We Need Help’: Coronavirus Fuels Racism Against Black Americans in China
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Jeff Remmington, an American professional basketball player trying his hand in China , had already been through xenophobic hell: ostracized in Guangzhou, where he was once celebrated for his acrobatic dunks , denied service at a restaurant with his 4-year-old son because of his skin color, quarantined for two weeks, though he showed no signs of coronavirus infection, he said.
But the breaking point came in May when he tried to find a new apartment. He had finally found a landlord who would rent to a “foreigner,” signed a lease, and was preparing to move when neighborhood officials stepped in.
“Good evening, fellow neighbors!” read a message that circulated in a neighborhood WeChat group, according to screenshots reviewed by The New York Times. A real estate agency has “introduced an African family to rent in our neighborhood. Is money more important than lives?” It continued, “African people are a high-risk group, and Guangzhou people are all not renting to them. But in our neighborhood, some people see money and get wide-eyed.”
“I kind of broke down,” said Mr. Remmington, 32, whose trash-talk moniker “the Black Angel of Death” has received new meaning with his experiences. “I was going to be homeless.”
When reports of race-based scapegoating first emerged last month in Guangzhou, a manufacturing hub where many Africans live, African ambassadors demanded China’s Foreign Ministry order the immediate “cessation of forceful testing, quarantine and other inhuman treatments meted out to Africans.” Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana summoned Chinese diplomats to protest, and Nigeria organized evacuation flights from Guangzhou.
Mistreatment of black Americans has received a far more muted response. On April 13, the State Department sent Americans an advisory noting that the police had specifically ordered bars and restaurants not to serve people who appear to be of African origin and advising African-Americans to avoid Guangzhou. The U.S. government has not organized flights for Americans to leave China since the early days of the coronavirus outbreak; it instead offers to loan them the money for a commercial flight.
CGTN, a Chinese state-run broadcaster, estimated that of nearly 31,000 foreigners living in Guangzhou, the third-largest population comes from the United States, and that about 15 percent of the total number — 4,553 — come from African nations.
The State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus, referring to the People’s Republic of China, said, “The Department of State condemns racism in the strongest possible terms, and has raised the issue directly and at high levels with P.R.C. authorities.” The department declined to say what, if anything, Beijing did in response.
“African-Americans in Guangzhou are collateral damage of a policy implemented to target Africans, in which Chinese don’t check your visa, just the color of your skin,” said Yaqiu Wang, a China researcher at Human Rights Watch. “In a bigger context, the Chinese perceive Africans doing business in China as ripping off the state, not paying taxes and overstaying their visas.”
By waging a sweeping anticoronavirus campaign against dark-skinned people, she said, “they’re trying to get rid of them.”
Gordon Mathews, the chairman of the anthropology department at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and a co-author of “The World in Guangzhou: Africans and Other Foreigners in South China’s Global Marketplace,” was less forceful.
“There is racism in China,” he said, “but this is more likely to be panic over coronavirus than any long-term policy.”
Guangzhou officials at first denied any discrimination. Then amid an international outcry, they issued rules this month that prohibited unequal treatment. But enforcement is lax, say African-Americans in Guangzhou, and abuses persist.
“Prior to this, I was perfectly fine,” Mr. Remmington said. Now, he added, “as I come into a grocery store, people are literally running outside, fearing for their life.”
Last month, an African-American teacher in Guangzhou, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, was confined for 14 days to a locked hospital isolation room, despite repeatedly testing negative for the virus. After having “a mental breakdown,” she said, she pleaded with the U.S. Consulate in Guangzhou to intervene.
“It didn’t feel like they were fighting for us,” the teacher, who is 34, said in an interview. “We saw other countries’ governments talking to China and trying to resolve this, but not ours.
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Refusing to rent to people and denying service strictly on the basis of their race.
Sad to see in 2021.
I guess that's something else the Chinese have stolen from America.
Will the Chinese people start wearing white robes and pointy hats?
Lol!
The Chinese wear white for funerals.
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I don't think asking if a thing like this may be a judgement from God is going to produce any trustworthy answers. In the past, when God did such things, He sent prophets to make sure that people knew that what was about to happen was a judgement from Him. That said, this may or may not be God's judgement on China. If it is, it apparently isn't important that we know or I think He'd send someone to make sure we knew for certain. We do have various people, usually some pastor, who claims that X happened because the sins of Y but they are merely espousing their own opinions, which is entirely different from someone saying "This is what the LORD of Heaven's Armies says."
In other news...
I caught this article yesterday on the CP. What struck me about it most was that, to my mind, it shows pretty well what's worst about the CCP. Some think that the CCP is about raising their people out of poverty and making things better for them. That isn't what they are about. What they are about is the CCP and it's ideology. When thinking of the CCP and what it's all about, that's the sum total of it. The power and glory of the CCP. The raising of their people out of poverty is an aid to that, not for the benefit of the people. That's simply incidental.
This is why the CCP makes the boneheaded moves that it does pointed out in this article. If there's a perception in the CCP that doing the smart thing will in some way diminish, tarnish or expose as wrong some aspect of the CCP ideology, they will not do the smart thing. They will protect their idol at all costs. Hong Kong was moving along just fine, for instance, but it stood as a testament that the CCP was not responsible for its success nor could its ideology be glorified by its success. Further, while Hong Kong enjoyed what freedom it had, the CCP could not use Hong Kong to force international businesses to bend to its will like it could with companies that did business on the mainland.
One might think that, considering all the problems the CCP created for themselves concerning what the article pointed out about them, the CCP might learn some lessons but that's the entirely wrong way to think about the CCP's thinking on these issues. I don't think they consider the idea that they took missteps. I don't think they think there are lessons to learn. I think they are perfectly satisfied that what they wanted to achieve they achieved. The broken eggs along the way do not matter to them. They wanted Hong Kong fully under their control and they got it. That's the end of it for them.
That's how I see it.
As I see it, China is not a nation where around half the people are happy with their government and the other half are not at any one time, and it is a battle to get anything done. It is a nation where pretty well all the people are happy with their government, not having personal reasons to not be. And the fulfullment of long term beneficial planning is what happens. The growing middle class have reason to be happy, and so do those who have been pulled out of abject poverty. The wealthy are enjoying their life as usual. But how would I know how people here feel, cause I've only been living here for 15 years? And have you happened to even ever VISIT China in order to formulate your opinon of it?
As for Hong Kong, in a couple of decades or so it is going to be part of the mainland under the complete control of the mainland CCP, and trying to stop that from happening would be like trying to stop the Earth from revolving around the sun, so America can forget about trying to convert Hong Kong into its own idea of perfection.
And if you show unhappiness you get shot.
Thank you for your childish ignorant opinion - but I expected no less. After all, doesn't America have the highest rate of incarceration in the world, and still imposes the death sentence itself?
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Do you want to me to post pictures of the Chinese Army power washing the remains of the people it slaughtered into storm sewers? Will that help you remember what happens to people who are unhappy with their government in China?
merica have the highest rate of incarceration in the world,
Weren't you a lawyer? You should know better than to try and get away with such a dishonest, irrelevant deflection.
What's China's rate of detention Buzz? Of course, no one knows, since it's China. However, we have to start with the million held in the concentration camps because of their religion so we know the number is high. Do you think people just forget about those imprisoned in the camps? Why would you ever bring up incarceration in China given the concentration camps? Some of us actually take the never again slogan seriously and will happily point out the Nazi like treatment China inflicts on religious minorities.
Concentration camps aside, honest people understand it's not a crime to mock the President or any other politician here, nor is killing people for their political views like the CCP equivalent to the handful of executions in America for murdering their fellow citizens.
Yes, Sean, I was a lawyer, but I was far from being a mathematician, but even if the figures for China are not perfect, and even if you were to double them, they are nowhere near competing with the incarceration rate in the USA. So who's being dishonest?
"We lock up close to 2.4 million people in this country. We're locking up more people than China and Russia." (POLITIFACT)
Here you go....
I thought only America is a racist country.
We’re not only racist, we’re “systemically” racist.
And he was wondering why he was always open on the court.
Good one
Of course there is. It’s a sad truth - but it shouldn’t surprise us - that racism in various forms exists around the world. China, in particular has been marked by sinocentrism - a kind of Chinese supremacy - for thousands of years.
China will be sure to blame the US and Trump for this as well. Democrats to agree shortly thereafter.
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Exactly. Well stated!
How sad for that beautiful little girl having to witness so much ugliness at such a young age.
Yeah, I feel the same way about the little Asian girls in America who see their parents kicked in the head.
Can you ever not deflect to attacking America?
When Americans who have never been to China criticize it for the very things that Americans do, I have every right to point out the hypocrisy.
What an insane statement. Have you been to Iran? [deleted]
How was I being hypocritical?
Please note that my comment about hypocrisy was a reply to Sean, not to you.
Oh okay. Thank you.