The Chinese Exclusion Acts of 1882
The Chinese Exclusion Acts of 1882, (and later the Gentleman’s Agreement between the U.S., under Teddy Roosevelt, and Japan (which seriously decreased the numbers of Japanese men who could legally immigrate for the same reasons)) were the first immigration laws to restrict immigration based upon ethnicity; these Acts severely restricted the numbers of Chinese people permitted to immigrate to our country from several thousand a year to app. 105 per year; this Acts were extended in different forms until they were repealed in 1943 during WWII because China was our primary ally against Japan during the Pacific Campaign of the War. However, some Chinese Americans continued to have their immigration informally limited until the passage of The 1965 Immigration Act, which prohibited the use of immigration quotas based upon nationality. Although most of them were highly-skilled and built most of the railroads and the vineyards out West, men of Chinese descent were paid less because of their ethnicity. It was the employers who paid them less and thus helped create the hostility that some White workers felt towards peoples from these countries. Thus, their being seen as “cheap labor/unfair economic competition”, along with racist stereotypes, were used to justify violent attacks against them in western U.S. states from 1849-1892: “The Tacoma Riot of 1885 and Seattle Riot of 1886 drew national attention to the burgeoning coastal cities in Washington territory for their forced expulsion of their Chinese populations by angry—and largely white—mobs. The actions were part of a brutal wave of anti-Chinese violence that rocked the American West in the second half of the 19th century, displacing more than 20,000 Chinese people; between 1849 and 1906, there were at least 200 purges of Chinese residents in California alone. In response, the U.S. government issued more restrictive immigration policies that created a precedent for race-based immigration quotas.” ( https://www.history.com/news/anti-chinese-violence-removal-tacoma-seattle-1885) AND to severely limit their immigration with The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Hate crimes against Asian Americans have also dramatically increased during the pandemic (see NYT article below, which has been copied and pasted below). Some say history is repetitive and cyclical; this is a potential example.
Instructions: First, please refer to the articles in The Atlantic and the NYTimes below which shows how media/popular culture at the time depicted them in negative and false ways:
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/harp/0327.html
*Then, please read the 3 links below and the NYT article below on anti-AAPI (Asian American Pacific Islander) hate crimes, in addition to the Market Revolution (Industrialization) and the Reconstruction power points, tell me what you learned about the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and make a comparison between the anti-Chinese sentiment and anti-Chinese violence at the time and the anti-Asian American Pacific Islander hate crimes during the app. past 2 years. Also, please tell me how the Market Revolution/Industrialization and Reconstruction helped pave the way for this Act. Again, the Market Revolution was from the early 1800s to the mid-1800s, and Reconstruction was from 1865 to 1877:( https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=47
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1866-1898/chinese-immigration
NYT article on Anti-AAPI Hate Crimes:
A string of attacks against older people of Asian descent has led to calls for more police officers, an idea rejected by the city’s Asian American leaders.
Members of United Peace Collaborative, a neighborhood watch group, patrolled the streets of San Francisco’s Chinatown this week.Credit…Mike Kai Chen for The New York Times
Published July 18, 2021 Updated July 21, 2021
SAN FRANCISCO — Two grandmothers stabbed and a third punched in the face in broad daylight. An 84-year-old man fatally shoved to the ground while on his morning walk. In the past seven months, at least seven older Asian residents have been brutally attacked in San Francisco, a city with one of the largest Asian American populations and the oldest Chinatown in the country.
“It’s a horrible feeling to be afraid in your own community,” said John Hamasaki, who is a member of San Francisco’s Police Commission and who is ethnically Japanese. “People are genuinely afraid to go outside, to walk down the street alone.”
The attacks first shocked and angered Asian American residents in the city. But the question of what to do about the violence has now become a source of division.
Many residents of Chinese descent are calling for a significant increase in police patrols. The city’s Asian American leaders, however, said they would rather explore solutions that do not involve law enforcement. One of the most proudly liberal cities in the country is torn between its commitment to criminal justice reforms in the wake of George Floyd’s killing and the brutal reality of the city’s most vulnerable residents being stabbed in the middle of the day on busy city streets.
Hundreds gathered at Embarcadero Plaza in San Francisco in March to protest the increase in hate crimes against the Asian American and Pacific Islander community.Credit…Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Connie Chan and Gordon Mar, the two members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors who are of Chinese descent, have been under pressure from Chinese activists to increase police staffing, a move the elected officials have largely resisted. Chinese activists — many of whom also denounce Chesa Boudin, the city’s district attorney, for not being tough enough on crime and back a recall effort against him — have shown up at meetings to challenge officials, including Ms. Chan and Mr. Mar.
“I haven’t heard of anyone in the Chinese community who doesn’t want more police,” said Leanna Louie, a former Army intelligence officer who is Chinese American and who last year founded a neighborhood watch group called the United Peace Collaborative. “We are very dissatisfied with Asian representatives. We are going to work furiously to replace them.”
How city leaders, police officials and prosecutors should respond to the violence has been part of a bitter and emotional debate at a time when Asian Americans in California and across the country have been the victims of verbal and physical attacks during the coronavirus pandemic.
Hate crimes against all major ethnic groups in California rose sharply last year, and bias crimes against Asian Americans more than doubled, from 43 in 2019 to 89 last year, according to a report released in June by the California attorney general’s office. The group most targeted by hate crimes in the state remained African Americans, with 456 bias crimes recorded last year.
In San Francisco, a city where 34 percent of the population is of Asian descent, the attacks have shaken up the Chinese electorate, which has voted in increasing numbers in recent decades but still below their share of the population. The social fabric and history of the city are tightly interwoven with the Cantonese, Japanese, Filipino, Vietnamese and many other Asian groups that have immigrated to the city since its earliest days. The city’s first Asian American mayor, Edwin M. Lee, died in office in 2017, a symbol both of ascendant yet not fully realized Asian political power.
“I haven’t heard of anyone in the Chinese community who doesn’t want more police,” said Leanna Louie, who founded United Peace Collaborative last year. Credit…Mike Kai Chen for The New York Times
The assaults themselves have become a point of dispute. Asian American leaders and residents disagree over whether the attacks were random or were motivated by racial animus. None of those arrested in the seven most high-profile attacks since January have been charged with a hate crime. The attacks occurred while San Francisco has been confronting what many residents perceive to be a crime problem worsened by the pandemic.
Car break-ins in San Francisco occur at rates among the highest in the nation. And midyear crime statistics released on Monday show a sharp rise in people injured or killed in shootings. And Asian residents are not the only ones being assaulted: Crime data from the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office shows that Black, Latino and white residents are more likely to be victims of crimes involving force and trauma than those of Asian descent.
In the most recent attack against Asian Americans in mid-June, a 94-year-old grandmother of Chinese descent who was walking with a cane was stabbed in front of her apartment building, blocks from one of San Francisco’s most exclusive neighborhoods.
The city’s immediate response to the attacks was to redeploy 20 officers onto foot patrols. A multilingual hotline to report hate crimes was established. But both city and community leaders have acknowledged that those measures have not been enough.
“I take personal offense to what we see happening on the streets because I’m very sensitive about the need for us to take care of our elderly population,” Mayor London Breed said in an interview. “I was raised by my grandmother and I can’t imagine if someone did this to her.”
Commuters waited at a bus stop in San Francisco the day after two older women were stabbed there during rush hour.Credit…Mike Kai Chen for The New York Times
The mayor’s spokesman, Jeff Cretan, said she had requested the hiring of 200 officers over the next two years, roughly enough to replace officers who are retiring. The city’s Board of Supervisors scaled back the request to 135 officers, a move the Police Department says will result in the force shrinking because of imminent retirements.
Bill Scott, the chief of police, said he was disappointed by the Board’s decision.
“The style of policing that I believe San Franciscans want is labor-intensive — community engagement, foot beats, bicycle patrols,” Chief Scott said. “We are far short of where we need to be.”
Ms. Chan, one of the city’s two supervisors of Chinese descent, argues that the money can be better spent on other city services and that the police can do more with its current staffing.
“It’s not really about the number of officers, it’s really about the quality of our officers,” said Ms. Chan, who immigrated to San Francisco from Hong Kong as a teenager.
Instructions: Please tell me 2 things you learned from reading each of the 4 news articles/websites below about Hollywood’s past and more recent portrayals of Native Americans and about how “fake news” is nothing new in some late-19th century publications and in some media today (Facebook):
1) https://time.com/3916680/native-american-hollywood-film/
2) Washington Post
Hollywood typically depicts Native American stories as sad and one-note. The ‘Rutherford Falls’ creators had other ideas.
By Valentina Valentini
April 22, 2021 at 5:00 a.m. CDT
Native Americans’ stories in Hollywood are, more often than not, depicted as sad and monolithic. And while the stories of historical trauma inflicted upon our nation’s first inhabitants serve a purpose, it seems a sea change may be afoot.
“Rutherford Falls,” a half-hour series for NBC’s Peacock streaming service, is one of a few Native narratives coming down the television pipeline (along with FX’s “Reservation Dogs,” NBC’s “Sovereign” and Marvel Studios’ rumored “Echo“) that tells a different story about America’s Indigenous peoples. The comedy follows two best friends — Nathan Rutherford (Ed Helms) and Reagan Wells (Jana Schmieding) — who both have a loyalty and love for their heritage, but whose histories come head-to-head when a statue of Nathan’s ancestor, their town’s founder, needs to be removed.
The minds behind “Rutherford Falls” — co-creator Mike Schur (“The Office,” “Parks and Recreation”), showrunner and co-creator Sierra Teller Ornelas (“Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” “Superstore”) and lead and co-creator Helms — wanted to take Native Americans out of the box in which they’re so often put.
“We very intentionally wanted to tell a story that had Native joy,” says Ornelas. “Diversity of Native perspectives was the big thing [in our writer’s room].”
Helms and Schur, who first worked together on “The Office,” decided to take their decades-long creative back-and-forth to the next level in 2016. They were interested in exploring the issues that they, as two White men, saw happening around them.
“In particular, all the ways people cling to historical narratives and derive so much identity from them,” says Helms. “It’s an endlessly fascinating question, right? What is history? Essentially, it’s just stories that our culture tells itself. Especially at this time in American culture where identity is becoming inextricably linked to other facets of our personal histories — it just felt so precious and fascinating.”
It was in this abstract place that Helms and Schur began to shape the idea of the main character, Nathan Rutherford: He is a good guy with blind spots; a small-town man who takes immense pride in his family’s history without any objectivity or context for the legacy the Rutherfords built on the backs of the Minishonka, a tribe who settled in that area long before White Europeans arrived.
“This meant that the tension and the comedy of the story needed to relate to Native American people,” says Schur. “And that’s not really our story to tell.”
Ornelas, who originally linked up with Schur on “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” and developed a pilot for Helms in 2017, is a seasoned TV writer and producer who was perfectly positioned to take the reins of “Rutherford Falls.” For a room of 10 writers, Ornelas staffed five Natives, including herself (she has a Latin-Navajo background) and Schmieding (who is a member of the Cheyenne River Lakota Sioux tribe). Decisions about the show — from the beadwork to the artwork to wardrobe to choosing Red Lobster as a hangout spot — came directly from the writers’ lives. Creating “authenticity” — a word that’s problematic in its own right — was effectively baked in.
The staff “had very different views on certain issues and not just Native issues,” says Ornelas. “It was so great to have those conversations [both in the room and] on the show. I have a lot of Native friends who have made films that depict trauma in really incredible ways [that are] moving and wonderful. I think that is what people assume they want to see from us, [but] I feel very reticent to present my trauma because there’s so much of my life that has been joyous.”
Adds Schur: “I wanted us to do a show where there’s a scene where three Native people are hanging out and they’re not talking about being Native, because that’s what actual, legitimate representation is; it’s the normal, boring, everyday stuff.”
It was the same mundane stuff that Schmieding was wading through in late 2019, just before she was hired as a writer on the show. At 38, she was still trying to transition out of public education and into full-time standup comedy and TV writing. At the end of her rope with the Hollywood hustle, she made a pact with herself that if she didn’t get staffed by spring of 2020, she was going to move back home with her parents.
“All of my writing samples featured a Native female lead,” says Schmieding, whose parents and grandparents taught her that representation mattered, especially in the small Oregon town where they were one of only a few Native families. “I don’t want to say that there was no interest in my samples, but I was worried that there was no market for Native roles. I was betting on my own identity and it wasn’t working out until it was. Until Sierra.”
Schmieding — who grew up loving to perform, went to the University of Oregon for theater arts and did the rounds on the New York City stand-up and sketch circuit — had no intention of acting on “Rutherford Falls.” Without a trace of self-pity, she explains that she just didn’t think that what she had going on was “marketable,” motioning to her body.
But Schur is known for casting his writers, probably a holdover from his days on “Saturday Night Live” where the line between behind the scenes and on-screen is often nebulous. Writer Paul Lieberstein famously ended up as Toby on “The Office,” and Schur himself played the fan-favorite Mose.
Schmieding thought that they’d given her the audition pages for Reagan Wells as a joke, giving it her best shot anyway. But Ornelas had her eye on Schmieding from the beginning, having followed her comedy for years. “She has this winning quality where you just cannot help but root for her,” says Ornelas.
“Jana was the funniest,” adds Schur. “That’s what it came down to. I come from an ethos that has never failed once — whoever wins the audition gets the part.”
As the entire team worked to bring this first-of-its-kind story to the small screen, Schmieding was able to focus her efforts not only behind the scenes, but on visibility in front of the camera, too. And while the story is built around the issues that come from a statue that needs to be moved from the center of town, she’s quick to remind that — much like the real-world protests over historical monuments — that is simply the inciting incident.
“It becomes much more personal than whether or not we should take down a statue,” says Schmieding. “What we’re really seeing is how historical narratives manifest between a friendship, which is something that I experience all the time as a Native person. In what ways has my life been in service to or supporting other people’s narratives about their life? And because people don’t have that deep level of literacy about Native history, we often get trapped being in support of other people’s dreams and visions. We don’t have that autonomy, that sovereignty, to go to bat for our history and when we do, it doesn’t get mainstream attention.”
The point of “Rutherford Falls” is to challenge the thinking around history: Is there a right or wrong history? A good or bad one? What parts of it are relevant and to whom, and how do we explore all those gray areas? But no one from the series is looking to give a lecture or wag a finger.
“The best TV and movies and art is prescriptive in the sense that it doesn’t just illustrate a problem, it gives you a path to work through or correct that problem,” says Schur. “This is a comedy show and we want it to be funny first and foremost, always. [But we also want it to] feel like a prescription for how people can be better in their lives in any way.”
Adds Schmieding: “These are complex narratives we’re having with each other. People from different walks of life, different cultural and ethnic backgrounds, coexisting in solidarity, but also having real issues with each other about this stuff. That’s real.”
Rutherford Falls (10 episodes) available for streaming on Peacock.
3) https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/yellow-journalism-the-fake-news-of-the-19th-century
4) https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/10/26/indisputable-harm-caused-by-facebook/
Analysis
The indisputable harm caused by Facebook
Columnist
October 26, 2021 at 12:01 a.m. EDT
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In this 2014 file photo, people pose in front of a screen projected with a Facebook logo in Zenica, Bosnia. (Dado Ruvic/Reuters)
A decade ago, Facebook could do no wrong. The rising social media company was at the vanguard of America’s embrace of tech positivism. Its leading executives were treated by the media not just as industry trendsetters, but as gurus on everything from the future of work to the new face of feminism.
Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s hoodie-sporting CEO, was made Time magazine’s 2010 Person of the Year. He was dubbed, simply, “the Connector” — a recognition then of the vast population of people around the world who had found a voice and each other through Facebook.
Earlier this month, however, Time again placed Zuckerberg on its cover and it reflects the profound shift in the zeitgeist since then. “Delete ‘Facebook’?” the cover’s caption line says.
Facebook and the other apps it owns, including WhatsApp and Instagram, are now increasingly seen through the prism of the harm they appear to cause . They have become major platforms for misinformation, polarization and hate speech. At the same time, Zuckerberg and his colleagues rake in billions of dollars each quarter in profits. The company also keeps growing its user base, which now encompasses nearly half of humanity.
In recent days, The Washington Post began publishing a series of reports based on internal documents from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen. The documents were reviewed by a consortium of media outlets and, according to Haugen, disclosed to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
The so-called “Facebook Papers” include a mix of presentations, research studies, discussion threads and strategy memos. The Post and other media companies obtained partially redacted versions of the papers through Haugen’s counsel.
What the documents reveal about Facebook’s behavior is stark and damning. They show how some of Zuckerberg’s public claims about Facebook’s principles and activities clashed with internal company findings. For example, he once told Congress that Facebook removes 94 percent of the hate speech it finds. But the inverse was true — according to internal estimates, the number was probably less than 5 percent.
Ahead of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, Facebook’s efforts to stem the flow of misinformation proliferating on its networks fell short. Company employees were unhappy as far-right groups spread the call to join the “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the attack.
“This is not a new problem,” one unnamed employee fumed on Workplace, an internal message system, on Jan. 6. “We have been watching this behavior from politicians like Trump, and the — at best — wishy washy actions of company leadership, for years now. We have been reading the [farewell] posts from trusted, experienced and loved colleagues who write that they simply cannot conscience working for a company that does not do more to mitigate the negative effects on its platform.”
Outside of the United States, Facebook has also failed to rein in misinformation. In one instance, as documented by my colleagues, two employees created a dummy account for a 21-year-old woman who lived in North India. They wanted to examine what a young woman’s Facebook experience looked like in one of the company’s largest markets.
Soon after the profile was created, the dummy user was encountering posts that included fake news, anti-Muslim hate and jingoistic support for India’s Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
“An internal Facebook memo, reviewed by The Washington Post, called the dummy account test an ‘integrity nightmare’ that underscored the vast difference between the experience of Facebook in India and what U.S. users typically encounter,” my colleagues reported, pointing to the real-life episodes of violence provoked by online misinformation in South Asia. “One Facebook worker noted the staggering number of dead bodies.”
Yet in part due to lack of attention, but also likely due to pressures from the Modi government, Facebook has fallen short. “Their investment in a country’s democracy is conditional,” Pratik Sinha, co-founder of a leading fact-checking site in India, told my colleagues. “It is beneficial to care about it in the U.S. Banning Trump works for them there. They can’t even ban a small-time guy in India.”
The Facebook Papers also make clear how Zuckerberg prioritized maximum engagement and the company’s bottom line over ethical concerns about safety and best practices. While he espouses a form of free speech maximalism in public in the United States, he has participated in enabling regimes of censorship elsewhere. My colleagues also pointed to a 2019 episode in Vietnam , where Zuckerberg personally decided to comply with demands from the autocratic government in Hanoi to censor dissident voices on his platform.
“Ahead of Vietnam’s party congress in January, Facebook significantly increased censorship of ‘anti-state’ posts, giving the government near-total control over the platform, according to local activists and free speech advocates,” my colleagues reported.
Zuckerberg and his colleagues have cast the slate of negative coverage as orchestrated by detractors and misrepresentative of the company’s work. “My view is that what we are seeing is a coordinated effort to selectively use leaked documents to paint a false picture of our company,” he said on an earnings call Monday.
“We have no commercial or moral incentive to do anything other than give the maximum number of people as much of a positive experience as possible,” Facebook spokeswoman Dani Lever said . “Like every platform, we are constantly making difficult decisions between free expressions and harmful speech, security and other issues, and we don’t make these decisions inside a vacuum.”
But the bare reality of what Facebook has unleashed is increasingly available for all to see — and recognized internally by many of its employees.
Haugen, the whistleblower, appeared Monday before a parliamentary hearing in Britain. She confirmed that she had seen a lot of internal research that Facebook “fans hate” because of the way its algorithm works. “Bad actors have an incentive to play the algorithm,” she said. “The current system is biased toward bad actors and people who push people to the extremes.”
The Facebook Papers “are astonishing for two reasons,” wrote the Atlantic’s Adrienne LaFrance. “First, because their sheer volume is unbelievable. And second, because these documents leave little room for doubt about Facebook’s crucial role in advancing the cause of authoritarianism in America and around the world. Authoritarianism predates the rise of Facebook, of course. But Facebook makes it much easier for authoritarians to win.”