Ten years ago, in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, a white supremacist opened fire on an American Sikh congregation, murdering six people and injuring many more before taking his own life. The eighth individual, Baba Punjab Singh, was partly paralyzed and subsequently passed away from his injuries.
It was one of the bloodiest mass shootings in a house of worship at the time since the KKK bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963. Additionally, it was the worst attack on the American Sikh community since they first immigrated to the US more than a century ago.
Journalists covering the atrocity had no background knowledge of the Sikh people. One anchor referred to the gurdwara as a mosque and the victims as Muslims. The gurdwara was reported as a Hindu temple by another journalist. A third used the name “sheikhs” rather than “Sikhs” to refer to the Sikh religion as a branch of Islam.
According to academics and government officials, there are about 500,000 Sikhs living in America. They have frequently been the focus of discrimination due to cultural ignorance.
Most of the Sikh population was headquartered in Punjab, which was taken over by British conquerors in 1849, and Sikhs started moving to other areas under the jurisdiction of the British Empire.
During the 1890s, the first Sikh community arrived in the US via the West Coast. As soon as they arrived, prejudice started to affect them. For instance Bellingham, Washington had the nation’s first racial riot in 1907 that was directed toward Sikhs. Sikh laborers were picked up by angry white mobs, assaulted, and driven out of town.
After 9/11, the number of racist attacks increased again, in part because Americans were unaware of the Sikh religion and confused the distinctive Sikh appearance with common perceptions of what terrorists look like.
After President Donald Trump’s victory in the election, the rate of violence against Sikhs increased. In 2018, the Sikh Coalition reported that around once every week in the United States, Sikhs were the subject of hate crimes.
Increased engagement with politics on social media predicts future decreases in racial resentment among liberals in the United States, according to new research published in Computers in Human Behavior. But this doesn’t appear to be the case for conservatives or independents.
“What drew my interest to this topic was the public opinion data and individual stories telling us that an increasing number of White Americans perceive that they are facing discrimination for being White, also called reverse racism,” study author Ian Hawkins, a visiting assistant professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
“This perception seems to conflict with what is actually occurring as extensive research tells us that minority groups still face the most discrimination. But regardless of whether increased reverse racism is occurring or not, perception is key and can be a motivating factor for some White Americans. I wanted to further understand what influences and possibly contributes to this idea of reverse racism.”
For their new study, Hawkins and his colleagues analyzed longitudinal data from 621 White participants, who completed online surveys in August 2016, October/November 2016, and November/December 2016. The participants completed questionnaires regarding their engagement with politics on social media, the strength of white identity, political identity, racial resentment, and perceptions of reverse racism.
The researchers found that increased engagement with politics on social media was indirectly linked to decreased perceptions of reverse racism via lower racial resentment.
That is, participants who reported greater engagement with politics on social media were less likely to agree with statements such as “It’s really a matter of some people just not trying hard enough; if Blacks would only try harder, they could just be as well off as Whites.” Lower racial resentment, in turn, was associated with decreased perceptions of reverse racism (e.g. “These days non-Whites benefit from preferential treatment that puts Whites at a disadvantage.”
However, the negative relationship between social media engagement and racial resentment was only observed among political liberals — not conservatives or independents.
“Beliefs like reverse racism are harmful and increasingly becoming more widely held and mainstream,” Hawkins added. “These attitudes do not operate in a vacuum as they likely have implications for policies or political candidates that individuals support or their willingness to participate in collective action. Because of this, we need continued information on what is motivating reverse racism and what role social media and identity play.”
Elon Musk-run Tesla has been hit by another gender discrimination lawsuit after dozens of current and former employees alleged the electric car giant operates under a ‘pre-Civil Rights’ atmosphere of racial discrimination as a standard operating practice.
The mass-action lawsuit, filed in Alameda Superior Court in California in the US, alleged the plaintiffs were subjected to racially motivated harassment and intimidation in Tesla factories which were transformed into racially hostile work environments.
The lawsuit names tech giant Tesla, as well as managers and supervisors who allegedly perpetuated constant racism and racial discrimination at Tesla.
“It’s hard to imagine a workplace culture that these hard-working people had to endure day after day, having to live through racist comments and abusive behaviour,” said attorney Mike Arias.
The alleged racial abuse and harassment include African American and Hispanic employees being subjected to offensive racist comments and behaviour by colleagues, managers, supervisors, and even HR employees on a regular basis.
The complaint included allegations of offensive and derogatory behaviour and language that people of colour were forced to endure while working for Tesla.
Earlier this year, California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) filed a lawsuit against Tesla, claiming that its Fremont factory is a “racially segregated environment where Black workers are subjected to racial slurs and discriminated against”.
Tesla is also under investigation by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).
Last year, a Black employee was awarded a reduced payout of $15 million in a case against Tesla for not doing enough to prevent racial discrimination.
The fresh lawsuit comes as Tesla saw about an 18 per cent drop in EV deliveries in the second quarter (Q2) this year amid supply chain woes and China lockdowns.
This is the first time in two years that Tesla deliveries have fallen quarter over quarter.
A race discrimination lawsuit has been filed against Detroit Club, one of Detroit’s oldest private social clubs, which proclaims on its website: “You’ll feel at home whether you are a tenured member or a first-time visitor.”
Not exactly, counters a former front desk clerk who is suing the 130-year-old Detroit Club in federal court, alleging management mistreats Black guests, enforces its dress code differently between white and Black patrons and in one case used the term “street rats.”
Similar allegations have been made on Google reviews in recent months, with multiple reviewers alleging they’ve encountered racism at the Detroit Club, which is now embroiled in a bitter legal feud with an employee who says she saw too much.
In a lawsuit filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court, former desk clerk Maria Victoria Ferrer is taking on the iconic downtown club that has entertained presidents, celebrities and dignitaries for decades at the corner of Fort and Cass avenues.
In her lawsuit, Ferrer, who is Latina, alleges that she was “abruptly” fired from the Detroit Club in April after voicing her concerns about racist behavior at work. According to the lawsuit, Ferrer was brushed off by management and questioned for being “too sensitive about racial discrimination.”
On April 9, bartender Charles Lisee complained to his boss that nonwhite guests were being “verbally” mistreated when they entered the club, but that nothing was done.
Ferrer is being represented by attorney Jack Schulz, who filed a similar discrimination lawsuit in 2018 against Founders Brewing on behalf of Tracy Evans, a fired events and promotions manager at Founders’ Detroit taproom who alleged that Founders tolerated a “racist internal corporate culture” and that he was fired in retaliation for his complaints about racism. Founders settled the lawsuit in 2019 for a confidential amount.
Schulz said he hopes the Detroit Club owns up to its alleged actions.
The lawsuit seeks an unspecified amount of punitive and compensatory damages. It names three defendants: the Detroit Club, Lynn Uralli, and Suzette Day, Ferrer’s supervisor.
A journeyman laborer who worked on Microsoft’s major Redmond, Wash., campus modernization project is suing the tech company as well as contractors Skanska and Balfour Beatty Construction over alleged racial discrimination he says took place on the job.
Quinte Harris was hired to work on the project through a Skanska-Balfour Beatty joint venture starting in the spring of 2021, according to a complaint filed on April 25 in Western Washington U.S. District Court. Within a month of joining the job, Harris, who is African-American, “became aware of racial discrimination and hostility from certain white construction operatives.”
The first incident involved another worker who, without invitation, approached Harris and said that he did not like the Black Lives Matter movement, or Black people in general, especially if they were from the South, the complaint states. The worker added that he was not the only white man on the job who felt that way and that Harris or any other African-American worker who complained about racial discrimination would find their employment in jeopardy.
Harris was “horrified and angered,” and also puzzled because he had not been discussing Black Lives Matter or anything related to racial politics. The “confrontation was based solely on Mr. Harris’s skin color and was intended solely to make Mr. Harris feel threatened, off-kilter, and unwelcomed,” his complaint states.
The court issued summonses to the three companies on June 22 ordering them to respond within 21 days. A spokesperson for the Skanska-Balfour Beatty joint venture said in a statement that it is aware of the lawsuit, but it does “not believe there is any factual basis for the claims.”
Meanwhile, work continues on Microsoft’s 72-acre campus modernization. The project includes the demolition of 12 buildings, construction of 18 buildings totaling 2.5 million sq ft, and renovation of another 6.7 million sq ft, plus the construction of a 2-acre plaza. Microsoft expects to begin taking occupancy of the new buildings late this year or in early 2023.
A video of two unidentified, elderly white women berating a Burger King employee for speaking Spanish began circulating online on Sunday.
In the video, two women having a meal at a Burger King restaurant are heard saying, “You’re in America. You should speak American English”. When the employee says, “No ma’am, I don’t”, one of the women replies, “Yeah, yeah, go back to Mexico if you want to keep speaking Spanish. Go back to your Mexican country, your state, your country”.
This prompts the employee, identified as Ricardo Castillo, to ask them to leave the restaurant. “Guess what ma’am, I’m not Mexican, but you’re being very prejudiced, and I want you out of my restaurant, right now,” Castillo, who was the general manager of the restaurant, can be heard saying.
The restaurant manager says ‘I’m not Mexican. I want you out of my restaurant, right now.’
The video from the fast-food outlet in Eustis, a city in Florida, was recorded by another customer who was dining there.
The argument between the women and Castillo started reportedly when they complained to Castillo after they heard one of the employees in the restaurant speaking Spanish.
While the video was shot in 2019, it was posted on Twitter by a popular account that goes by the name @Imposter_Edits, after which it again went viral.
Anti-Mexican sentiment is an attitude toward people of Mexican descent, Mexican culture, and/or Mexican Spanish and is mostly found in the United States.
Its origins in the United States date back to the Mexican and American Wars of Independence and the struggle over the disputed Southwestern territories. That eventually would lead to the Mexican American War in which the defeat of Mexico caused a great loss of territory. In the 20th century, anti-Mexican sentiment continued to grow after the Zimmermann Telegram, an incident between the Mexican government and the German Empire during World War I.
A U.S. Senate candidate in Arizona who has been endorsed by Donald Trump blamed “Black people” for gang warfare and gun violence.
Discussing the “gun violence problem” on a talk show two months ago, Senate candidate Blake Masters said: “It’s gangs. It’s people in Chicago, St. Louis shooting each other. Very often, you know, Black people, frankly. And the Democrats don’t want to do anything about that.”
Masters, a venture capitalist who has major financial backing from tech billionaire Peter Thiel, is seeking the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate in the Arizona primary on Aug. 2.
In a statement, Masters stood by his comments and criticized “the media backlash” accusing him of racism.
“Journalists only cover shootings where the shooters and victims fit a certain profile,” Masters said. “But most victims of gun murder in America are black men. And most perpetrators of gun murder in America are black men. These are simple facts, go look up the FBI crime statistics and CDC cause of death data while you still can.”
Masters said: “There’s an epidemic of violence that’s killing young black men in America,” and “I actually want to solve it.”
Masters also backs Trump’s false claims about voter fraud during the 2020 presidential election in which President Joe Biden carried the state of Arizona.
Masters has also been videotaped aggressively shoving a man wearing a Black Lives Matter shirt who attended one of his campaign events.
The things that would help curb gun violence — broadening health care access, curbing gun access and funding social programs — are literally tenets of the Democratic agenda that Republicans vehemently oppose. If Blake Masters is looking to blame someone for gun violence, he should start with the old, white guys running the GOP before opening his mouth to slander Black people.
The 2020 U.S. Census largely undercounted Black, Latino and Native American communities, raising skepticism about the accuracy of its data. Even if the census had counted more accurately, it faces a more fundamental problem: Its race and ethnicity measurements overlook Afro-Latinos.
The 2020 Census faced many obstacles: the pandemic, natural disasters, labor shortages, President Donald Trump’s racist rhetoric against Black and Latino immigrants, and his attempt to add a citizenship question. Many were thus reassured when the Census Bureau announced its first Latino and non-White director, Robert Santos.
However, even if the census improves enumeration, it still makes some identities invisible. The questions that it asks about race and ethnicity exclude Afro-Latinos — Black people with Latin American ancestry — from representation.
Afro-Latino identity has been complicated by transnational anti-Blackness and the particular history of race in the Latin American diaspora.
For centuries, Latin American political elites emphasized narratives of national sameness, playing down racial differences, even while their Black and Indigenous communities were regularly disenfranchised. American racism is largely based on physical differences, while racism in Latino communities erases and denies different racial groups’ diverse experiences. These inequities persist among U.S. Latinos.
Many Latinos are proud of their complex racial background, seeing themselves as having a beautiful mixture of Spanish, Indigenous and Black African cultures. Thus, Latinos tend to embrace cultural affinities to Africa, even as their physical appearances range the full spectrum of color. Survey research misses this complexity. For instance, it is hardly surprising that in a survey that asked Latino respondents whether they identified as “Afro-Latino,” most identified their race as only White.
Nationally representative samples of Latinos contribute to Afro-Latino erasure by favoring the densely populated Western region over the north and southeast coasts, where Afro-Latino enclaves predominate. This adds greater weight to non-Black Latinos and disregards the hardships specific to Afro-Latinos.
Though surveys treat Black Latinos as Latinos, U.S. society and institutions treat them as Black based on their appearance. Afro-Latinos’ looks can determine whether they are seen as professionals or as dangerous, as citizens to be protected or threats to be detained. As such, Black Latinos experience higher rates of discrimination than non-Black Latinos.
Conservative legal scholar Ilya Shapiro has been cleared to join the Georgetown Law faculty, four months after he was placed on administrative leave following a series of controversial tweets that suggested President Joe Biden’s commitment to nominate a Black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court would result in a “lesser nominee.”
Law dean William Treanor wrote in a Thursday message to the law school that university investigators concluded Shapiro is not subject to discipline because the tweets in question were published a week before he was set to begin his employment as leader of the school’s Center for the Constitution.
Shapiro can now take up the post as originally planned and serve as a senior lecturer, Treanor wrote. Still, investigators determined the tweets “had a significant negative impact on the Georgetown Law community,” he said.
Hundreds of Georgetown law students and alumni called on the school to rescind Shapiro’s job offer after his Jan. 31 tweets questioning the use of race in Supreme Court vetting, calling them “racist rhetoric.”
Shapiro deleted the tweets in question and later described them as “inartful.” But he maintained that he did not violate any university rules or policies. The incident drew national attention amid a series of free speech debates that have roiled law school and university campuses.
Shapiro said in a statement Thursday that he is “gratified” to be able to take the job for which he was hired, adding, “all students and participants in my programs can expect to be accorded the freedom to think and speak freely and to be treated equally.”
In one of his tweets, Shapiro wrote that his own favored candidate to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer “doesn’t fit into latest intersectional hierarchy so we’ll get (a) lesser black woman.” In another, he said Biden’s pledge to pick a Black woman meant the nominee would have an “asterisk attached.”
Several public-school teachers in Rochester, New York were put on leave after exchanging racist texts messages that made “racist and demeaning” references to students, officials said Friday.
The Democrat and Chronicle reported the teachers worked at Enrico Fermi School 17, which has a large percentage of Black and Hispanic students in pre-kindergarten through eighth grade.
“I am horrified at the racist and demeaning references and language used to describe children … our children! The staff members have been put on leave and the District will use all forms of available discipline up to and including termination,” Rochester City School District Superintendent Lesli Myers-Small said in a prepared statement.
Students discovered a series of texts, including one containing an obscenity that wished one girl would beat another up. Another obscene text suggested an automated call that insulted children and their parents, according to the newspaper.
The discovery comes weeks after Rochester school officials said they were investigating allegations that a white teacher told his seventh-grade class of mostly Black students to pick seeds out of cotton and put on handcuffs during lessons on slavery.
Students who spoke with News 8 said the 7th-grade social studies teacher brought bags of cotton to school, and made students pick out seeds. They said on another occasion, the teacher brought in shackles and handcuffs to use on the students during a lesson.
“He said, ‘It’s cotton, you’re going to be picking cotton today,’ so I immediately was like, ‘Oh, I’m not doing that,’” said student Janasia Brown. “And then he was like, ‘Do it. It’s for a good grade.’”
Students said the teacher favored the white students in class. They said during the cotton-picking incident – students in the class got up to throw out their cotton, refusing to participate, but only the white students were allowed to do so.
Rochester Teachers Association President Adam Urbanski said he did not know how many teachers had been accused in this latest episode.
“I want to make it clear that we strongly believe that everyone, and especially our students, are entitled to be treated with dignity and respect,” he said. “We are also committed to fairness and due process and the investigation is still ongoing.”