Cross posted from: https://feddit.de/post/11208953
Even for Chinese people who live in Canada and the United States, where English is the main language, a mix of habits, cultural affinity, and other factors means that they continue to get most of their information from Chinese-language media, writes a Chinese in the U.S.
Chinese social media platforms are decrying the lawless state of American society non-stop. “Similar videos also turned up on the phones of my family members in China and they’d send them to me in WeChat groups or private messages,”
"I liked to chat on the phone with my family on the way back home from school, and my grandmother would urge me to get home as quickly as possible. In her imagination, nowhere is safe in New York after nightfall. When I talked to relatives on my way to work in the mornings, they warned me to be careful of Black people on the street, who, they cautioned, are “uneducated and savage.”
“In some videos, we also see violence meted out against Black people by US police, like the death by choking of George Floyd, which ignited the Black Lives Matter movement.”
In all of these cases, though, the time, location, and source of the clips are never cited. All of them seem to agree that the mere sight of a Black face on camera makes it self-evident that a crime is being committed.
“An elderly gentleman told me he doesn’t usually read the newspaper because ‘the characters are too small’ and he gets most of his information from WeChat posts and videos. He also doesn’t know how to find new WeChat accounts so he just reads whatever turns up in his groups. Most of the articles he showed me were exaggerated or misleading reports.”
"He told me he believes America is becoming more and more unsafe, and he deliberately avoids black people when he sees them on the streets. He said with absolute certainty that, since the Covid-19 pandemic, street crime has been skyrocketing nationwide. When I asked him where I got this information, he said, ‘This is what everyone thinks.’”
“Who is everyone?” I asked him.
“Everyone!” he said with absolute certainty.
While this is probably a much easier thing to achieve with people who are comfortable in languages other than English, a lot of media is doing an excellent job of this narrative in English as well.
Edit: I sure picked a great article to comment on from the porcelain throne while not even bothering to read the damn thing. The whole premise is on African Americans and lawlessness, that part is of course complete fabrication.
Um, do you think this part is true?
Of course not. The last comment was made based on the title and not the content, which focused completely on African-American crime. I will stand by the fact that the media perpetuates this in English too. If one event occurs, the media makes it appear as if it’s a widespread trend and overplay the frequency and severity of such events, while implying specific races are responsible. All of which is a blatant effort to maintain status quo. “The poor cause crime, the rich follow the rules”
As Norm MacDonald pointed out, Black people are poor, and poor people are dangerous. I don’t have a bunch of statistics to hand because I’m really not that kind of guy, but poverty in the face of extreme wealth more or less demands lawlessness.
Poor people that question their circumstances or don’t follow the rules are dangerous for rich people. America has systematically reduced the wealth of millions of African-Americans and rather than vilifying “reparations” everyone should be fighting for equality and justice. Of course the current trend is to subject anyone below a certain wealth threshold to ever-tighter conditions to keep them from ever gaining or building reasonable wealth.
Ugh, despicable.
Yeah, I had to make an edit after actually using my failing reading comprehension skills.