Healing Hate in Southern California
By Dianne Anderson
Murderous acts of race hate spanning generations require financial compensation to start the healing, but communities of color standing in solidarity is something money can’t buy.
Hassam Ayloush said the Antisemitic flyers recently distributed in Redlands reflect a larger uptick in hate flyers against groups across southern California.
But he feels part the solution is banding together so hate recruitment and intimidation are not normalized or tolerated.
“We don’t know who did it yet, but there are enough indications that it’s part of the white supremacist Neo-Nazi hate propaganda that we’ve seen recently in the L.A. area, Pasadena area, Culver City. Unfortunately, it’s a common thing,” said Ayloush, Executive Director of the Greater Los Angeles Area office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
He said targeted communities should never feel alone in the fight, but as blatant as hate incidents are, he feels they are not as mainstream acceptable today as in the past years.
“They’re throwing flyers anonymously. Many years ago they would be doing it publicly, no shame. They would be going out in rallies scaring people in neighborhoods. Hatred and the people behind it are more and more isolated and becoming socially unacceptable,” he said.
To have restitution requires many moves, the least of which is acknowledging undeniable historic injustices, he said. Even if anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism ended in America today, the impact is reflected in emotional and economic harm.
Closing that gap must include adjustments and reparations to redress past injustices, and mistakes of society and the government.
“There’s also a future of making up for that injustice in terms of what it needs to level the playing field so a young African American boy or girl today or a young Native American boy or girl has exactly the same opportunities that any other person in America might have,” he said.
That also requires budget shifts at city, state and federal levels to ensure equity, which he stressed is not about punishing whites for mistakes of the past, as he hears people say their parents never had slaves.
“I don’t know if their forefathers did, or not. This is about what we owe fellow Americans that have been pushed to the margins for decades and decades in our country’s history,” he said.
What it takes to heal centuries of racism brought out the experts in a recent webinar to examine the fallout of race hate that continues to plague the psyche of people of color.
Julian Do, co-director of Ethnic Media Services, described his own family situation in coming to America in 1975 at the end of the Vietnam War, and how immigrants exposed to war and imprisonment still live with trauma.
Do recounted some of the top reported hate crime cases of recent times, including Atlanta’s mass shooting, the targeting of Asian salons, and brutal attacks on Asian Americans in subways and on the sidewalks of New York. Targeted shootings of African Americans at the grocery store in Buffalo, and the Charleston church shootings.
Jewish worshipers were targeted at synagogues and the recent LGBTQ targeted shooting at a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs. The genocide of Native Americans in boarding schools, and countless attacks against Latinos at shopping centers and schools.
“We could go on and on,” he said. “So the question is, how do people and communities find a way to reconcile with horrific acts perpetrated against them?”
Helen Zia, author and founder of The Vincent Chin Institute, talked about violence and division, and how triggers bring back the inter-generational traumas.
COVID-related hate in the Asian community spiked when the virus was identified in 2019, and one example of how hate and violence against Asians that happened long ago lurks just beneath the surface.
“They continue and you know they’re absorbed not only in our psyche, but in our bodies,” she said, adding that those triggers are not just impacting Asian Americans, but violent incidents and hate of any kind. “We have seen how there’s a rise in that kind of hate, violence, and killings that have affected every marginalized community in America.”
For her, 1982 with its hate-targeted Japanese community changed her life when Vincent Chin was beaten to death with a baseball bat by two white men.
“Vincent Chin, was out celebrating his bachelor party when two white auto workers blamed him for the unemployment, and the terrible misery that the economic depression in the Midwest was causing everywhere,” she said.
Zia, then a journalist in Detroit, had also been an autoworker and saw the height of job loss, but the rhetoric turned to blame, and Japan became the enemy. There was no question that the two killers did the crime. It was in front of about 100 witnesses.
“The judge said in Detroit, in a depression, in a city that was majority Black and still is, that these are not the kind of men you send to jail and sentenced them to probation. So, these two killers actually never spent a single day in jail,” she said.
James Taylor, professor of African American History, University of San Francisco, said he also taught the case of Vincent Chin in his classes, knowing these stories that others experience helps understanding, and breaks down barriers.
In his work as a member of the San Francisco African-american Reparations Advisory Committee, he had hoped reparations would gain more traction after the George Floyd murder, as protests shed light on so many unresolved issues.
“What we’ve done is stirred a conversation that has changed the game for reparations forever,” he said, noting that there are now about five other states considering statewide reparations programs.
“The truth is, Black people in America have always been broken. Apart from their own deep religious and spiritual culture that has kept them alive and kept them thriving, I’m saying they were broken from day one,” he said.
But he stressed that denial from the larger society is the real problem as they refuse to recognize that there was ever an injury to begin with.
In San Francisco, the Japanese community is a top supporter of Black reparations, as well as the Jewish community, but he said the concept of reparations is not new. Reparations for the Japanese came due in the late 1980s with a formal apology and $20,000 for every survivor of the internment camps, but it first started in the 1880s.
During Reconstruction, former slave Callie House brought her case to the Supreme Court, which knocked it down, ruling the state is sovereign and immune. House was fighting on the premise of pension compensation for slave labor. Later, she was arrested on bogus mail fraud charges, but today her fight continues through education at Vanderbilt University’s African American and Diaspora Studies Program renamed its research arm the Callie House Research Center for the Study of Black Cultures and Politics.
For Nestor Fantini, publisher and sociologist, is focused on unjust incarceration and oppressive political systems.
He described being a former political prisoner in Argentina for years for speaking out as a pro-democracy student. He was tortured, and fellow prisoners were beaten and tortured, completely naked, and never charged with a crime. His friend was executed in front of him.
With the help of Amnesty International, Fantini was released. He said he supports reconciliation, restorative justice, and humane alternatives to the dysfunctional criminal justice systems, such as the one in the U.S.
“With more than 2 million people in prison, with institutional racism that leads to about 60% of the prisoners being from members of minority groups, African Americans, Latinos,” he said.
For all the horrible atrocities in Argentina, he said there was never any acknowledgment of the torturous campaign, and there was no shame.
“There could be no [consolation], no forgiveness until the military acknowledged their [role], and also until they disclose the whereabouts of the 30,000 disappeared and the 500 babies, that only about 132, I believe, have been [found],” he said.
Beth Wright, staff attorney for the Native American Rights Fund, was scheduled to speak, but unavailable due to technical difficulties.
Professor Taylor summed up that it’s not about what white people did to Black people that fuels the demand for reparations.
“The California Committee and San Francisco Committee is not based on race. It’s based on African American lineage tied to the freedmen,” he said, adding that after slavery, that was the plan of the federal government to help Blacks get on their feet, but it never happened.
He also finds the issue of money is a distraction because of the prejudiced view that Black reparations will be spent rapidly.
“[It’s that] these people won’t be responsible. Well, if you look at the package we put together, we had 110 recommendations, money stimulus was just one [of the recommendations],” he said.
When the subject of money reparations circulated in the media, their website that hardly had visitors suddenly blew up from 300 hits in over a year to 13,000 hits in one day.
The recommendation is now up to $1.2 million for Black residents that are descendants of slaves.
“That’s where it is right now, and it’s not just about the money. Reparations, it’s about the total fixing, the healing, the recovery, the fixing of the Black community, and, I think, is the last frontier for America,” he said.
To see San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee
https://www.sfreparations.org/
To see the California Task Force Interim Reparations Report
This news story was supported in whole or in part by funding provided by the State of California, administered by the California State Library.
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