of black youth and 26 percent of Latino youth. Almost half of Bangladeshis too (44 percent) are considered low-income, along with 31 percent of Pakistanis.

-Many Asian-Americans are undereducated. Among the broader U.S. population, 19 percent of people in the U.S. lack a high school degree or GED, but more than 40 percent of Cambodians, Laotians and Hmongs, do not have a high school degree. 

-One in four Koreans in the U.S. is undocumented. And one in six Filipinos is undocumented. And between 2000 and 2009 the undocumented Asian Indian population grew 40 percent. The nation’s immigrant community is broad and multifaceted; these statistics attest to that.

For more, including what we can do about all of this, check out the report and recommendations here

(Source: colorlines.com)

Compare & Contrast: ‘Maybe you shouldn’t blame an entire religion for the acts of few.’ 

(via cartoonpolitics)

GET YOURSELF BETTER KNOWLEDGED: 10 Things Men Can Do To End Violence Against Women

(via reagan-was-a-horrible-president)

The truth of the matter is that this innocent victim of the Boston Marathon Bombing was suspected, scapegoated, harassed, and villainized by people and the media without evidence simply because he had the misfortune of being a brown person while doing what most others were doing too at the site. Simply, this is the injustice of racial profiling.

Amy Davidson writes: 

We don’t know yet who did this. “The range of suspects and motives remains wide open,” Richard Deslauriers of the F.B.I. said early Tuesday evening. In a minute, with a claim of responsibility, our expectations could be scrambled. The bombing could, for all we know, be the work of a Saudi man—or an American or an Icelandic or a person from any nation you can think of. It still won’t mean that this Saudi man can be treated the way he was, or that people who love him might have had to find out that a bomb had hit him when his name popped up on the Web as a suspect in custody. It is at these moments that we need to be most careful, not least.

It might be comforting to think of this as a blip, an aberration, something that will be forgotten tomorrow—if not by this young man. There are people at Guanátanmo who have also been cleared by our own government, and are still there. A new report on the legacy of torture after 9/11, released Tuesday, is a well-timed admonition. The F.B.I. said that they would “go to the ends of the earth” to get the Boston perpetrators. One wants them to be able to go with their heads held high.

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Adding the discourse of sexual racism—though this piece never uses this term—is this interview with The Henry, a self-described “hairy Asian muscle panda,” at theyreallsobeautiful.com.

In addressing the prevalent, “No fats, no femmes, no Asians” on online profiles, The Henry connects the problem with identifying racial preferences in the historical context of racial discrimination. He says:

Baby Asian gays see this sort of “no Asian” stuff on gay profiles so early in their unsure gay lives… how do they feel as they get into their gay adult lives? Fucked up! So you’re not responsible for racism because it’s a physical “preference,” but to state it in a way that makes baby Asian gays feel bad about themselves is awful.  White people during the Civil Rights Era did not “want” black people in their businesses. Did that make it ok to put up signs that said “No Blacks”?  It’s just a preference right?  People would post those signs. Signs that make young black kids feel unacceptable to your place of business.  Fine for those people to feel that way about black people but you don’t have a right to put up that sign. It is “racist” yes, but the real problem is in how it affects the victims of something under the auspices of preference.  So your stated “preference” on your gay profile makes it so you get what you want, but it may as well be a “no blacks allowed” sign as far as baby gay Asians are concerned.  Whether it’s racist or not? I don’t really care. It bothers me that it makes baby Asian gays feel undesirable because of their ethnicity. That’s just criminal.

Read more of the interview here and to revisit my piece on sexual racism in MetroWeekly, check it out here.

WATCH: Chris Hedges - Empire of Illusion

Writer and journalist Chris Hedges’ lecture on spectacle based on his book Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle at The New School.

[via:azspot]

In this marvelous piece, journalist Chris Hedges indicts the “liberal” intellectual elite for their role in propagating a public discourse that rubber stamped the invasion of Iraq under President George W. Bush. He writes:

These apologists [among them he calls out Bill Keller, Michael Ignatieff, Nicholas Kristof, David Remnick, Fareed Zakaria, Michael Walzer, Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman,George Packer, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Kanan Makiya and the late Christopher Hitchens], however, acted not only as cheerleaders for war; in most cases they ridiculed and attempted to discredit anyone who questioned the call to invade Iraq. Kristof, in The New York Times, attacked the filmmaker Michael Moore as a conspiracy theorist and wrote that anti-war voices were only polarizing what he termed “the political cesspool.” Hitchens said that those who opposed the attack on Iraq “do not think that Saddam Hussein is a bad guy at all.” He called the typical anti-war protester a “blithering ex-flower child or ranting neo-Stalinist.” The halfhearted mea culpas by many of these courtiers a decade later always fail to mention the most pernicious and fundamental role they played in the buildup to the war—shutting down public debate. Those of us who spoke out against the war, faced with the onslaught of right-wing “patriots” and their liberal apologists, became pariahs. In my case it did not matter that I was an Arabic speaker. It did not matter that I had spent seven years in the Middle East, including months in Iraq, as a foreign correspondent. It did not matter that I knew the instrument of war. The critique that I and other opponents of war delivered, no matter how well grounded in fact and experience, turned us into objects of scorn by a liberal elite that cravenly wanted to demonstrate its own “patriotism” and “realism” about national security. The liberal class fueled a rabid, irrational hatred of all war critics. Many of us received death threats and lost our jobs, for me one at The New York Times. These liberal warmongers, 10 years later, remain both clueless about their moral bankruptcy and cloyingly sanctimonious. They have the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocents on their hands.

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Read more here

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