Media Storm - S1E2 Pandemic of hate: We need to talk about anti-Asian abuse - with Zing Tsjeng and Hussein Kesvani

Episode Date: December 2, 2021

Media Storm presented by Mathilda Mallinson and Helena Wadia Episode 1.2 Pandemic of hate: We need to talk about anti-Asian abuse - with Zing Tsjeng and Hussein Kesvani Transcript: https://mediastormpodcast.com/2021/12/13/1-2-pandemic-of-hate-we-need-to-talk-about-anti-asian-abuse/ With reports anti-Asian hate speech surged by 1,662% during the pandemic, and many accounts of rising hate crimes against Asian communities, Media Storm hears from those personally affected. It seeks to find out the impact of the pandemic on Asian people, and investigate the accuracy of the data that emerged over the Covid-19 crisis. Vice UK editor Zing Tsjeng and podcaster & producer Hussein Kesvani join us in the studio to discuss the way the mainstream media reported on the pandemic and the 2021 Atlanta Spa shootings, East & South Asian representation on screen, and the latest coverage of cricketer Azeem Rafiq's accusations of racism and bullying at Yorkshire.  https://www.ditchthelabel.org/research-papers/hate-speech-report-2021/  https://stopaapihate.org/national-report-through-september-2021/ Get in touch Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/mediastormpod or Instagram https://www.instagram.com/mediastormpod or Tiktok https://www.tiktok.com/@mediastormpod like us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/MediaStormPod send us an email [e-mail] check out our website https://mediastormpodcast.com Media Storm is part of The House of the Guilty Feminist Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/media-storm. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Hulu original series Murdoch Death and the Family dives into secrets, deception, murder, and the fall of a powerful dynasty. Inspired by shocking actual events and drawing from the hit podcast, this series brings the drama to the screen like never before. Starring Academy Award winner Patricia Arquette and Jason Clark. Watch the Hulu original series Murdoch Death in the Family, streaming October 15th on Disney Plus. Did you know that in the UK, anti-Asian hate speech increased by 1,662% in 2020 compared to 2019? 1,662%. I misread it in the brief you sent me.

I thought it was 162% and I was shocked by that. So that stat came from the youth charity ditch the label and the study that they carried out found that many of the racist slurs now levied at Asian people both online and in person didn't actually exist two years ago prior to the COVID pandemic. So there's a whole new vocabulary that's developed as a result there. I did see some coverage of the abuse that East Asian people in particular were receiving at the height of the pandemic. But, and I'm sure we'll talk about this plenty later, there also seemed to be a fair amount of coverage that actively exacerbated that abuse. Definitely. And there were so many

shocking statistics that came out. But I also think that the rise in anti-Asian sentiment in the UK or indeed the US or any other countries in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, that didn't happen in a historical vacuum. Maybe people just weren't really listening before. The anti-agent sentiment we're seeing is worse now, for sure, but it has never been non-existent. I know I've lived my life as a South Asian women here in the UK relatively free from major discrimination, save from maybe some taunting at school or some choice comments in the workplace or men on Twitter telling me to go home whenever I speak about racism. But I do remember immediately after the Brexit vote was the first time I experienced a direct slur being shouted at me from an adult,

from a stranger. Really? How did you feel when that happened? I felt a multitude of things. I felt really really surprised and shocked. And I remember thinking, oh gosh, here we go. I also thought there wasn't much point reporting it because we were in a place where there was no CCTV, maybe a couple of witnesses. But I thought, how are you ever going to find a random person that just shouted at me? Is there a point putting myself through that? If there were a couple of witnesses, did you see shock expressed on anyone else's face? Or did anyone else do anything to intervene? No one. No one did anything. I wish I was shocked by that.

And actually, that makes a point in itself that you didn't even think it was worth reporting. If you say that hate speech increased by over 1,000, nearly 2,000 percent, how many more people didn't report their experiences than did? And what does that mean the real trend might be? Well, that's exactly what I've been finding out. I'm heading around the UK to talk to people about the racism, they encountered both during the pandemic and before, plus to find out if we're even getting the full story when it comes to Asian hate.

And I'll see you back in the studio with some very special guests to discuss everything around this media storm. Come flu. As the number of coronavirus cases goes up. Feeling invisible. So do reports of abuse. Cases of the Indian variant have risen from 5. In Chinatown. And you are the Chinese virus.

That the virus leaked from Chinese laboratories. I've got to get really tough with social media sites. This virus does not discriminate. People do. Welcome to Media Storm, a news podcast that starts with the people who are usually asked last. I'm Helena Wadia. And I'm Matilda Malinson. This week's investigation.

Pandemic of hate. We need to talk about anti-Asian abuse. I'm sitting here scrolling through statistic after statistic about how the fear surrounding coronavirus inflamed xenophobic attitudes around the world. And I'm also saying how easy it is to find conspiracy theories online about China and about the origins of COVID-19. And I'm reading a lot about how the rhetoric of some world leaders at the time caused enduring harm to the East Asian community.

COVID-19, that name gets further and further away from China as opposed to calling it the Chinese virus. So how much did the pandemic expose that anti-Asian sentiment that was bubbling below the surface? I'm Michelle Elman and I'm the creator of Scarne Not Scared. People like me would have even been given a voice without social media. There are all these TikToks at the moment with these guys proclaiming that they were. Just sat here reading the comments on my three ways to sell. Michelle Elman is a life coach and author with a huge social media following.

Her following was amassed when she started. started talking about body confidence and embracing body scars under the username Scarred Not Scared. Her TikToks have amassed over 7 million likes, but at the height of the pandemic, she felt pushed off the platform due to the racist abuse she was receiving. Michelle lives in London and I'm on my way to talk to her now to find out more about her experiences online during the pandemic. Hey, come in. Hi, Michelle, thanks. Lovely to see you. You too.

So just run me through what happened online to you on your social media platforms when the pandemic started. I just started noticing a number of comments that were race-related on TikTok. And hate comments on TikTok are quite normal. And I kind of approached TikTok with the point of view. their young people don't react to it, their children who are saying stupid things, like you would say in a playground. And it was only when it started becoming so overwhelming. I wasn't seeing any other comments on there that I really was like, this is different

and so different that videos of mine were actually going viral simply for the fact that every comment section was being filled with racist comments. And can you tell me what were the sort of most common kind of comments, were getting? Off the top of my head, it was things like Ching Chong Chinese man. You're the reason I can't see my family. You caused coronavirus. Your family want to eat bats and that's why I can't see my family. Your culture is disgusting. Your culture is gross, calling it kung flu and all of these things that were going around at the time or even just China virus. Like that perpetuates so much racism and puts it on a certain group. And because everyone sees Asians as the same,

it wasn't just affecting Chinese people, although of course I am Chinese. You said that you mentioned Kung flu and the China virus and those were both things that Donald Trump said. How much do you think that affected the way that people viewed Chinese people during the pandemic? Huge amounts. And I also think it was a knock on effect because he starts using it. other politicians start using it. It becomes normalized. Some people are using it naively because they just thought that's what it's called in the same way that we called it Spanish flu. So it becomes this commonly used term, but then you have a target for blame. And when there's so much fear running around, people want someone to blame. And so it became a thing of if you're

Chinese, you're part of the problem. Social media is completely vital to your job and your industry, what was the impact? Did you use it less? Yeah, I stopped posting for about three months. I didn't. There was just a point where, like, I had to come off on offline completely. I remember at least two, three phone calls to friends crying about it. And many phone calls to my agent being like, I need, I need someone to do something about this. And my agent reaching out to people and nothing was done. TikTok itself says that attacks on the basis of protected attributes, such as race, go against its own community guidelines. Michelle reported the racist abuse she was receiving to two people who worked at TikTok.

One apologised, but no action was taken. Let me ask you, had you experienced any specific online anti-Asian abuse pre-pandemic? I think I've always had more comments surrounding my weight and my scars. So I can't say if it was there, I noticed it as much. But I think there is racism in the fact that, especially before the pandemic, before the stop Asian hate movement, I had been in rooms of influences when I talked about racism and talked about the lack of representation and how there are next to know Asian creators, especially in the plus size community, I would be told things like, oh, well, you're just playing the race card. You mentioned earlier that you were getting these comments from quite a young audience. How young were we talking? I don't know.

It's always hard to tell because they're more anonymous, but there were definitely times I would click over and they had videos on there. And the youngest I probably saw, I would guess, would be about five years old. Five years old? Yeah, that young. What would you say to sort of the parents of these children that were posting such horrible things on your TikTok? I think you can't assume your kids know to be anti-racist. So your avoidance of the conversation is part of the silence.

And so you actually need to have an active conversation about racism, even if your child is white. And the reason why I say even if your child is white is because if your child is a person of colour, the likelihood is they're having that conversation because they have to. Chinese kids come home crying about different comments. And so we have that conversation already. whereas if you're white, you might not have to have that conversation

but actually realizing, no, you do have to have that conversation and being really aware of your own biases and it might not be explicit racism, but we all have our own biases and a lot of the things around Asian racism specifically haven't been discussed. I've been standing up for Asians for years. I think the first article I wrote about Asian discrimination was in 2016 for the Metro.

but the appetite for having these articles written or even posting on my page and the engagement and my audience actually responding to it, if you compare it to my normal engagement was nothing. Every time I wanted to talk about racism, no one was hearing it, whether it was me wanting to write an article about it, or whether it was me actually in a room with a fashion company saying, hey, you don't have a single Asian on your entire newsfeed. Like, you need to change that. So it's parents, it's brands, it's companies, it's PR agencies who become gatekeepers for these events, it's all of it. But we haven't had a conversation about it because it's not been seen as a legitimate enough issue until, unfortunately, a number of people had to die this summer. While hate comments and conspiracy theories were affecting East Asian people like Michelle online, hate crimes were happening offline too, some with devastating effects.

In February 2021, Dr. Peng Wang, a lecturer at the University of Southampton and originally from China, was out jogging when a group of four men drove past in a car shouting abuse at him. They circled around him in the car several times. When confronted by Dr. Wang, the men got out of the car and proceeded to punch and kick him to the ground. It has been confirmed the incident was racially aggravated. There was a car that in the other side of the road, there was a mine who sat behind the driver, you know, who opened the window and shouted at me by using richest words. You know, Chinese, you know, fuck you get a, you know, Chinese virus. So immediately, I noticed it was, you know, ricious attack.

So I shouted back. They stopped their car. then I went to the car I you know I shot at them why you shot at me I touched the wind of the car then the driver you know went out of the car and

attacked me on the street on the ground you know I'm I'm looking at a photo of the aftermath of the attack now and it's horrible to see there's blood across your nose and your mouth and it's so upsetting what was the

physical trauma that you needed treatment for? You know, it's mainly, you know, about my nose. Yeah, even now when I touch it, it's still, you know, it's not as well as perfect as it used to be. So fortunately, the bone was intact. Yeah, so it's mainly about bruise and also my elbow. But, you know, after two months, I would say I was almost healed.

We've spoken about the physical effects of the attack, but what has been the effect on your mental health? Have you felt safe in Southampton in your community since the attack? Yeah, obviously no. I still can remember, you know, after the attack, when I took my son out, you know, I felt nervous, to be honest. If they attacked me, how can I protect my son? Before the pandemic, had you experienced racism in the same way? Yeah, I would say, yeah. So I can only recall, you know, there was once I went to the Burger King in the city center.

You know, some teenagers around 12, 13 years old. Yeah, they said ching ching chung to me. Yeah, but obviously after the pandemic, you know, so it's more frequent. Yeah, so I had a feeling, you know, the, you know, the things are getting worse after the referendum. People, you know, they do not, you know, they were not as tolerated, you know, to other people as they used to. Yeah, so, so I had a feeling, yeah. Do you in any way regret your actions of that day? No, no, no.

I believe, you know, you know, if you don't fight back, the things can veerate. will get worse. This time, they shot at you. Maybe next time they attacked you. So, yeah, you have to stop them. The police have identified two of them. So, yeah, in total, they are facing eight charges. Yeah, so I believe if they know the consequence,

they won't do that again. Hate crimes against Asian people were also rising quickly and more violently across the pond in the U.S. You're on your fucking cold flu. He's just assaulted me. This man had just assaulted me. A Filipino-chuk in China flu shoved up your ass. Okay, well done, sir.

A Filipino-American man was slashed in the face with a box cutter on the New York City subway. An elderly Thai immigrants died after being shoved to the ground in San Francisco. An 89-year-old woman was slapped in the face and then set on fire in Brooklyn. Asian communities under attack? What do we do? Sam, my way back. When the Asian people are. The Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism says anti-Asian hate crimes increased by nearly

150% in 2020. But this statistic is likely to be an underestimate. We'll get on to why in a minute. The U.S. Congress responded to the increase in Asian abuse by enacting the COVID-19 hate crimes act signed by President Joe Biden on May 20th, 2021. We heard how too many Asian Americans have been waking up each morning this past year, genuinely, genuinely fearing for their safety. It's simply, to use the phrase, it's simply un-American. My message to all of those you are heard in is, we see you. And the Congress has said,

we see you. The law focuses on reviewing hate crime incidents and provides grants to police departments so they can establish hotlines for people to report hate crimes. But do these kind of laws actually address the root issue? And is more police funding ever the answer? California State University professor Phyllis Gerstenfeld is a criminal justice expert who studies hate crimes. In general, I don't think that hate crime laws deter anyone, at least not directly. So the general answer is no. And I don't think that a lot of people are necessarily very aware of it. That doesn't mean that the law is not useful, though.

It can have the more sort of effect of making people aware that this is a problem, sending a message that, this is an issue that we need to deal with and need to be aware of. So it can have an indirect effect, but I don't think it will directly result in deterring anyone. I suppose a good thing about hate crime acts is data collection, right? But a lot of people think that more data just means more of the same. And the same hasn't always been that great for people of color, right? Agreed. I mean, part of the problem is that the data we do have.

have are unreliable and inconsistent. When it comes to immigrants, for example, a lot of immigrants may feel uncomfortable reporting hate crimes or crimes against them may go unrecognized for a variety of reasons, especially when they're undocumented. So one solution is to be more thoughtful about how data are collected and that the data that we get at are more representative of what's really happening in the world. But again, having a lot of data doesn't do us any good if we don't. do useful things with it. There are some people who seem to think that just collecting numbers

means we've done our job. The problem is solved. We don't have to worry about it anymore. And that's only a very beginning step in the process. A really big question is, are hate coins specifically difficult to prosecute? Hate crimes are extremely difficult to prosecute. They're just about the only crime that requires a prosecutor to prove motive beyond a reasonable doubt. And it's really hard to prove motives. Even people who are acting may be unaware of their own motives. All of the people who are involved in a particular event may have very different perspectives of what happens. So a victim may view something one way, the police may view it another, witnesses another way, lawyers another way. So they're extremely difficult to prosecute. Very few prosecutors have a lot of experience or

training in dealing with hate crimes. And in many cases, they just won't touch it. I guess a lot of people think that hate crime bills don't address, as you were saying, the kind of root cause of why crimes happen. But in general, is that something that could be addressed or measured by a government? I think so, but in a sort of indirect way. So one way a government can do that is by funding research, you know, putting money, I guess where our mouths are, encouraging researchers to really look at what's going on. And then drafting policy. that's responsive to that research, things like training, education, rehabilitation programs, all of those things are things the government can sponsor, but it can't do those things well

if it doesn't know what the real problems are on what really works. A lot of attention is paid to sort of organized extremism, I guess because it's most obvious we can see marching in the streets. But the research says that's not who commits most hate crime, something like it's estimated maybe as much as 95% of hate crimes are committed by people who don't belong to any organized group. So I think if we put more focus on understanding why those other 95% of people are committing these crimes and what we can do to intervene and prevent, that could be really useful. Lawmakers have perhaps overlooked the most important piece of the puzzle, prevention of racism. But does our media teach us to be active

anti-racist. That takes us back to the studio. Thanks for sticking around. Welcome back to the studio and to Media Storm, a podcast that seeks to provide balance to the mainstream media. Some mainstream medias often forget to speak to people with lived experience of the issue, so we want to provide a space for those people often found caught in the eye of the media storm. Today we are talking about anti-Asian discrimination and racism and with us are some very special guests. Our first guest is editor-in-chief of Vice UK, the author of the Forgotten Women series and host of United Zingdom, a podcast about what it means to be British. It's Zing-Sing. Thank you so much for having me. Hello.

Thank you so much for being here. Our second guest is a journalist and producer. You may know him from the podcast Trash Future, Human Era and 10,000 posts, or you might have read his book, Follow me, Aki, the online world of British Muslims. It's Hussain Kaspani. Hi. Thanks for having me on. So you just heard the investigation that Helen is out to do for us. Do you have any immediate thoughts? It honestly doesn't surprise me what's been happening over the last two years now, the rise in pandemic racism, because I've experienced it myself. Was it tangibly different from before the pandemic?

I would say like on a good year, this is going to depress a lot of people. In like a good stretch, I could go for maybe like a year without someone saying something that I could point to and be like, yeah, that's racist as hell. Now it was happening like every few months, every month, every month. It'll be happening online. It'll be happening offline. Just last week, I was on the street let out a bit of a cough and a cyclist went past and just shouted coronavirus at me. People feel more comfortable saying it. And it's for the reasons that you have political leaders signing off on this kind of language and saying to people essentially it's okay if you call it the Chinese flu it's okay if you use racist and discriminatory language because here's me doing it in a press

conference. Hussein as somebody that is and I'm sure you won't mind me saying extremely online when we heard about the investigation about the comments that Michelle was getting on TikTok from people who were as young as five years old what's your reaction to that? Yeah, it's really sad but it's also like incredibly common that especially the most extreme vitriol will sort of happen online where people kind of feel like they have much more licensed to be much more directly threatening to people. There's also like different axioms of vulnerability as well. It's a really vulnerable place to be in, right? You're really like putting yourself out there. For lots of people who like want to be abusive and you know, and this isn't just

about like racial abuse, it's all different types of abuse. They know that like social media is extremely effective because they can really kind of get into those vulnerabilities and it can really disorientate you. One of the questions we want to ask here is how responsible the mainstream media have been in encouraging this. What role have they played? Particularly looking at how the pandemic was reported on. I was working on a video team at the time and I remember all of the press agency footage we were getting in for any news videos remotely connected to the pandemic were filmed, and this is completely serious, were filmed in Chinatown. It was just general images of British Asians with masks in Chinatown.

There was a really lazy impulse for mainstream news outlets to just go for the lowest common denominator and think coronavirus is a story coming out of China, so therefore we have to somehow illustrate it in a Chinese way. And the understanding of what Chinese culture is in the UK is so, so narrow that the first thing that many people think of is literally just Chinatown. Like that's the really, really sad state of affairs. It's always Jarrah Street. It's always something to do with lanterns in a breeze. And I think that that just speaks to overall,

the complete lack of representation of any kind of Chinese culture in the British media. It is literally just seen as women in Chongsham, floating lanterns, Chinese acrobatts and Chinatown. And it's so limited for Chinese people, Chinese journalists, Chinese actors, Chinese creatives. And then you have something like the pandemic coming along. And then all of a sudden, the only image that people think of when they think of anything Chinese is Chinatown.

I used to, when I worked in media covering like terrorism stories and stuff, I would always be sent to White Chapel or I'd always be sent to places in East London where it was mostly like Bengali immigrants who have been here for a really long time to ask them about people that they don't really know and like who they don't even sort of share like an ethnic lineage. And to me, it always like reflected this kind of obsession with simplification and this obsession with superficiality that so much of media has partly to do with the kind of demand of the news business, the idea that stuff has to be out and you have to be. faster than everyone. But the second is also just like a very ingrained sense of racism and the ingrained sense of superiority. It basically boils down to the fact that not a lot of people bother to understand the differences between these cultures and communities in the UK. Yeah, it's like, BAME. I've always thought how strange to pack an entire continent into one little letter of an acronym of several minority ethnic groups. It would basically be like me as someone who comes from Singapore and an English person coming to Singapore

and, you know, visiting me and saying hi, I would basically be like, oh, hey, I've made you a really nice meal, I've made you some schnitzel. Like, this is your culture, right? It's exactly, I mean, it's kind of the same, right? Fish and Chip Schnitzel. You really, really chose the worst European country for food there. Like past. Controversial, Matilda. I definitely think that Eastern, Southeast Asian people bore the brunt of this kind of racism and then a bit further on into the pandemic we started getting coronavirus variants

from other places and genuinely mainstream media outlets were and then news anchors were sitting there using the words the Indian variant not even the scientific name of it or the variant that was first identified in India it was genuinely the Indian variant. And, you know, I know personally, at least two people

who were verbally abused told, stop bringing coronavirus over here. And that's only the people I know about, let alone the amount of people that were talking about it on social media. I think a lot of people at the time, when we started talking about maybe we should be saying the Delta variant, saw that as political correctness gone wrong.

Yeah, okay. As people who actually live the consequences of language, which I wonder, yeah, I wonder what you would say to them. Yeah, like, well, yeah, the whole, like, obsession of wokeness is also, like, come out in the past, like, two years, like, or in the past kind of couple of years and, like, crucially, in the context of the pandemic, so now everything that you don't like is, like, woke. With the Indian variant, I definitely know from, like, families and friends,

especially those who, like, run, like, in-service businesses, like, running short shops and stuff, that they kind of had received a lot of abuse, a lot of racial abuse as a result of it. And that was on top of like the abuse of it came with being an essential worker that like, you know, everyone who worked in a kind of like service economy job faced in some way. Hussain, you mentioned wokeness. And I think what we're going to talk about next, I think so many people as we talk

about it would probably roll their eyes and be like, oh, you know, PC brigade, you can't say anything these days. But in December 2020, there was an advert for Domino's Pizza. And in the advert, a group of friends were sat around and they were deciding what to order for dinner. And one of them says, anything but Chinese. Now, I don't know if people might say that I was being too sensitive or whatever it is. But I am surprised that of surely so many people that an advert has to go through that not one person thought, hey, maybe that's a bit off. Yeah. And, you know, Chinese takeaways are incredibly racialized sites of identity. So, you know, I know so many people whose parents came over to the UK set up Chinese takeaways and then were kind of expected to feed what in many cases was a white majority town or village and then just put up with the racism they experienced as a kind of price of doing business. So many people I know had parents who just kind of swallowed that pain and just never really talked about it and just brushed it off. And to have that be reduced to a

punchline, you know, I can only imagine how kind of hurtful that could be. But I'm also really aware of the fact that part of the problem with discussing things like this is that there will be someone out there who is listening to it and saying the woke mob wanted to cancel Dominoes. And that's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying that maybe Dominoes might consider their script a little bit better and maybe hire some more East and Southeast Asian people. Was interesting that you say that because the kind of accusations of the woke mob are also really useful and effective ways that are utilized to, like, shut down any kind of attempt, not even to capitulate or to even just like meet you halfway. Yeah. I mean, you can be defensive or you can listen and not take it

personally. Zing, what you just said about Chinese takeaways and the history there and the emotion, that is not something I've heard before. And that touches me. And I'm glad that I know that now and I will reflect on certain things differently. I do think that our response is often to feel attacked and to become defensive in a way that's really counterproductive to progress. I think there was a debate, maybe a few years back, about calling Chinese takeaways the C word. And people got really defensive over it. Someone said, oh, if it's racist to call the Chinese takeaway the C word, then isn't it racist to call a fish and chip shop a chippy? Yeah, I mean, the logic just didn't make any sense at all. That was a real kind of like brainworms moment

from whoever tweeted that. It's also the same thing about like minor inconvenient, like how these minor inconveniences. Well, they end up being framed of these, like, huge grievances against like English culture, right? I know. I went to university in like in, in, in York. And every year, they'd always be the same scandal of students are trying to get these shops to stop selling like gollywags. The way that it was framed is very much along the lines of, you know, these kind of lefty students who come from London are trying to prevent local businesses from, you know, thriving. And it's like, you know, when you set that frame as like, you're kind of, you know, starting point, then I, I don't, I don't know where like that productively takes you.

I think this is actually something the media is really culpable in. It's these culture wars because they often dig up these issues and they make a whole hoo-har about it because it sells paper. I think that they see culture wars as quite a profitable battleground and therefore deliberately flare up these things that are basically just distractions. Oh, definitely. I think it's like the light entertainment version of journalism in that if you actually cornered some of these journalists in a pub and say,

do you actually care that Mrs. blogs down, you know, year old York traditional souvenir store can no longer sell her racist collie walks. All of them will literally hold up their hands up and say, actually, I don't care. But then it's just cultural fodder for the grist. You know, it's not anything that they feel genuinely emotional or engaged about. And just to drill in the seriousness of the consequences on the other side, the very real life responses to racism and to rhetoric and culture that becomes normalized. I think we should talk about the Atlanta spa shootings that happened in March of this year. And for anyone who's not aware, that was in America when a white gunman went on a shooting spree targeting three spas in Atlanta, killing eight people, six of whom

were Asian women. So let's start with how the shootings were reported. Zing, you wrote a really arresting article. And I just want to read the title. It was Asian women's bodies are not playgrounds for white people. You touch on how Asian women and East Asian women are represented in pop culture. Do you think that that has an important role in how the media reports on these things? When you're in East or Southeast Asian women, you get very quickly used to kind of constant sexualization of justification and fetishization. And it's very strange because you're simultaneously totally replaceable with another Asian woman because, you know, quote and quote, we all look the same. When that's the only representation you see of Asian women in the media,

that has a knock on effect on how you report about real Asian women when things happen to us. And I think you could definitely see that in the way that the shooting was reported and the way that the police even reported the shooting themselves. So there's this really infamous press conference in which an officer on the case kind of says, well, you know, the shooter, you know, he says he's got an addiction, it's a problem and he was trying to fix the source of his addiction. It's just really dehumanizing language. And that's what happens when you just reduce an entire community down to stereotype. You dehumanize them and you therefore make it easier to erase them as real human beings. And you compare that to how little sympathy is given to

the mental health of non-white terrorists because he was charged with domestic terrorism. Part of that really infamous press conference you were talking about was when I think it was the county sheriff said that he'd had a bad day, the shooter. Excuses for doing what he did were really plastered everywhere in the mainstream media that he had a bad day, that he had a sex addiction. The fact that we were even debating whether or not it was a racialized attack was awful to me. But even to say that I have a sex addiction and I associate these spars with the biggest temptations, is that not in itself racist?

Oh, yeah, 100%. How could you argue with the fact that shooting is not racially motivated? When you look at the breakdown of who was shot, who was targeted and who was killed, if that is not a racially motivated crime, I honestly don't know what would meet that criteria. Hussein, do you have any thoughts about, for example, how South Asian or South Asian men are represented in the media? Yeah, with all these types of events, it always starts off with like, oh, this is another Muslim terrorist, the same kind of rhetoric about immigration and this is what happens when you let refugees come into your country and so on. then when like more information comes out you can see how people are not only trying to go back

on their own stories but they're still trying to weave their own narrative the affordance of mental health is given to certain people but for others it's very much like no you were motivated primarily by theology you were motivated primarily by race and so on and i think to answer your question about like south asian men and in the aftermath of like terrorist attacks and also in other stories like you know grooming gangs for example right immigrant men and particularly dark-skinned immigrant men who are like threats to your nation and like threats to your race and threats to the spiritual health of your country. It's always largely like fixated on this idea of the immigrant savage, the foreigner who just by virtue of doing something morally apprehensible

is not subjected to the individualistic moral failings that are afforded to like people who are white or people who are not come from immigrant backgrounds or like who are not Muslim. It's always sort of framed as culture wars and it's always framed as like clash of civilizations. I guess the point that I'm trying to say is that when it comes to people of color, very often these people are commodified and they're sort of used to particular ends in order to kind of tell their objects that are there to tell stories rather than individuals who have agency over their own actions. I think British Asian people are seen as perpetual foreigners. That's how I feel anyway, you know, if we watch, I mean, not so much now, there's a, there's a lot of new

and varied representation, I think, coming up in TV and film, but I mean, before it was what, cab driver, newsagent, terrorist, geek. I mean, what, I had Bend It Like Beckham, then nothing for 20 years. That's how I feel. I think a lot of it has to do with what's commonly known as the model minority myth, which is basically stereotypes of Asian people, such as Asian. Asian children being geniuses or like musical legends at the age of two, those myths kind of portray Asian people as polite and quiet and quiet and law-abiding in a place that isn't

really their home. The whole modern minority myth is used as a kind of wedge to drive home the differences, to suppose the differences between different ethnic communities, right? You know, the academic achievements of East Asian people are used as a kind of stick to be other communities with to say, look at this ethnic minority, they've done really well, look at their college admissions, you know, they're acing school. So what excuse does your community have? Well, if you only tried harder, if you assimilated better, then you could be just like these guys. And to basically kind of perpetuate the idea that if some immigrant groups

do well and others don't, then that's a problem on them. It has nothing to do with their relationship to the state. It has nothing to do with their history. By extension, then, there is no obligation for the state to do anything proactive to, like, help them in their experience or to help them in terms of like how they kind of navigate like quite a hostile, you know, a pretty hostile environment. Time now to look at current headlines and we're going to be talking about the story of Azeem Raphic. So just to catch up anyone who doesn't know, the cricketer Azeem Raphic has exposed experiences of racism, harassment and bullying during his time playing for Yorkshire.

One of his many allegations was against the former England captain Michael Vaughn who he alleges said, quote, too many of you lot, we need to do something about it to Rafiq and three other Asian players during a match for Yorkshire in 2009. Vaughn, as a result, will not be part of the BBC's coverage of the Ashes in Australia and the BBC has said that that would be a conflict of interest. We want to talk about an article that was in the telegraph. The headline, BBC, under pressure to reinstate Michael Vaughn as Azeem Rafiq says, Fuhrer, quote, made bigger than necessary. Hussein, why don't you lead the charge on this one? This type of reaction is very familiar. This idea of like, oh, you know, you're making a

mountain out of a molehill and like, you know, you're over exaggerating. This stuff is in the past and so on. Basically, like, it's this kind of really pure example of minimizing what is a really, like, horrific problem. I watched, I watched Azim Rafiq at parliamentary hearing. He either, like, was very close to breaking down to tears or he actually did. You could kind of see just how like heartbreaking it all was. So when you like kind of read this headline, which is, it reminds me a lot of like how racism was dealt with when I was in primary school and secondary school. The language used throughout this article and in the headline is so interesting. The article referred to it as a furor. Asim's actual comment where he says the

quote made bigger is actually quite vague to what he's referring to. I mean, everything in this article from the language to the emissions to the inclusions is very, agenda specific. I think that that's the dangerous thing. It's not a piece of reporting. This is a piece of opinion, but it is presented as a piece of reporting. A lot of the packaging of the quotes is very decontextualized and misleading. I think the final paragraph of the article is probably the most overtly biased. Honestly, I was on the edge throughout this whole article and the final paragraph tip me over the edge. I'll just read a few lines from it. Sky footage also shows Vaughn greeting a smiling Rafiq during the pre-match huddle in which he has alleged to have made the

comments. Yeah. Like that's so loaded, right? Because you're essentially implying that Raphic has made it up in the sense that why would you smile at someone who said something racist to you? It's a form of telling people, actually, you thought you experienced this, but actually we don't think you did. And even if you did, it doesn't matter to us. It's also kind of absurd because it's whatever any of us have really faced any kind of like abuse or harassment, catches you really suddenly. Your impulse really is not to react, especially when you sort of know that you're in public, right? I don't know about like everyone else, but I definitely know for me, I kind of learned how to process a lot of that very, very privately. Of course. Especially when you're

in institutions, whether they're in like particular schools, universities, newsrooms and so on. Newsrooms in particular, I would actually say, when you have to like navigate that type of abuse or that type of harassment, your kind of default is to sort of just like get on with your day and then really process it afterwards. So the idea of like, oh, how could he have been? been racist if, like, Azim Rafiq was smiling and, like, not reacting, how could that be possible? You know, again, I think you're right about, like, this is, this is very much a news piece that is, like, disguised opinion or at least kind of, like, opinion positioning. I mean, I guess, like, at a base level, yeah, this is, like, very classic victim blaming,

but it's also, you know, and I hate using this word really lightly. It is very, very clear gas-lising. I think something else interesting about this article was that there are multiple mentions of Azim Rafiq's old Facebook messages from 2011 in which he used anti-semit Semitic language, which he has apologized for. On the flip side, they failed to mention Michael Vaughn's old social media posts how in 2010, Vaughn tweeted

not many English people live in London, I need to learn a new language. And in 2017, following the Manchester Arena bombing, he answered yes to a question on Twitter whether England or Rounder Moin Ali should ask Muslims if they are terrorists. Vaughn has said he's embarrassed

by the tweets and he's a different person now, but it seems a very obvious omission, especially when they are talking about old social media posts. It's interesting whose past behaviour is mentioned in order to discredit their version of events. You can also claim plausible deniability. The fact that we have a news article that is effectively an opinion piece, or at least very close to one, is basically one that says, oh, you know, we're just reporting the news and like, we're just being objective. When you think about news, we should be thinking about what quotes are being selected,

what types of positions are being magnified, and what ones are being ignored. And I think it's also about who gets given the life. in the press and the platform to show that they are a fully rounded to human being who is capable of making mistakes and that we should afford them forgiveness and understanding. You can see in the way that Azimera Freaks' old Facebook posts were used against him. That forgiveness and that license of understanding and empathy is not extended to people of colour in the same way it's extended to white people. Please, can we also talk about the fact that Monty Panasar's views are given two whole

paragraphs in this article and he has nothing to do with the incident in question? And from what I understand his thing is like, oh, they should just like, he should just be focusing more on his cricket or South Asian players should be focusing less on racism and more cricket. There's a tough enough. And yeah, and again, it's very much you're the type of immigrant that we like because you're the one who will basically say that your solutions to your problems are just like, you know, hustling grind more, right?

And just to kind of prove yourself and that's when people will respect you. There's this really sad element to it as well where for so many immigrant communities who came to Britain and like, you know, faced all this hardship. The reason why they accepted this was because. they knew that they weren't going to get any support or help anywhere else. With our generation, like, you know, second, third generation immigrant kids who, like, were born in this country, you know, we have these expectations. And I think this is the first time that this media class that could just ignore minorities because most of them were, like, working class

and, like, didn't really have any kind of opinions that were valuable to them. This is the first time that for lots of these institutions, they actually have to listen. That's why we have diversity workshops and all that. I think a lot of that is a reaction to having to confront this for the first time. In addition to that, that accusation that it's just online trolls and it's like a hate mob, basically, which I think came across really strongly in the way that, was it the Sunday Times handled this Prince Philip obituary on the front page, which was written by Christina Lam, a foreign correspondent. And the Sunday Times eventually apologized for it after she'd written about Prince Philip's racist jokes that we secretly enjoyed Prince Philip's gaffes.

This blew up on Twitter. There was a formal complaint filed. People signed a petition. The Sunday Times apologised. And then Christina Lamb wrote an editorial saying that she was the target of an online mob by the quote unquote woke mob. The jihadists were polite in comparison. I mean, where do you even go with something like that, really? Obviously, if you are abused on social media and you're giving death threats, that's unacceptable. But she then goes on to talk about completely legitimate criticism that she received from community groups from Gemma Chan saying that this kind of language is unacceptable. You know, who's the we here who are laughing at Prince Phillips' racist gaffs because it really isn't Asian people. It's a really convenient way of dismissing any like structural criticism. And I think it's just important to say on this point that many Muslims would object to the use of the term jihad as a terrorist term, that it's a spiritual term that doesn't mean what it's often implied to mean and that that in itself is negatively stereotyping one religion as terrorist.

I remember thinking in the Christine Lamb article, how many people of color have been abused for so long, both online and offline, and don't get a whole newspaper column dedicated to it. Singh and Hussain, thank you so much for joining us. Where can people follow you and do you have anything you'd wish to plug? You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram. I'm Ms. Zing, M-I-S-S-I-N-G. I think there's an underscore in between Miss and Zing on Instagram because someone else is a Missing there. If you like what I have to say, you could buy in my book series Forgotten Women and read my articles on Vice. You can follow me on Twitter at HKazvani on Twitter.com

and you can listen to like one of my many podcasts, but I guess, like I'm one way too many. Trash Future, which you can find on most podcast providers. And on my BBC show that I do with the comedian Olga Koch, which is about technology and politics, it is called Human Error. You can find that on BBC Sounds or on any podcast app. Thank you so much for listening. We'll be back next week with episode three, rape justice.

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