No one should be surprised that the Chinese are scapegoating Africans
Growing up, I moved in almost exclusively Chinese friendship circles. My friends’ parents, all of whom were immigrants from China, always warmly welcomed me into their homes. I knew, though, that I would not have been welcome if I’d been black. For these Chinese parents, the worst thing that could happen would be for their child to pair up romantically with a black person.
A couple of years ago, Rafael Santiago, a half-black, half-Hispanic man, wrote about the racism he experienced growing up in America when hanging out with a half-Asian friend. Santiago tried to fit in with his friend’s Asian community, but it never quite worked. Eventually, a group of Asians beat him up badly, leaving him with permanent scars, because they thought he’d hit upon one of the girls in the group.
To give context to the attacks against him, Santiago researched racism within the Asian community and discovered what I’d long known: Asians believe that they are a superior race, making other races inferior. And within that class of supposedly inferior people, blacks are at the bottom:
What happened to me is but one of many examples of racism and intolerance in Asian communities. China in particular has ramped up its anti-black rhetoric in recent years; Chinese politicians are trying to “solve the Black population” in China, and WeChat, an application used by nearly everyone in China to communicate, recently translated the words Black foreigner to nigger.
One would think that there would be plenty of Asian activists or celebrities who would cover the issue of Asian racism and look to address it, but I see very few, if any, speaking out. Instead, I feel as though the pressure is put on me to not harbor any animosity towards the Asian community. But that doesn’t make any sense, given that there are Asians who fear every Black person, I don’t get why it’s on me to understand that not every Asian is racist or intolerant.
Three years ago, Chinese TV ran a commercial in which a woman brutally pushed a masculine black man into a washing machine, added the correct brand of detergent, and transformed him into an effeminate Asian man. The commercial implies that this change was all to the good:
With that as a background, only naïve people should find surprising how Chinese people and the Chinese government are persecuting blacks by making them scapegoats for Wuhan virus:
While American liberals castigate President Donald Trump as racist for countering Chinese Communist Party propaganda (which claims the coronavirus originated in America) by referring to the "Chinese virus," black people in China face extra quarantines, exclusion from businesses, suspicion from police, and some have even been booted from their own homes in the name of fighting the virus.
"The way they are treating black people, you cannot accept," Congolese businessman Felly Mwamba, who has lived in China for 16 years and now faces restrictions in the southern city of Guangzhou, told The New York Times. He said he found himself sealed in his home, prohibited from leaving and viewed with suspicion as a carrier of the disease, simply because he was African. "We are not animals."
[snip]
The attacks on foreigners seem particularly targeted against black people. Africans in Guangzhou told The Washington Post they have been evicted from their apartments and refused entry to restaurants. Other residents in a part of the city known as "Little Africa" are being forced to remain in their apartments, even if they have not traveled anywhere that would warrant quarantine, and submit to coronavirus tests.
"Photos and videos posted on social media over the weekend showed Africans sleeping on sidewalks or waiting under shop awnings after being ordered out of their apartments and hotel rooms. Others showed Nigerian diplomats delivering food in the pouring rain to evicted compatriots, and Chinese police in riot gear herding African men along a street," the Post reported.
Until now, the Democrats unanimously and reflexively supported China simply because Trump has always warned against it. That support went stratospheric with the Wuhan virus, as Democrats strained to show that the virus was Trump’s fault, not China’s. (This Twitter thread documents the media’s unabashed support for the communist government’s party line.)
Now, though, Democrats have a problem:
If I had to take bets, I’d say that, despite both the Times and the WaPo covering China’s little racism problem, Democrats will end up siding with China. After all, they’ve already shown that they will do anything and ally with anybody to destroy Trump. Moreover, as the Blexit moving keeps saying, the Democrat party takes blacks for granted. Having noted China's racism, Democrats will feel that, by throwing a sop to blacks, they can go back to parroting the communist governments' anti-Trump, anti-American propaganda.