David Inoue
We have all heard the cries about the threat of misinformation and disinformation gone rampant. But exactly what is meant by these terms? Unfortunately, the past few weeks we have witnessed some extreme cases of how misinformation and disinformation can spread like wildfire, much to the detriment of targeted minority communities and individuals.
Sometimes, stories take on a life of their own. Supposedly, a single social media post said that someone’s cat had been missing and the owner of the cat had speculated that the cat had been attacked by a Haitian neighbor. The only fact that seemed to be part of that story was that the cat was missing, but the speculation of involvement of a Haitian individual quickly spiraled into increasingly false narratives attacking the Haitian community. Former President Donald Trump highlighted this falsehood during the Presidential Candidate debate and was immediately fact-checked by the moderators, who countered that the local authorities had stated unequivocally that the stories were false. In the following days, vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance doubled down on the story as important because it was bringing attention to the supposed plight of those in Springfield. In doing so, he admitted that the story was not true, but he didn’t care. All that mattered was that people were talking about Springfield, even if that talk centered on lies he had told about the Haitian community, enflaming hatred toward the people, resulting in bomb and other threats to the community.
Even as the controversy in Springfield was brewing, in Washington, D.C., the Republican-led House of Representatives passed a full slate of legislation during what they called “Tough on China” week. Most concerning were bills to reinstate the China Initiative in the Department of Justice and another bill limiting ownership of agricultural land near sensitive security sites. It has been widely noted that Chinese interests own less than 1 percent of agricultural land in the United States. This was all reminiscent of the anti-Japan bashing of the 1980s and perhaps reinforced by the public opposition of President Joe Biden to Nippon Steel’s takeover bid for US Steel. The Japan bashing of the ’80s culminated in the murder of Vincent Chin. We can only hope that we do not end in similar tragedy.
At the time of Vincent Chin’s murder, we did not have hate crimes legislation as we do today. That would come years later with the passage of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, passed in remembrance of the law’s namesakes, both of whom were murdered in incredibly heinous manners due to their individual identities as targeted minorities.
Which brings us to the third sign of how much we seem to have accepted overt racism as the new normal. At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on hate crimes, Arab American Institute Executive Director and Co-Chair of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights Hate Crimes Task Force Maya Berry was viciously attacked by Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy with accusations of support to Hamas and Hezbollah.
As Berry pointed out, this was a perfect encapsulation of why a hearing on hate crimes was so needed to reveal the depths of anti-Arab hatred existing at the highest levels of our own government. The accusations by Kennedy directly parallel the accusations of dual loyalty that Japanese Americans know all too well, and just as much today, American Jews. Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley lamented that he wanted an entire hearing focused on antisemitism just prior to his colleague’s rant that highlighted one of the major components of antisemitism, that an Arab must be aligned with Hamas just as Jews must be aligned with Israel.
All of this has happened in the span of less than two weeks.
What ties all three items together is that the desire of those propagating the lies or passing new legislation are seeking to separate us into groups of us and them. For the purposes of the hearing on hate crimes, Berry and others who identify as Arab American or Muslim American are part of the other; in this case, ironically, Jews are part of the in-crowd with Sen. Kennedy.
In the House, it was obvious that the Chinese are the other, but how does the average American distinguish between Chinese and Chinese American? As we learned over 40 years ago, Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz could not tell the difference between Japanese and Chinese American. And finally, the Haitian residents of Springfield now live in fear within their own community, and to what degree has that fear extended to other Haitian communities across the country?
These efforts to dehumanize and disenfranchise directly follow the history of anti-Japanese American tropes and pretty much how any community has ever been targeted. The point Berry tried to make throughout the Senate hearing was that an attack on a Jew was an attack on a Muslim as much as an attack on an Asian, Black or Hispanic. As any community is attacked, so are all of us. We must ALL fight back and call out this racism and not let it continue to go unrestrained.
Perhaps there is something good about this sense of honesty, that racists feel no shame in showing us who they are. But now we need to make sure that all of those who claim to oppose racism, do so, and hold the racists accountable for their speech and their actions.
David Inoue is executive director of the JACL. He is based in the organization’s Washington, D.C., office.
