A Report on Human Rights Violations in the United States in 2022
Editor’s Note: The State Council Information Office issued a report on March 28 on human rights violations in the United States. The following is the first part of the text. More excerpts to follow next week.
Contents
Foreword
I. Dysfunctional Civil Rights Protection System
II. Hollowed-out American-style Electoral Democracy
III. Growing Racial Discrimination and Inequality
IV. Worsening Subsistence Crisis among US Underclass
V. Historic Retrogression in Women’s and Children’s Rights
VI. Wanton Violation of Other Countries’ Human Rights and Trampling on Justice
Foreword
The year 2022 witnessed a landmark setback for US human rights. In the United States, a country labeling itself as a “human rights defender”, “chronic diseases” such as money politics, racial discrimination, gun and police violence, and wealth polarization are rampant. Human rights legislation and justice have seen an extreme retrogression, further undermining the basic rights and freedoms of the American people.
The US government has greatly relaxed gun control, resulting in high death toll from gun violence. The US Supreme Court’s decision in the Bruen case in 2022 became a landmark regression in the field of gun control in the country. Nearly half of US states have relaxed gun restrictions. The US leads the world in gun ownership, gun homicide and mass shootings, with more than 80,000 people killed or injured by gun violence in 2022, the third consecutive year on record that the US experienced more than 600 mass shootings. Gun violence has become an “American disease”.
Midterm elections have become the most expensive ones in the US, and American-style democracy has lost its popular support. The cost of elections in the US has soared again, with cumulative spending of the 2022 midterm elections exceeding more than $16.7 billion. Political donations from billionaires accounted for 15 percent of the federal total, up from 11 percent in the 2020 election cycle. “Dark money” donations manipulate US elections furtively, and political polarization and social fragmentation make it difficult for the country to reach a democratic consensus. With 69 percent of Americans believing their democracy is at “risk of collapse” and 86 percent of American voters saying it faces “very serious threats”, there is a general public disillusionment of American-style democracy.
Racism is on the rise and ethnic minorities suffer widespread discrimination. Hate crimes based on racial bias in the US increased dramatically between 2020 and 2022. The racist massacre at a Buffalo supermarket, with 10 African-Americans killed, has shocked the world. A total of 81
percent of Asian Americans say violence against Asian communities is surging. African Americans are 2.78 times more likely to be killed by police than whites. The sufferings caused by genocide and cultural assimilation taken by the US government against Indians and other aborigines in history still persist today.
Life expectancy has plummeted, and deaths from drug abuse continue to climb. According to a report released in August 2022 by the National Center for Health Statistics under the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), average life expectancy in the US dropped by 2.7 years to 76.1 years from 2019 to 2021, the lowest since 1996. Interest groups and politicians trade power for money, allowing drug and substance abuse to flourish. The number of Americans dying from drug and substance abuse has increased dramatically in recent years, to more than 100,000 per year. Substance abuse has become one of America’s most devastating public health crises.
Women have lost constitutional protections for abortion, and children’s living environment is worrying. The US Supreme Court’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade has ended women’s right to abortion protected by the US Constitution for nearly 50 years, which lands a huge blow to women’s human rights and gender equality. In 2022, more than 5,800 children under the age of 18 got injured or killed by shooting in the US, and the number of school shootings amounted to 302, the highest since 1970. The child poverty rate in the US increased from 12.1 percent in December 2021 to 16.6 percent in May 2022, with 3.3 million more children
living in poverty. The US has seen a nearly 70 percent increase in child labor violations since 2018, and registered a 26 percent increase in minors employed in hazardous occupations in fiscal year 2022.
US abuse of force and unilateral sanctions has created humanitarian disasters. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the US has carried out military operations in 85 countries in the name of “anti-terrorism,” which directly claimed at least 929,000 civilian lives and displaced 38 million people. The US has imposed more unilateral sanctions than any other country in the world, and it still has sanctions in place against more than 20 countries, resulting in the inability of those targeted to provide basic food and medicine for their people. Immigration issue has become a tool of partisan fight, and immigration farces have been staged on a large scale, making immigrants face extreme xenophobia and cruel treatment. There were a record high of nearly 2.4 million migrant arrests at the nation’s border in 2022, and the death toll of immigrants at its southern border reached 856, the deadliest in a single year.
The US, founded on colonialism, racist slavery and inequality in labor, possession and distribution, has further fallen into a quagmire of system failure, governance deficits, racial divide and social unrest in recent years under the interaction of its polarized economic distribution pattern, racial conflict dominated social pattern and capital interest groups controlled political pattern.
American politicians, serving the interests of oligarchs, have gradually lost their subjective will and objective
ability to respond to the basic demands of ordinary people and defend the basic rights of ordinary citizens, and failed to solve their own structural problems of human rights. Instead, they wantonly use human rights as a weapon to attack other countries, creating confrontation, division and chaos in the international community, and have thus become a spoiler and obstructor of global human rights development.
I. Dysfunctional Civil Rights Protection System
The US is a country defined by extreme violence, where people are threatened by both violent crime and violent law enforcement, and their safety is far from being guaranteed. Prisons are overcrowded and have become a modern slavery establishment where forced labor and sexual exploitation are commonplace. America’s self-proclaimed civil rights and freedoms have become empty talk.
Collusion between politicians and businesses paralyzes the gun control agenda.
US gun interest groups have mounted powerful political lobbying for their own interests. In defiance of public opinion, the government has drastically relaxed gun controls, allowing guns to be carried in crowded public places such as hospitals, schools, bars and stadiums. On July 3, 2022, Bloomberg News reported that the US Supreme Court’s decision in the “Bruen case” on June 23 overturned half a century’s gun control legislation in New York and six other states. Residents of these states were allowed to make concealed carry, a landmark backward step in the field of gun control in the US. The New York Times reported on Oct 28, 2022, that a federal court in Texas ruled that a state law banning adults under 21 from carrying handguns was unconstitutional. Nearly half of US states have now relaxed gun restrictions. “The country has been moving as a whole, in the past two or three decades, very clearly and dramatically toward loosening gun-carrying laws,” said Ali Rowhani-Rahbar, a professor at the University of Washington. American scholar Pamela Haag’s book “The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture” points out that guns in the US are an industrial chain that “begins with production line and ends with the death of victims.” “The tragedy of gun violence in America has its roots in the secular gun trade.”
Gun violence rises in tandem with gun ownership.
A study published in the British Medical Journal suggests that the relaxation of gun control in the US has led to a simultaneous rise in gun ownership and mass shootings. With less than 5 percent of the world’s population, the US owns 46 percent of the world’s civilian guns. The US leads the world in gun ownership, gun homicide, and mass shootings. According to the Gun Violence Archive website, the number of mass shootings in the US has increased significantly in recent years. In 2022, gun violence killed 43,341 people, and injured 37,763 people, and 636 mass shootings occurred in the US, an average of two a day. America’s firearm homicide rate is eight times higher than Canada’s, 13 times higher than France’s, and 23 times higher than Australia’s. In an opinion piece published on June 25, 2022, The Australian newspaper said that the US “is a country all but defined by ultra-violence, in its media and on its streets.” Gun violence has become an “American disease”.
Major crimes such as murder and robbery continue to rise.
The USA Today reported on Sept 11, 2022, that in the first half of 2022, homicides in member cities of the Major Cities Chiefs Association increased by 50 percent and aggravated assaults were up by about 36 percent compared to the same period in 2019. The Wall Street Journal reported on Sept 6, 2022, that as of September that year, the homicide rate in New Orleans was up 141 percent, shootings up 100 percent, carjackings up 210 percent, and armed robberies up 25 percent, compared with the same period in 2019.
According to a Council On Criminal Justice report on July 28, 2022, in the first half of 2022, robberies rose 19 percent and larcenies rose 20 percent in major US cities. Fox News reported on July 7, 2022, that since June 2021, the overall crime in New York City increased by 31 percent, grand larceny by 41 percent, robberies by 36 percent, burglaries by nearly 34 percent, and felony assault victims increased by about 1,000 per quarter. According to a CNN report on June 8, 72 percent of Americans were dissatisfied with the country’s policies on reduc
ing or controlling crime, and more Americans said they worried a great or fair deal about crime and violence (80 percent) than at any point in well over a decade.
Police violence gets worse. In 2022, a record 1,239 people died as a result of police violence in the US, according to the website Mapping Police Violence. During the year, there were only 10 days when no police killing happened. Most police killings occur during routine law enforcement such as stop checks or when dealing with nonviolent crimes. Police are rarely accused of using excessive force. In police killings between 2013 and 2022, 98.1 percent of the officers involved were not charged with a crime. On June 27, police in Akron, Ohio, fatally shot Jayland Walker, an unarmed 25-year-old African American, more than 90 times. According to a preliminary medical report, Walker had more than 60 wounds on his body. This was the third police shooting in Akron between December 2021 and June 2022.
The life and health of prisoners are threatened.
The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and prison conditions are terrible. According to a report in the Guardian on Oct 1, nearly 500 people per 100,000 were incarcerated in the US, which is about five times that of Britain, six times that of Canada, and nine times that of Germany. According to an article published by The Fair Justice Initiative organization on April 25, 2022, inmates in Mississippi prisons were kept in dark cells without lights or clean water, and the room temperature was often extremely hot. The Chicago Sun-Times reported on Feb 19, 2022, that cells at the Joliet prison in Illinois were infested with rats, and rotten food and raw sewage overflowed into common areas. Prisoners’ lives are not guaranteed. According to a study published in October in Prison Legal News, a publication on inmates’ rights, a shortage of guards and inadequate infrastructure in Alabama’s prison system led to high rates of violence and deaths among inmates. There were 39 deaths in the first eight months of 2022, 30 of which were unnatural ones.
Prisons became places of modern slavery.
According to a report jointly released by the University of Chicago Law School and the American Civil Liberties Union on June 16 last year, the US incarcerates more than 1.2 million people in state and federal prisons, about 800,000 were engaged in forced labor, accounting for 65 percent of the total number of prisoners. Over 76 percent of the prisoners surveyed said they would be punished with solitary confinement, no mitigation and loss of family visitation rights if they refused to work. Incarcerated workers were forced to provide food service, laundry, and other operations but they have few rights and protections, said a report by the Prison Policy Initiative on March 14, 2022. Besides, incarcerated workers typically earn little to no pay at all, according to a research by American Civil Liberties Union on June 15. American prisons have become veritable modern-day slavery factories.
Religious intolerance intensif ies.
According to the Hate Crime Statistics for 2021 released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Dec 15, 2022, a total of 1,005 religious hate crimes were reported in the US
in 2021, of which 31.9 percent were anti-Semitic incidents, 21.3 percent were anti-Sikh incidents, and 9.5 percent were anti-Islamic incidents, 6.1 percent were anti-Catholic incidents and 6.5 percent were anti-Orthodox incidents. Intolerance of Islam in the US has intensified, and Muslims are severely discriminated against, said a report released by the Council on American-Islamic Relations in 2022. In 2021, the Council on AmericanIslamic Relations received 6,720 complaints, including 308 hate and bias incidents related complaints, an increase of 28 percent over 2020; 679 law enforcement and government overreach complaints, an increase of 35 percent over 2020; 1,298 incidents of discrimination in workplaces and public places, an increase of 13 percent over 2020. The Middle East Eye reported on Aug 23, 2022, that a study showed that Muslims are five times more likely to experience police harassment because of their religion compared to those of other faiths.
II. Hollowed-out Americanstyle Electoral Democracy
Political donations have made American elections a game for the rich, alienation of two-party politics has turned into polarized politics, and American democracy is losing its foundation in public support. Former US president Jimmy Carter once said political bribery has tainted the US political system. “It’s just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery being at the essence of getting the nominations for President, or to elect the President,” Carter said.
Money in elections has set a new record.
American elections are at the heart of its democracy, powered by money. Election costs have soared since donation limits were lifted in 2010 and again in 2014. According to an analysis published by OpenSecrets, the total cost of the 2022 state and federal midterm elections was nearly $17 billion, the most expensive election in history. Federal candidates and political committees spent $8.9 billion, while state candidates, party committees, and ballot measure committees spent $7.8 billion, both of which set all-time records. CNN
reported on Dec 8 that the five most expensive Senate races of 2022 have seen nearly $1.3 billion in spending across the primary and general elections. Leading the way is the Pennsylvania Senate race, where nearly $375 million have been spent on the race this cycle.
Political donations create an oligarchy.
US politics has been kidnapped by capital and there is a stable “money-return” relationship. “Of the people, by the people, for the people” has become “of the 1 percent, by the 1 percent, and for the 1 percent”, and as the slogan of the Occupy Wall Street movement says: “We are the 99 percent, but controlled by the 1 percent.” Helene Landemore, a political theorist at Yale University, wrote in an article published by the Foreign Policy magazine in December 2021 that American democracy lacks “people’s power,” and that only the very rich, a very small part of the population, can use their very high economic status to push for a set of policy priorities that serve themselves.
“American billionaires spent a whopping $880 million on the elections by the end of October, with the final total likely approaching an astronomical $1 billion. That’s a gamechanging amount of money that undoubtedly influenced the electoral outcomes we are now seeing,” Fortune magazine wrote on Dec 9, 2022, in a report titled “Billionaires had an extra $1 trillion to influence the midterm elections. Save American democracy by taxing extreme wealth.”
Billionaire wealth has been, as Americans for Tax Fairness Executive Director Frank Clemente put it, “drowning our democracy,” the magazine reported. Billionaires made up 15 percent of all federal political itemized donations from Jan 1, 2021, to Sept 30, 2022, up from 11 percent in the 2020 election cycle, Reuters reported on Nov 9, 2022, adding that Financier George Soros was the top individual donor, spending more than $128 million to support Democratic campaigns. With plutocrats using their money to control the outcome of elections, US elections are increasingly out of line with the nature of democracy.
Dark money donations secretly manipulate the direction of elections.
Dark money has been invisibly influencing US elections. The Brennan Center for Justice reported on Nov 16, 2022, that four party-aligned dark money groups pumped almost $300 million into this election cycle by giving to sister super political action committees (PACs) or buying cleverly worded ads. There are hundreds more politically active groups pouring secret money into the elections.
A billionaire secretly transferred $1.6 billion to a Republican political group, the largest known political advocacy donation in American history, according to a report titled “Billions in ‘dark money’ is influencing US politics” by the Guardian on Aug 29, 2022. In 2020 alone, more than 1-billion-dollar worth of dark money flooded around weak disclosure rules and into America’s elections. Heading into the 2022 election, the situation is getting worse. The two parties’ major Senate and House Super PACs are all being funded by anonymous dark money groups that are not required to disclose their donors. Dark money has secretly captured the US political parties and government, and the majority of voters have become tools of political games.
Multiple tactics and manipulation of election results.
Many Americans have completely abandoned the idea of equality, and it is often these people who reject the idea of equality who set the rules that others have to follow, said J. R. Pole in his book “The Pursuit of Equality in American History”. Laws restricting voters’ eligibility to vote are frequently introduced. According to the study published by the Brennan Center for Justice on May 26, 2022, 18 states passed 34 restrictive laws in 2021. For the 2022 legislative session, lawmakers in 39 states have considered at least 393 restrictive bills, which have disproportionately affected voters of color by setting up a series of voting obstacles. As many as 200,000 voters could be at risk of having their registrations canceled after Arizona enacted a law regulating the provision of documentary proof of citizenship for voter registration. On Aug 4, 2022, the Global Organization Against Hate and Extremism published a report titled “Americans’ Fears Suppressing Participation in Democracy,” which said that 40 percent of Black people and 37 percent of Hispanic people were very worried about being denied the ability to cast a ballot. Strict voting eligibility laws blocked nearly 16 percent of Mississippi’s Black votingage population from casting a ballot. Mississippi has one of the highest concentrations of Black people in the country, yet has not elected a Black person to statewide office in well over a century, The Guardian reported on its website in an article entitled “The racist 1890 law that’s still blocking thousands of Black Americans from voting”, on Jan 8, 2022. The National Urban League’s release of the “2022 State of Black America: Under Siege the Plot to Destroy Democracy” on April 12, 2022, showed that in 2021 alone, 20 states have leveraged census data to redraw congressional maps. These means of manipulating elections have deprived a large number of voters of their voting eligibility, leaving equal voting rights to exist on paper only.
American elections are accompanied by violence and intimidation. Its political history has not been short of violence and terror. Historically, groups such as the notorious Ku Klux Klan prevented African Americans from voting through violence such as beatings, lynchings, and assassinations, creating a sense of fear that continues to this day.
Voters may face intimidation at the polls and beyond from vigilante actors, the Brennan Center for Justice said in a report released on Oct 28, adding that in Arizona, right-wing extremist groups have recruited volunteers to monitor drop boxes, some of whom often showed up armed and in tactical gear.
The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism said in a report on Aug 4 that there is a growing sense of fear among Americans, with minorities particularly concerned about security at the polls and voters generally worried about safety at polling stations. Overall, 63 percent of those surveyed said they are “very worried” about such things as violence, harassment, and intimidation happening at their polling place. The psychological shadow of lynching and the atmosphere of fear became a great obstacle for voters to exercise their right to vote.
Two-party politics has become a polarized one.
Political polarization, especially the polarization of two-party politics, has been one of the most striking features of American politics in the past three decades. The widening ideological divide and opposition between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party have expanded the tear in American society and led to the idling of American politics.
Around 28 percent of Americans named “political extremism or polarization” as one of the most important issues facing the country, according to a survey by the US poll tracker FiveThirtyEight on June 14, adding that 64 percent said they felt political polarization is mostly driven by political and social elites.
According to a report by NBC NEWS on Oct 23, 81 percent of Democrats said they believe the Republican Party’s agenda poses a threat that, if it is not stopped, will destroy Amer
ica, while 79 percent of Republicans believe the same of the Democratic Party’s agenda. Seventy-one percent of voters said the country is headed in the wrong direction. “It seems like voters are no longer looking for a ‘Contract with America.’ They want a divorce,” said Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research Associates.
Political polarization and social rifts have made it difficult to reach a democratic consensus, and election farce and post-election chaos have become prominent features of US politics. The polarization of party contention and vicious rivalry has led to the collapse of political trust and brought serious governance crisis to the US, wrote Marc J. Hetherington, professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University, and Thomas J. Rudolph, professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois, in their book, titled “Why Washington Won’t Work: Polarization, Political Trust, and the Governing Crisis.”
Government officials take advantage of their positions for personal gain. High-level politicians can in advance get access to a lot of sensitive information that could allow them to make profits. The reported net assets of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, along with her husband Paul Pelosi, are worth more than $114 million, and a majority of their wealth is derived from investments such as stocks and options, The Hill said in an opinion piece on July 24. In March 2021, Paul exercised options to purchase 25,000 Microsoft shares worth more than $5 million. Less than two weeks later, the US Army disclosed a $21.9 billion deal with Microsoft. Shares of the company rose sharply after the deal was announced. In June 2022, Paul bought up to $5 million in stock options from Nvidia, a leading semiconductor company. The purchase came as Congress was set to vote on legislation that would result in $52 billion in subsidies allocated to elevate the chip-production industry. During Pelosi’s term as the house speaker, the Pelosis have made approximately $30 million from trades involving big tech companies the former House speaker was responsible for regulating. Of the 435 House members, 183 traded stocks through themselves or their immediate family members from 2019 to 2021, Daily Mail said in an opinion piece on Sept 13, 2022. It added that at least 97 bought or sold stocks, bonds, or other financial assets through themselves or their spouses that directly intersected with their congressional work. A Wall Street Journal investigative report on Oct 11 revealed that more than 2,600 officials at agencies from the Commerce Department to the Treasury Department disclosed stock investments in companies while those same companies were lobbying their agencies for favorable policies. In what came to be known as the kids-for-cash scandal, former Pennsylvania judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan shut down a county-run juvenile detention center and accepted $2.8 million in illegal payments from two for-profit lockups, the Associated Press reported on Aug 18. Ciavarella pushed a zero-tolerance policy that guaranteed large numbers of kids would be sent to the facilities, the report added. Many top US politicians were making empty promises to voters while profiting financially from their positions.
Public confidence in American democracy continues to decline.
American scholars Thomas R. Dye, Harmon Zeigler and Louis Schubert pointed out in their book “The Irony of Democracy: An Uncommon Introduction to American Politics” that few Americans today still believe that government is run for the benefit of the people. Most see the political system as run by a few big interests for their own benefit, leaving the average person forgotten behind, the book added. Sixty-seven percent of Americans think the nation’s democracy is in danger of collapse, said a poll by The Quinnipiac University Poll on Aug 31. AP said in a report on Oct 19 that there is a general despair over democracy in America which comes after decades of increasing polarization nationwide. Just 9 percent of US adults think democracy is working “extremely” or “very well,” while 52 percent say it is not working well, it added. PR Newswire reported on Nov 4 that a nonpartisan More Perfect poll before the midterm election showed that 86 percent of voters said the US democracy faces very serious threats. Seventy-two percent of American voters rated the health of American democracy as poor; 64 percent said there is too much money in politics; 61 percent believed US politics is corrupt; and 58 percent thought there is too much-biased information and misinformation in American democracy. According to a survey by NBC News on Nov 9, 72 percent of Democratic voters, 68 percent of Republican voters and 70 percent of independents agreed that democracy was threatened. Public confidence in American democracy continues to decline, reflecting that American democracy is losing popular support.
III. Growing Racial Discrimination and Inequality
The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination said in the Concluding observations on the combined tenth to twelfth reports of the United States of America released on Sept 21 that the lingering legacies of colonialism and slavery continue to fuel racism and racial discrimination around the country.
In recent years, hate crimes and hate speech incidents in the US have increased significantly, the number of race-related gun injuries and deaths has jumped substantially, and people of color and ethnic minorities continue to face systematic discrimination in medical care, education, housing and other fields, the agency said.
Racial discrimination is widespread.
Racial inferiority and superiority complexes are deeply embedded in US systems and have become “inextricable.” Interviews with more than 3,000 African Americans showed that 82 percent of them considered racism a major problem for African descendants in the US, while 79 percent reported having experienced discrimination because of their race or ethnicity, and 68 percent said racial discrimination is the main reason why many Black people cannot get ahead, CNN reported on Aug 30. According to a survey published by the Ipsos group on March 29, 2022, 65 percent of the Latino Americans surveyed reported having experienced racist comments in the past year. According to a report released by the US National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum on March 30, 2022, 74 percent of Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander women reported experiencing racism and/or discrimination over the previous 12 months, with 53 percent reporting the perpetrator was a stranger and 47 percent reporting that the incidents took place in public places such as restaurants and shopping centers.
Racial hate crimes remain high.
Fifteen major US cities saw a doubledigit growth in hate crimes between 2020 and 2021, and an increase of about 5 percent in bias-motivated incidents till August 2022, according to a study by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. In an article titled “Hate crime reports surge” published on Oct 21, 2022, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that as of Oct 18 that year, the Chicago Police Department had received reports of 120 hate crimes. On May 14, Payton Gendron, a 19-year-old White gunman, killed 10 African Americans and wounded three others in a racist massacre at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. The killer also videotaped the attack for live streaming. According to a report published in February 2023 by the Anti-Defamation League based in the US, the number of US mass killings spiked over the past decade, and all extremist killings identified in 2022 were linked to right-wing extremism, with an especially high number linked to white supremacy. “It is not an exaggeration to say that we live in an age of extremist mass killings.”
Rampant hate crimes against Asian Americans.
A report issued by the non-profit organization Stop AAPI Hate shows that it received reports of nearly 11,500 hate incidents between March 19, 2020, and March 31, 2022. An online poll by the research firm AAPI Data found that one in six Asian Americans nationwide experienced race-based violence in 2021, the Los Angeles Times reported on March 22, 2022. The New York Times reported on March 14, 2022 that a 28-year-old man was charged with hate crimes in connection with a twohour spree of attacks on seven women of Asian descent in Manhattan, and four Asian New Yorkers had died in recent months after being attacked. CNN reported on Nov 30 that in Yonkers, a man punched an elderly Asian woman more than 100 times, hurled racist abuse at her, stomped on her body repeatedly and spat on her. The Houston Public Media reported on Aug 22 multiple attacks on people of Asian descent in San Francisco. One of the victims, Amy Li, said that she still sees the offender in her neighborhood almost every day. “I’ve reported this case to the police and haven’t heard anything ... Every day my son and I live in fear.”
Fifty-seven percent of Asian Americans said they often or sometimes felt unsafe in public places because of their race or ethnicity, 81 percent of the group agreed that violence against the Asian American community was on the rise, and 73 percent said violence posed more of a threat now than it did before the pandemic, according to a report published on the medical magazine Health Affairs on April 12, 2022. According to the testimony of Erika Lee, Regents Professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of Minnesota, at a US congressional hearing on discrimination and violence against AsianAmericans, “As shocking as these incidents are, it is vital to understand that they are not random acts perpetrated by deranged individuals. They are an expression of our country’s long history of systemic racism and racial violence targeting Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.”
Entrenched racial discrimination in law enforcement and justice. A concluding report of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination revealed that it still widely persists in the US that law enforcement officials use excessive violence against people of color and minority groups and get impunity. Statistics from the Mapping Police Violence website show that in police killings between 2013 and 2022, Black Americans were 2.78 times more likely to be killed by police than white people, and unarmed Black Americans were 1.3 times more likely to be killed by police than whites. In Boston, Minneapolis and Chicago, Blacks are over 20 times more likely than whites to be killed by police. Citing a report from the National Registry of Exonerations, National Public Radio reported on Sept 27 that Black people represent under 14 percent of the US population, but they account for 53 percent of those who were falsely convicted of a serious crime and then freed after serving at least part of their sentence. Black Americans are about seven times more likely than white people to be wrongfully convicted of three major crimes, and Black people were 19 times more likely to be wrongfully convicted of drug crimes, it added. The criminal justice system permeated with racism “is increasingly serving as a major gateway to a much larger system of stigmatization and long-term marginalization,” noted the book published by the National Academies Press, “The growth of incarceration in the United States: Exploring causes and consequences”.
Widening racial wealth gap.
Workers of color have long been forced to do literally “dirty laundry” due to the racist barriers they face in employment. CNN reported on Aug 30 that two-thirds of Black Americans said that the recent increased focus on race and racial inequality in the US had not led to changes that are improving the lives of Black people. A recent long-term study, co-released by researchers from Princeton University and University of Bonn, found that the racial wealth gap is the largest of the economic disparities between Black and white Americans, with a white-to-Black per capita wealth ratio of 6 to 1. The racial wealth convergence between Blacks and whites after the abolition of slavery followed an even slower path and then had stalled by the 1950s. Since the 1980s, the wealth gap has widened again as capital gains have predominantly benefited white households. In 2021, 19.5 percent of Black people living in the US were living below the poverty line, compared to 8.2 percent of white people, Statista Research Department said in a report on Sept 30, 2022. More than half of Black and Latino households and over two-thirds of Native American ones reported the recent price increases driven by inflation had caused them serious financial problems, according to a national poll jointly released by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health on Aug 8. The impact of inflation on Black Americans is “extremely devastating,” said Professor William Darity Jr. at Duke University. “People will have to make very, very hard decisions about whether or not to purchase medicines or buy food or forgo payment of their utilities.”
Discrimination in housing policies.
The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination said in its concluding observations that there is a high degree of residential racial segregation, persistent policy and legal discrimination in access to housing on the grounds of race, color and national or ethnic origin. The gap between white and Black homeownership rates in the US is at its widest in 120 years, according to a BBC report on July 10, 2022. Some 19.4 percent of Black applicants were denied a mortgage in 2021, compared with 10.8 percent of white applicants, according to the property firm Zillow. For many Black homeowners, interest rates are already often higher than their white counterparts regardless of income, The Hill quoted a 2021 Harvard University study as saying on Aug 28, 2022. Just 45.3 percent of Black households and 48.3 percent of Hispanic households owned their homes during the second quarter of 2022, compared to 74.6 percent of white households, it added.
Severe racial inequality in health services.
The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination said in its concluding observations that racial and ethnic minorities are disproportionately affected by higher rates of maternal mortality and morbidity. Ethnic and racial disparities in maternal mortality rate increased significantly. The rate rose markedly for non-Hispanic Black women in 2020, 2.9 times as non-Hispanic white women, according to a report published by National Center for Health Statistics on Feb 23, 2022. Study showed racial and ethnic disparities persist in outpatient COVID-19 treatment among Black, Hispanic and Native American patients, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report published on Oct 28. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused disproportionate impact on racial and ethnic minority groups, it said. Inequitable health services affect minority patients’ right to life. Hispanic populations in California lost 5.7 years of life expectancy between 2019 and 2021. Black populations lost 3.8 years, and Asian populations lost 3 years, while white populations lost 1.9 years, according to a study by Princeton School of Public and International Affairs published on July 7, 2022.
American Indians have not seen their misery alleviated.
“The first root of America was the colonial genocide of its indigenous peoples. This root remains a fundamental pillar of American society and permeates American culture.” The US Department of Interior released the first part of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative on May 11, 2022. It admits past efforts by the federal government to assimilate Native American children into white American society by separating them from their families and stripping them of their languages and cultures.
The review notes that from 1819 to 1969, there were 408 federal schools in 37 states. Children and teenagers at these schools were subject to systematic militarized and identity-alteration methodologies by the federal government, including getting English names, haircuts, and being banned
from using their native languages and exercising their religions. The initial investigation found that 19 boarding schools accounted for the deaths of more than 500 American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children. The number of recorded deaths is expected to increase to tens of thousands as the investigation gets underway.
It was a genocide, said Marsha Small, a northern Cheyenne researcher.
Donald Neconie, a Native American tribal elder who was once student at a government-backed Indian boarding school, testified about the hardships he endured, including beatings, whippings, sexual assaults, forced haircuts and painful nicknames.
Neconie recalled being beaten if he spoke his native Kiowa language, “Every time I tried to talk Kiowa, they put lye in my mouth. It was 12 years of hell,” he said. “I will never, ever forgive this school for what they did to me.”
Misery that American Indians endured historically persists through today. Minority households reported the price increases driven by inflation had caused them “serious financial problems.” It’s even higher among
Native Americans, with that number rising to more than two-thirds of those surveyed, according to an NPR report on Aug 8.
A US CDC report analyzed maternal deaths for American Indian and Alaska Native people who are more than twice as likely as white mothers to die of pregnancy-related causes but often undercounted in health data due to misclassification, according to a report released by USA Today on Sept 19, 2022. More than 90 percent of indigenous mothers’ deaths were preventable, according to the analysis. “In both African American and Native Americans, we see this historic and unfortunate, constant disparity in outcomes,” said Dr Andrea Jackson, division chief of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California, San Francisco.