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midwinterhunt · 6 months

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CW: this dream contains themes of violence against homeless people, gang violence, death, police violence, guns, animal cruelty, xenophobia and discrimination, and a really weird biting scene. I think my brain had some stress to work out.

I was some kind of shape shifter or mutant thing, somewhere between a hedgehog, tumbleweed, and an otter. But most of the time i looked human enough. I had a twin brother who was older and more serious than me, but I still made it my job to take care of him. We kinda both took on that job. He looked after my physical well-being and kept me fed, and I would take care of his emotional well-being and keep him from making big life mistakes.

We were homeless teenagers by the way. And we had a pretty tight knit group of people with similar abilities we stayed with. We stayed in the same camp, played together, found food together, made money where we could. One day we all made teeth impressions in each other's skin by biting and said we would all get each other's teeth marks tattooed on us so we would always remember each other. Admittedly I instigated this, my brother was confused about why i had everyone bite him. But he smiled at the explanation. It was going to be special between all of us.

But everything ends. We were raided by the police and our camp torn down. Some of us were arrested, others scattered, we weren't even sure who all made it. Me and my brother stuck together, and that was all he focused on.

Somehow my brother got it into his head that the only way for us to be safe was for us to leave the country. Maybe go somewhere less prejudiced against demi-humans. But that required money.

My brother left me in a slum for about a day so he could go searching for a job. I was to stay put until he got back. I only wandered a little bit. There was a lot of crime, and there were a particularly large amount of demi-humans who had been hurt or killed. I ran into a human investigator and was scared at first, but she assured me that she wasn't here to report anyone. She just wanted to help the demi-humans, because someone was taking advantage of us. She pointed out a bite mark tattoo on the body and said that was her only clue. Whoever was doing this tattooed his teeth onto everyone who worked for him. She didn't want me to do anything dangerous, but if I heard anything I should contact her and she gave me her contact info. If I managed to help, she would reward me with whatever I needed.

When my brother returned he said he'd found a job, but it was with a gang that was dangerous and he didn't want me involved. I however, wasn't going to let him do this alone. We were brothers, and we should stay together.

In the morning, two gangsters showed up and my brother gave me one last chance to stay behind. I noticed bite mark tattoos on them, it was the gang the investigator was looking for. Even if I didn't give her the info, I couldn't let my brother get used and tossed out like trash by these guys.

Even though most of the gang were demi-humans, the leader was human. He was a big guy with stringy dark hair and bristly stubble that was in want of being shaved, and he blew cigar smoke everywhere.

He said he wanted some new mutts for a job he had. He'd been cheated by some foreigner to the southwest and wanted his money back. He had rare valuables in an exotic fur pouch, and needed fresh faces that wouldn't be recognized by the business man we'd need to infiltrate and rob. But he didn't want just anyone, we'd need to prove we could do it. Otherwise we were only good as pets.

Between me and my brother, I was the better talker. So I spun all our skills and abilities into something that sounded capable. We could both dig quickly, we could roll up together and pass as a tumbleweed, and we could lay flat on the ground and be protected by our quills. Plus, we were so perfectly identical that if we nestled up side by side we almost looked like one animal. The only difference is that my quills were slightly more purple-brown, where my brother's were a mossy brown.

We were examined and appraised by the boss, sized up like one would a race horse. Finally he declared that we would do just fine and said we should be prepped for our marks.

You see, he never sourced work from anyone he didn't own. You work for him once, he keeps you forever. But we had been in to deep to run away with our lives since he laid eyes on us. I could only hope that I would have a chance to tip off the investigator at some point, and of course my brother hoped that the payment we'd get would be enough to get out of the country.

As it turns out, the tattoos were the leader's actual bite mark. It was.... Super bad. He took something that was a dream of mine, something personal and special, and then he grabbed me with his meaty hands and stench of tobacco smoke and clamped his slimy mouth over by bicep, his teeth sinking painfully into my skin. It was enough to bruise, but not make me bleed. And then he held me like that for about a minute to make sure he left a solid impression. That alone was enough to make me cry, but then they tattooed the impression onto my arm to make it permanent.

Neither me nor my brother had gotten tattoos before, and these tattooists were insanely heavy handed. Honestly, I was more concerned with scarring and infection than how it would look.

When we were done we were released with little instruction other than a foreigner group to the southwest and the guy's name. We initially made a mistake and tried to sneak in and steal from the wrong people, but we never found the right fur bag with the money. My brother wanted to keep the money we did find because we needed it, but I drew the line there. We wouldn't steal from people who hadn't done anything wrong.

Eventually we did find the right guy. He had a fairly illegal circus, which, would've been nice to know from the start. We tried to sneak in, but someone was heading our way. So we hid in the giraffe food trough. It was filled with human food scraps, dirt, and manure. Also the giraffe was right there and kept trying to nibble at us.

Unfortunately we were still spotted. And I very enthusiastically launched into how we just wanted work and how we love giraffes and that we will clean up after and feed it and we don't even need paid we'd just like some food and to take care of such a cool animal. The ring master seemed suspicious at first, but then he quickly brightened and happily gave us the job and went back to his tent over by the rabbit hutches.

The usual animal caretaker was straight up pissed that two random kids took his job and implied that he wasn't doing it right. And my brother wanted to just get the job over with and take off with the money we stole instead of returning it to the gang. And I didn't want to blow our cover, but I also wanted to give the animals fresh food. So I mucked out the manger and had my brother fetch some hay. The animals, all penned up together, rushed for the food. Horses, the giraffe, and elephant, the zebras, all were starving. We had to do several loads of hay. And the regular caretaker was insulted by this. Kept saying I was doing it wrong. That hay was expensive and he could keep these animals alive on stale pizzas, random stuff, and whatever built up in the bottom of the feeder. And I called him out to his face. Told him the animals were all skinny and malnourished. That he was starving them. And the man lost his mind. He pulled out a gun and yelled something about how if I loved these animals so much then I could have them, or he'd take them away, or something dramatic about how my loving them and trying to help them is why he did this; but he started shooting the animals.

I couldn't stop him, he had a gun! And I had good reason to believe he would shoot a demi-human just as quickly. So I ran, dragging my brother close behind me. I quickly told the ring master that the caretaker was shooting the animals, and without hesitating he pulled out his own gun and shot the caretaker. Then he praised me for minimizing the damage to his business, and he promoted me and my brother to full employees.

Unfortunately this is where I woke up.

#mid dreams #dead dove do not eat

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whatsyourcolor · 4 years

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Psycho-Pass 3 - Episode 8 review [SPOILERS]

After going through all the stages of grief yesterday, here are my thoughts on episode 8 of Psycho-Pass 3 and of this season overall if anyone cares to read. If you have been reading my other reviews, you have an idea of what this will be, so read at your own discretion. This last episode manifests the vision for the whole season and what they tried to accomplish and how they failed in doing so. I tried summarizing the episode, but got bored, considering the first 20 minutes or so are random clips thrown together with no coherent transitions between them, so I’ll just deal with the aspects that interest me.

1. Kei breaking bad and the ills of tokenism

Mao confesses her “sins” to Kei which include a lukewarm sense of revenge and a lack of reasonable online practice (such as not trusting people online.) Her story is clumsily connected to the incident where a PSB inspector died and the other one was institutionalized. It would’ve been mildly interesting if Mao had been the active agent in informing Asuzawa of the investigation because of rightful anger at a perceived injustice, causing the death of someone in Division 1 (Irie, for example) and then having a redemption arc where she helps bring the sucker down. But no, we get the story of a coward who got involved with bad people, got scared, and hasn’t followed any of their instructions since, hoping that they’ll forget about her.

So the writers have her telling this story to Kei, just so that they can justify his ambivalence later in the episode. What if, he too, could get what he wanted? So many ways to plant the seeds of this internal conflict that we now have to explain to ourselves because the writers didn’t have the time for it. Instead Kei frowns, grunts and punches so that we, the viewers, can see he’s upset. But where’s the chipping away at an inherent sense of morality and at his psyche to the point where he’s abating a congressman in his escape? What’s the switch? Some people say it’s Maiko, even though just one episode before Kei was telling her that they should believe in Sibyl and that her hue will recover. So which is it? Does he trust the system or does he not? Why do we have to guess? Where was all this ambivalence throughout the season? The writers could’ve set up his internal conflict so much better, tie it with the corrupt ideals of the terrorists, show him tempted to go down that path. He’s the immigrant, he’s the one who can offer the point of view that’s so muddled and lazily written for the other immigrants.

Time to start cooking meth, Kei.

To add insult to injury, Kei becomes a Fox not because of a deliberate, motivated decision, but because, like Mao, he clicked the wrong link and now he owes them a favor. What if they hand’t spent the whole season demeaning the power of Sibyl, putting it in the background as an inconvenience, instead of a real system of control with real consequences (the, ummm, whole premise of Psycho-Pass)? Just how the whole terrorist plot was rationalized as a way to make Sibyl “pay for its crimes against immigrants,” even though we don’t see what actual crimes Sibyl committed, why it committed them, we don’t even know what Sibyl’s stance is in regards discrimination and xenophobia. Crap on a cracker, we don’t even know why Sibyl deemed that allowing immigrants in was a good idea. They could’ve set up Maiko and Kei as protagonists of this season, giving us their point of view as conflicted immigrants who survived war and famine, who have to dye their hair, answer “yes ma’am,” endure xenophobic insults and be powerless in order to keep each other. Have them lose each other, their own values, their own morality as power appears in the form of an invitation to be a fox and get back at the system. Have Maiko be deemed a latent criminal who’s beyond all recovery be the switch, but that would only work if Sibyl is still the big, bad guy and Bifrost appears as the preferable bad guy in the eyes of Kei. Give us flashbacks of Maiko and Kei’s traumas together, show us why he’d make the decision to flip to have her back with him. A reason doesn't not equal a motivation. The latter suggest a process, an acquiring of a view through experience, a lie that the character believes or a truth that they hold. “Maiko’s been in jail for a day, so I accidentally became a fox” would be laughable (and believable) if one didn’t care an ounce for this show.

It seems like the writers wanted the world of Psycho-Pass to be relevant to today’s issues and so they used the topic of immigration to signal that. It worked in the PP Movie (warlords, refugees, etc) because they had kept the same philosophical thread about human will, power and systems of authority since Season 1. The complexities of that dialogue are lost in this season. They wanted to make some characters neutral, such as Karina or Venerable Auma, or the sister or O’Bryan, have them pass as misunderstood or misjudged and have the whole conflict of immigration be a problem that could be resolved if all these people just got together and sang Kumbaya.

2. Arata is Jesus and Asuzawa is a troll

When you need other characters to remind you of the importance of the protagonist or the villain, it’s perhaps because those characters are poorly written and can’t stand out on their own. When Toyohisa Senguji smokes from a pipe made from the bones of Rikako Oryo, you know the man is the most sinister psychopath that was spawned upon the earth. You don’t need anyone to tell you that.

Arata seems to have a destiny imprinted on him that he is special, or so we’re told. Sybil wants to integrate him, Mika wants him to stay a detective, the Bifrost is interested in him, his father appeared to be an important dude, yet I can’t think of a single thing he’s done that’s special or unique. He could’ve also have much more of an internal conflict, but we only get hints (yes, even in the last episode) that his dad was a complete prick. It’s never clear beyond “curiosity for humans” what his deal with Karina is and why he gives her a pass, to the point of snubbing Kei, even when Karina is a total hypocrite who fired her immigrant secretary. Yes, the one who threw herself in front of her kidnappers to protect her.

It happened right after she donated her kidney to me, true, but she did always put too much sugar in my coffee. I can’t have someone like that in my team!

With Asuzawa something similar happens. He’s called “clever” and “cunning” and we’re meant to believe it. He’s supposed to be deft, predicting the next bend of the road, being two steps ahead of everyone, but that takes time to write, so instead let’s make both the MWPSB and MOFA look incompetent and let’s have Asuzawa be called a “mastermind” just because. The whole mission to capture him is ridiculous. Asuzawa meets the congressman, says he’s going for smokes and never comes back. Kei meets him, helps him escape. Kogami and Ginoza let the pathfinders escape again. The only new revelation we have about him is that he’s an ex-enforcer who was tortured by Arata’s dad. According to Asuzawa’s secretary, Shindo senior used to manipulate people with his powers.

Who you callin’ Spookie Boogie? I’m known in the commufield as Growly Grumpy. Credit to @azweidos

3. Locking horns for incompetence

Finally the MOFA and the MWPSB meet to share intel on the Bifrost and they know as much as we know, but this meeting was needed because otherwise they couldn’t have inserted Kogami and Gino in the whole mission to tackle Asuzawa. Mika and Frederica are still competing to see which one of them is more obnoxious, while Asuzawa leaves through the front door of the building as if he hadn’t caused 95 of the 100 traffic accidents in Tokyo that year.

Well, so much for carrying a gun! Not an obstacle for this octogenarian.

4. In defense of criticism

There’s this general feeling nowadays that criticizing something means you’re spreading negativity, like we’re supposed to be part of a like-minded cult or a mental hive like Sibyl that’s perpetually content, even when given a mediocre product. The problem with this season is precisely that: it’s not bad. It’s perfectly mediocre. And it’s not because the old Division 1 isn’t there. It’s not because Akane is in jail (and we still don’t know why). It’s because they couldn’t deal with the elements that they themselves created for this season. The idea of the world of Psycho-Pass spreading is brilliant, the idea of an elite that’s exempt from Sibyl's judgement is brilliant, the idea of an outsider point of view is brilliant, but they overestimated their own abilities and underestimated their viewers. There’s only so much disbelief and rationale we can suspend before we realize they’re playing us like a fiddle. There’s only so much a villain can grin to hint at us that they knew what they were doing all along.

Some argue that this is because the creators want to make Psycho-Pass into a franchise as if that means everything and anything is justified to the point of bastardizing the ideas of the show and reaching the point of absurdity where it parodies itself (you think I didn’t notice those Madeleines?) Is the hope of the creators to bury Psycho-Pass into the ground while they laugh their way to the bank? Why should I care about their money, or how much money they hope to make? I care about the end product and that’s what I base my judgement on.

5. The Shinkane reunion

See, the creators aren't dumb. They knew they had to bait us somehow because this season alone won’t stand. Not only that, but they know us so well they saved their budget to keep the best quality for this scene. I’ll just paste what I said about it yesterday.

I thought it was sweet how Akane backpedals against the door with a tinge of pleasure on her face, like she wants to hear his voice and feel that he’s on the other side. I loved the smiles they gave to each other and how he comforts her. I think it’s evident this is not the first time he visits her.

It was lovely. It would’ve been lovelier if it had been tied to the overarching plot of this season, but that plot barely held itself together. So let’s bask on those few seconds we got until they bait us again to watch the 2020 movie.

#psycho-pass #psycho-pass 3 #review #rant

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bountyofbeads · 4 years

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This is a heartbreaking investigation into how Donald Trump's DISGUSTING 🤢, VILE, DESPICABLE, APPALLING, and DEPRAVED behavior is trickling down in our society and having REAL LIFE EFFECTS(including suicide) on our children and young people. The FISH ROTS from the HEAD. Melania it looks like your 'BE BEST' campaign isn't working out so well. Perhaps you should start by taking your husband's phone away and removing him from public view. PLEASE READ 📖 and SHARE this investigation. TY 🙏🏻🙏🏼🙏🏽🙏🏾🙏🏿

HOW THE BULLY-IN-CHIEF IS TURNING AMERICA NASTIER

By Paul Waldman | Published February 13 at 4:07 PM EST | Washington Post | Posted February 14, 2020 |

Sometimes we overestimate the degree to which a president can change a country, not just altering federal policy but also transforming our national life. But President Trump, there can be little doubt, will have as profound an effect on America as nearly any president in memory. The problem is that he’s doing it in all the worst ways.

As a new report from The Post demonstrates, across the country schools are reporting increased incidents of bullying and harassment directed at minority children in the time since Trump began running for office:

Since Trump’s rise to the nation’s highest office, his inflammatory language — often condemned as racist and xenophobic — has seeped into schools across America. Many bullies now target other children differently than they used to, with kids as young as 6 mimicking the president’s insults and the cruel way he delivers them.

It’s not all kids bullying kids — some of the cases involve teachers telling minority students that Trump will deport them or saying things such as “You’re getting kicked out of my country” (and there are also cases, though much smaller in number, of pro-Trump children being bullied).

Amazing what happens when you take the most repugnant human being in America and put him in the White House.

I exaggerate — but only a bit. I’m sure there are some Americans who are more morally despicable than Trump. Serial killers, for instance. But whether you like his administration’s policies, the president of the United States is a con man, a tax cheat, an accused sexual predator and the most prolific liar in the political history of Planet Earth, among other things.

But he might have been all that and not produced this kind of bullying. In fact, it was utterly predictable, because bullying is at the core of Trump’s being — and his political persona.

When he started running for president in 2015, Trump made clear that not only was he selling an agenda of xenophobia and racism, but he also wanted people to proclaim their hatreds loudly. “I’m so tired of this politically correct crap,” he said, and he wasn’t just talking about campus speech codes. He was angry at the foundational idea behind “political correctness,” that in our daily lives we should try to treat each other with respect.

The hell with that, Trump said. Every day he offered an instruction in the liberating power of being offensive. Not only shouldn’t you let a bunch of scolds tell you what kind of language to use, you should revel in the transgressive thrill of telling other people just what you think of them.

Trump plainly believes that if they see it to their advantage, people with more power should attack, victimize and humiliate those with less power. It’s something he’s known all his life, from when he was a young man being sued with his father for housing discrimination for refusing to rent apartments to black people, to when he was cheating struggling people out of their life savings, to when he refused to pay hundreds of small businesspeople what he owed them because they didn’t have the power to fight him.

In every case the logic was the same: He had more power than them, so he did what he wanted.

This is a man who mocked a reporter for his disability and who said women who accused him of sexual assault were too ugly for him to have victimized.

A different person might ascend to the most powerful position in the world and decide not to concern themselves anymore with petty squabbles. But if anything, Trump has accelerated his feuds, increasing the frequency with which he lashes out at those who are less powerful than him. Some are public figures who may be used to that sort of thing, but others are not.

One victim after another describes the disorienting feeling of being an ordinary person and realizing that the president of the United States is going after you. Just this week, Trump decided to attack the foreperson of the jury in the trial of his friend Roger Stone.

Imagine what it’s like to be her right now. You got the notice in the mail, went to do your civic duty, and now the president is insulting you on Twitter — with the inevitable threats and harassment from his supporters to follow.

And this is critical: Trump’s amen chorus celebrates him for his own bullying and the way he encourages others to be bullies. Recall the 2017 incident in which now-Rep. Greg Gianforte (R-Mont.) body-slammed a journalist to the floor. On Fox News they cheered the assault as “Montana justice,” and host Laura Ingraham tweeted, “Did anyone get his lunch money stolen today and then run to tell the recess monitor?” Trump later appeared at a rally with Gianforte and said, “Any guy that can do a body slam, he is my type!”

That’s the ethos of the Trump era: There are no more standards of morality or appropriate behavior or even simple politeness. There is only his power, and how you have to submit to it.

When Republicans impeached Bill Clinton for lying about an affair, they responded to the argument that it had nothing to do with his official duties by saying the president is a role model, so his behavior matters. They were wrong about a lot, but they were right about that.

The difference is that back then, nobody in Clinton’s party defended him for having an affair, let alone praised him for it. Today, Trump sends the message over and over that power and status should be used to punch down, mock, degrade and humiliate those you don’t like. And his legions of lickspittles laugh and cheer.

So it’s no wonder that Trump, who has the world’s biggest megaphone, has managed to spread his particular poison throughout the country, even to children. It would have a been a surprise if it didn’t happen.

*********

TRUMP’S WORDS, BULLIED KIDS,

SCARRED SCHOOLS .... THE PRESIDENT’S RHETORIC HAS CHANGED THE WAY HUNDREDS OF CHILDREN ARE HARASSED IN AMERICAN CLASSROOMS, The Post found

By Hannah Natanson, John Woodrow Cox and Perry Stein | Published Feb. 13, 2020 | Washington Post | Posted February 14, 2020 |

Two kindergartners in Utah told a Latino boy that President Trump would send him back to Mexico, and teenagers in Maine sneered "Ban Muslims" at a classmate wearing a hijab. In Tennessee, a group of middle- schoolers linked arms, imitating the president's proposed border wall as they refused to let nonwhite students pass. In Ohio, another group of middle-schoolers surrounded a mixed-race sixth-grader and, as she confided to her mother, told the girl: "This is Trump country."

Since Trump's rise to the nation’s highest office, his inflammatory language — often condemned as racist and xenophobic — has seeped into schools across America. Many bullies now target other children differently than they used to, with kids as young as 6 mimicking the president’s insults and the cruel way he delivers them.

Trump’s words, those chanted by his followers at campaign rallies and even his last name have been wielded by students and school staff members to harass children more than 300 times since the start of 2016, a Washington Post review of 28,000 news stories found. At least three-quarters of the attacks were directed at kids who are Hispanic, black or Muslim, according to the analysis. Students have also been victimized because they support the president — more than 45 times during the same period.

Although many hateful episodes garnered coverage just after the election, The Post found that Trump-connected persecution of children has never stopped. Even without the huge total from November 2016, an average of nearly two incidents per school week have been publicly reported over the past four years. Still, because so much of the bullying never appears in the news, The Post’s figure represents a small fraction of the actual total. It also doesn’t include the thousands of slurs, swastikas and racial epithets that aren’t directly linked to Trump but that the president’s detractors argue his behavior has exacerbated.

“It’s gotten way worse since Trump got elected,” said Ashanty Bonilla, 17, a Mexican American high school junior in Idaho who faced so much ridicule from classmates last year that she transferred. “They hear it. They think it’s okay. The president says it. . . . Why can’t they?”

Asked about Trump’s effect on student behavior, White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham noted that first lady Melania Trump — whose “Be Best” campaign denounces online harassment — had encouraged kids worldwide to treat one another with respect.

“She knows that bullying is a universal problem for children that will be difficult to stop in its entirety,” Grisham wrote in an email, “but Mrs. Trump will continue her work on behalf of the next generation despite the media’s appetite to blame her for actions and situations outside of her control.”

Most schools don’t track the Trump bullying phenomenon, and researchers didn’t ask about it in a federal survey of 6,100 students in 2017, the most recent year with available data. One in five of those children, ages 12 to 18, reported being bullied at school, a rate unchanged since the previous count in 2015.

However, a 2016 online survey of over 10,000 kindergarten through 12th-grade educators by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that more than 2,500 “described specific incidents of bigotry and harassment that can be directly traced to election rhetoric,” although the overwhelming majority never made the news. In 476 cases, offenders used the phrase “build the wall.” In 672, they mentioned deportation.

For Cielo Castor, who is Mexican American, the experience at Kamiakin High in Kennewick, Wash., was searing. The day after the election, a friend told Cielo, then a sophomore, that he was glad Trump won because Mexicans were stealing American jobs. A year later, when the president was mentioned during her American literature course, she said she didn't support him and a classmate who did refused to sit next to her.

“‘I don’t want to be around her,’ ” Cielo recalled him announcing as he opted for the floor instead.

Then, on “America night” at a football game in October 2018 during Cielo’s senior year, schoolmates in the student section unfurled a “Make America Great Again” flag. Led by the boy who wouldn’t sit beside Cielo, the teenagers began to chant: “Build — the — wall!”

Horrified, she confronted the instigator.

“You can’t be doing that,” Cielo told him.

He ignored her, she recalled, and the teenagers around him booed her. A cheerleading coach was the lone adult who tried to make them stop.

“I felt like I was personally attacked. And it wasn’t like they were attacking my character. They were attacking my ethnicity, and it’s not like I can do anything about that.”

— Cielo Castor

After a photo of the teenagers with the flag appeared on social media, news about what had happened infuriated many of the school’s Latinos, who made up about a quarter of the 1,700-member student body. Cielo, then 17, hoped school officials would address the tension. When they didn’t, she attended that Wednesday’s school board meeting.

“I don’t feel cared for,” she told the members, crying.

A day later, the superintendent consoled her and the principal asked how he could help, recalled Cielo, now a college freshman. Afterward, school staff members addressed every class, but Hispanic students were still so angry that they organized a walkout.

Some students heckled the protesters, waving MAGA caps at them. At the end of the day, Cielo left the school with a white friend who’d attended the protest; they passed an underclassman she didn’t know.

“Look,” the boy said, “it’s one of those f---ing Mexicans.”

She heard that school administrators — who declined to be interviewed for this article — suspended the teenager who had led the chant, but she doubts he has changed.

Reached on Instagram, the teenager refused to talk about what happened, writing in a message that he didn’t want to discuss the incident “because it is in the past and everyone has moved on from it.” At the end, he added a sign-off: “Trump 2020.”

ust as the president has repeatedly targeted Latinos, so, too, have school bullies. Of the incidents The Post tallied, half targeted Hispanics.

In one of the most extreme cases of abuse, a 13-year-old in New Jersey told a Mexican American schoolmate, who was 12, that “all Mexicans should go back behind the wall.” A day later, on June 19, 2019, the 13-year-old assaulted the boy and his mother, Beronica Ruiz, punching him and beating her unconscious, said the family’s attorney, Daniel Santiago. He wonders to what extent Trump’s repeated vilification of certain minorities played a role.

[ More than 300 Trump-inspired harassment incidents reported by news outlets from 2016-2019]

Anti-Hispanic: 45%

Anti-black: 23%

Anti-Semitic: 7%

Anti-Muslim: 8%

Anti-LGBT: 4%

Anti-Trump: 14%

[ **Note: Some incidents targeted multiple groups and, in other cases,

the ethnicity/gender/religion of the

intended target was unclear. Figures may not precisely add up because of rounding. Source: Washington Post analysis of media reports]

“When the president goes on TV and is saying things like Mexicans are rapists, Mexicans are criminals — these children don’t have the cognitive ability to say, ‘He’s just playing the role of a politician,’ ” Santiago argued. “The language that he’s using matters.”

Ruiz’s son, who is now seeing a therapist, continues to endure nightmares from an experience that may take years to overcome. But experts say that discriminatory language can, on its own, harm children, especially those of color who may already feel marginalized.

“It causes grave damage, as much physical as psychological,” said Elsa Barajas, who has counseled more than 1,000 children in her job at the Los Angeles Department of Mental Health.

As a result, she has seen Hispanic students suffer from sleeplessness, lose interest in school, and experience inexplicable stomach pain and headaches.

For Ashanty Bonilla, the damage began with the response to a single tweet she shared 10 months ago.

“Unpopular opinion,” Ashanty, then 16 and a sophomore at Lewiston High School in rural Idaho, wrote on April 9. “People who support Trump and go to Mexico for vacation really piss me off. Sorry not sorry.”

A schoolmate, who is white, took a screen shot of her tweet and posted it to Snapchat, along with a Confederate flag.

“Unpopular opinion but: people that are from Mexico and come in to America illegally or at all really piss me off,” he added in a message that spread rapidly among students.

The next morning, as Ashanty arrived at school, half a dozen boys, including the one who had written the message, stood nearby.

“You’re illegal. Go back to Mexico,” she heard one of them say. “F--- Mexicans.”

Ashanty, shaken but silent, walked past as a friend yelled at the boys to shut up.

In a 33,000-person town that is 94 percent white, Ashanty, whose father is half-black and whose mother is Mexican American, had always worked to fit in. She attended every football game and won a school spirit award as a freshman. She straightened her hair and dyed it blond, hoping to look more like her friends.

“It’s gotten way worse since Trump got elected. They hear it. They think it’s okay. The president says it. . . . Why can’t they?”

— Ashanty Bonilla

She had known those boys who’d heckled her since they were little. For her 15th birthday the year before, some had danced at her quinceañera.

A friend drove her off campus for lunch, but when they pulled back into the parking lot, Ashanty spotted people standing around her car. A rope had been tied from the back of the Honda Pilot to a pickup truck.

“Republican Trump 2020,” someone had written in the dust on her back window.

Hands trembling, Ashanty tried to untie the rope but couldn’t. She heard the laughing, sensed the cellphone cameras pointed at her. She began to weep.

Lewiston’s principal, Kevin Driskill, said he and his staff met with the boys they knew were involved, making clear that “we have zero tolerance for any kind of actions like that.” The incidents, he suspected, stemmed mostly from ignorance.

“Our lack of diversity probably comes with a lack of understanding,” Driskill said, but he added that he’s encouraged by the school district’s recent creation of a community group — following racist incidents on other campuses — meant to address those issues.

That effort came too late for Ashanty.

Some friends supported her, but others told her the boys were just joking. Don’t ruin their lives.

She seldom attended classes the last month of school. That summer, she started having migraines and panic attacks. In August, amid her spiraling despair, Ashanty swallowed 27 pills from a bottle of antidepressants. A helicopter rushed her to a hospital in Spokane, Wash., 100 miles away.

After that, she began seeing a therapist and, along with the friend who defended her, transferred to another school. Sometimes, she imagines how different life might be had she never written that tweet, but Ashanty tries not to blame herself and has learned to take more pride in her heritage. She just wishes the president understood the harm his words inflict.

Even Trump’s last name has become something of a slur to many children of color, whether they’ve heard it shouted at them in hallways or, in her case, seen it written on the back window of a car.

“It means,” she said, “you don’t belong.”

Three weeks into the 2018-19 school year, Miracle Slover's English teacher, she alleges, ordered black and Hispanic students to sit in the back of the classroom at their Fort Worth high school.

At the time, Miracle was a junior. Georgia Clark, her teacher at Amon Carter-Riverside, often brought up Trump, Miracle said. He was a good person, she told the class, because he wanted to build a wall.

“Every day was something new with immigration,” said Miracle, now 18, who has a black mother and a mixed-race father. “That Trump needs to take [immigrants] away. They do drugs, they bring drugs over here. They cause violence.”

Some students tried to film Clark, and others complained to administrators, but none of it made a difference, Miracle said. Clark, an employee of the Fort Worth system since 1998, kept talking.

Clark, who denies the teenager’s allegations, is one of more than 30 educators across the country accused of using the president’s name or rhetoric to harass students since he announced his candidacy, the Post analysis found.

In Clark’s class, Miracle stayed quiet until late spring 2019. That day, she walked in wearing her hair “puffy,” split into two high buns.

Clark, she said, told her it looked “nappy, like Marge off ‘The Simpsons.’ ” Unable to smother an angry reply, Miracle landed in the principal’s office. An administrator asked her to write a witness statement, and in it, she finally let go, scrawling her frustration across seven pages.

“I just got tired of it,” she said. “I wrote a ton.”

Still, Miracle said, school officials took no action until six weeks later, when Clark, 69, tweeted at Trump — in what she thought were private messages — requesting help deporting undocumented immigrants in Fort Worth schools. The posts went viral, drawing national condemnation. Clark was fired.

“Every day was something new with immigration. That Trump needs to take [immigrants] away. They do drugs, they bring drugs over here. They cause violence.”

— Miracle Slover, referring to Georgia Clark, her former English teacher

Not always, though, are offenders removed from the classroom.

The day after the 2016 election, Donnie Jones Jr.’s daughter was walking down a hallway at her Florida high school when, she says, a teacher warned her and two friends — all sophomores, all black — that Trump would “send you back to Africa.”

The district suspended the teacher for three days and transferred him to another school.

Just a few days later in California, a physical education teacher told a student that he would be deported under Trump. Two years ago in Maine, a substitute teacher referenced the president’s wall and promised a Lebanese American student, “You’re getting kicked out of my country.” More than a year later in Texas, a school employee flashed a coin bearing the word “ICE” at a Hispanic student. “Trump,” he said, “is working on a law where he can deport you.”

Sometimes, Jones said, he doesn’t recognize America.

“People now will say stuff that a couple of years ago they would not dare say,” Jones argued. He fears what his two youngest children, ages 11 and 9, might hear in their school hallways, especially if Trump is reelected.

Now a senior, Miracle doesn’t regret what she wrote about Clark. Although the furor that followed forced Miracle to switch schools and quit her beloved dance team, she would do it again, she said. Clark’s punishment, her public disgrace, was worth it.

About a week before Miracle’s 18th birthday, her mother checked Facebook to find a flurry of notifications. Friends were messaging to say that Clark had appealed her firing, and that the Texas education commissioner had intervened.

Reluctant to spoil the birthday, Jowona Powell waited several days to tell her daughter, who doesn’t use social media.

Citing a minor misstep in the school board’s firing process, the commissioner had ordered Carter-Riverside to pay Clark one year’s salary — or give the former teacher her job back.

[A snapshot of the harassment in 2019 ( SEE WEBSITE)]

In the three months after the president tweeted on July 14, 2019, that four minority congresswomen should "go back” to the countries they came from, more than a dozen incidents of Trump-related school bullying — including several that used his exact language — were reported in the press.

Jordyn Covington stood when she heard the jeers.

“Monkeys!” “You don’t belong here.” “Go back to where you came from!”

From atop the bleachers that day in October, Jordyn, 15, could see her Piper High School volleyball teammates on the court in tears. The sobbing varsity players were all black, all from Kansas City, Kan., like her.

Who was yelling? Jordyn wondered.

She peered at the students in the opposing section. Most of them were white.

“It was just sad,” said Jordyn, who plays for Piper’s junior varsity team. “And why? Why did it have to happen to us? We weren’t doing anything. We were simply playing volleyball.”

Go back? To where? Jordyn, her friends and Piper’s nine black players were all born in the United States. “Just like everyone else,” Jordyn said. “Just like white people.”

“It was just sad. And why? Why did it have to happen to us? We weren’t doing anything. We were simply playing volleyball.”

— Jordyn Covington

The game, played at an overwhelmingly white rural high school, came three months after Trump tweeted that four minority congresswomen should “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

It was Jordyn’s first experience with racism, she said. But it was not the first time that fans at a school sports game had used the president to target students of color.

The Post found that players, parents or fans have used his name or words in at least 48 publicly reported cases, hurling hateful slogans at students competing in elementary, middle and high school games in 26 states.

The venom has been shouted on football gridirons and soccer fields, on basketball and volleyball courts. Nearly 90 percent of incidents identified by The Post targeted players and fans of color, or teams fielded by schools with large minority populations. More than half focused on Hispanics.

In one of the earliest examples, students at a Wisconsin high school soccer game in April 2016 chanted “Trump, build a wall!” at black and Hispanic players. A few months later, students at a high school basketball game in Missouri turned their backs and hoisted a Trump/Pence campaign sign as the majority-black opposing team walked onto the court. In 2017, two high school girls in Alabama showed up at a football game pep rally with a sign reading “Put the Panic back in Hispanic” and a “Trump Make America Great Again” banner.

In late 2017, two radio hosts announcing a high school basketball game in Iowa were caught on a hot mic describing Hispanic players as “español people.” “As Trump would say,” one broadcaster suggested, “go back where they came from.”

Both announcers were fired. After the volleyball incident in Kansas, though, the fallout was more muted. The opposing school district, Baldwin City, commissioned an investigation and subsequently asserted that there was “no evidence” of racist jeers. Administrators from Piper’s school system dismissed that claim and countered with a statement supporting their students.

An hour after the game, Jordyn fought to keep her eyes dry as she boarded the team bus home. When white players insisted that everything would be okay, she slipped in ear buds and selected “my mood playlist,” a collection of somber nighttime songs. She wiped her cheeks.

Jordyn had long ago concluded that Trump didn’t want her — or “anyone who is just not white” — in the United States. But hearing other students shout it was different.

Days later, her English teacher assigned an essay asking about “what’s right and what’s wrong.” At first, Jordyn thought she might write about the challenges transgender people face. Then she had another idea.

“The students were making fun of us because we were different, like our hair and skin tone,” Jordyn wrote. “How are you gonna be mad at me and my friends for being black. . . . I love myself and so should all of you.”

She read it aloud to the class. She finished, then looked up. Everyone began to applaud.

t's not just young Trump supporters who torment classmates because of who they are or what they believe. As one boy in North Carolina has come to understand, kids who oppose the president — kids like him — can be just as vicious.

By Gavin Trump’s estimation, nearly everyone at his middle school in Chapel Hill comes from a Democratic family. So when the kids insist on calling him by his last name — even after he demands that they stop — the 13-year-old knows they want to provoke him, by trying to link the boy to the president they despise.

In fifth grade, classmates would ask if he was related to the president, knowing he wasn’t. They would insinuate that Gavin agreed with the president on immigration and other polarizing issues.

“They saw my last name as Trump, and we all hate Trump, so it was like, ‘We all hate you,’ ” he said. “I was like, ‘Why are you teasing me? I have no relationship to Trump at all. We just ended up with the same last name.’ ”

Beyond kids like Gavin, the Post analysis also identified dozens of children across the country who were bullied, or even assaulted, because of their allegiance to the president.

School staff members in at least 18 states, from Washington to West Virginia, have picked on students for wearing Trump gear or voicing support for him. Among teenagers, the confrontations have at times turned physical. A high school student in Northern California said that after she celebrated the 2016 election results on social media, a classmate accused her of hating Mexicans and attacked her, leaving the girl with a bloodied nose. Last February, a teenager at an Oklahoma high school was caught on video ripping a Trump sign out of a student’s hands and knocking a red MAGA cap off his head.

And in the nation’s capital — where only 4 percent of voters cast ballots for Trump in 2016 — an outspoken conservative teenager said she had to leave her prestigious public school because she felt threatened.

In a YouTube video, Jayne Zirkle, a high school senior, said that the trouble started when classmates at the School Without Walls discovered an online photo of her campaigning for Trump. She said students circulated the photo, harassed her online and called her a white supremacist.

A D.C. school system official said they investigated the allegations and allowed Jayne to study from home to ensure she felt safe.

“A lot of people who I thought were my best friends just all of a sudden totally turned their backs on me,” Jayne said. “People wouldn’t even look at me or talk to me.”

For Gavin, the teasing began in fourth grade, soon after Trump announced his candidacy.

After more than a year of schoolyard taunts, Gavin decided to go by his mother’s last name, Mather, when he started middle school. The teenager has been proactive, requesting that teachers call him by the new name, but it gets trickier, and more stressful, when substitutes fill in. He didn’t legally change his last name, so “Trump” still appears on the roster.

The teasing has subsided, but the switch wasn’t easy. Gavin likes his real last name and feared that changing it would hurt his father’s feelings. His dad understood, but for Gavin, the guilt remains.

“This is my name,” he said. “And I am abandoning my name.”

Maritza Avalos knows what's coming. It's 2020. The next presidential election is nine months away. She remembers what happened during the last one, when she was just 11.

“Pack your bags,” kids told her. “You get a free trip to Mexico.”

She’s now a freshman at Kamiakin High, the same Washington state school where her older sister, Cielo, confronted the teenagers who chanted “Build the wall” at a football game in late 2018. Maritza, 14, assumes the taunts that accompanied Trump’s last campaign will intensify with this one, too.

“I try not to think about it,” she said, but for educators nationwide, the ongoing threat of politically charged harassment has been impossible to ignore.

In response, schools have canceled mock elections, banned political gear, trained teachers, increased security, formed student-led mediation groups and created committees to develop anti-discrimination policies.

In California, the staff at Riverside Polytechnic High School has been preparing for this year’s presidential election since the day after the last one. On Nov. 9, 2016, counselors held a workshop in the library for students to share their feelings. Trump supporters feared they would be singled out for their beliefs, while girls who had heard the president brag about sexually assaulting women worried that boys would be emboldened to do the same to them.

“We treated it almost like a crisis,” said Yuri Nava, a counselor who has since helped expand a student club devoted to improving the school’s culture and climate.

Riverside, which is 60 percent Hispanic, also offers three courses — African American, Chicano and ethnic studies — meant to help students better understand one another, Nava said. And instead of punishing students when they use race or politics to bully, counselors first try to bring them together with their victims to talk through what happened. Often, they leave as friends.

In Gambrills, Md., Arundel High School has taken a similar approach. Even before a student was caught scribbling the n-word in his notebook in early 2017, Gina Davenport, the principal, worried about the effect of the election’s rhetoric. At the school, where about half of the 2,200 students are minorities, she heard their concerns every day.

But the racist slur, discovered the same month as Trump’s inauguration, led to a concrete response.

A “Global Community Citizenship” class, now mandatory for all freshmen in the district, pushes students to explore their differences.

A recent lesson delved into Trump’s use of Twitter.

“The focus wasn’t Donald Trump, the focus was listening: How do we convey our ideas in order for someone to listen?” Davenport said. “We teach that we can disagree with each other without walking away being enemies — which we don’t see play out in the press, or in today’s political debates.”

Since the class debuted in fall 2017, disciplinary referrals for disruption and disrespect have decreased by 25 percent each school year, Davenport said. Membership in the school’s speech and debate team has doubled.

The course has eased Davenport’s anxiety heading into the next election. She doesn’t expect an uptick in racist bullying.

“Civil conversation,” she said. “The kids know what that means now.”

Many schools haven’t made such progress, and on those campuses, students are bracing for more abuse.

Maritza’s sister, Cielo, told her to stand up for herself if classmates use Trump’s words to harass her, but Maritza is quieter than her sibling. The freshman doesn’t like confrontation.

She knows, though, that eventually someone will say something — about the wall, maybe, or about how kids who look like her don’t belong in this country — and when that day comes, the girl hopes that she’ll be strong.

______

Julie Tate contributed to this report.

______

What is your school doing to stop politically charged bullying?

A Washington Post reporter may contact you with additional questions. We will not publish your name or what you submit below without first contacting you. We offer options to securely send information to our journalists using encrypted messaging services and email. To find out how, please go to website to fill out form.

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deafblindblast · 4 years

Text

Anti-Asian Racism in the Time of COVID-19

Link: https://youtu.be/LELS_izhnag

[video description/transcript (by Leang Ngov):

Black background with white bold font text, centered, that reads, “Anti-Asian Racism in the Time of COVID-19

Black fade out

Black background with white bold font text, centered, that reads, “Content warning: Graphic Images and Descriptions of Violence”

Noel King is a deaf queer Korean-American adoptee cisgender womxn with black short hair. She wears a dark plum purple long sleeved shirt. She sits on a black plastic chair with white wall in the background.

“Dear friends, family and community. We need your attention.

With this COVID-19 pandemic happening right now, you know that viruses do not discriminate against people. But people can. We are seeing the rapid global spread of what?

Anti Asian Racism. Means violence, bullying, assaults, harassments happening against Asian people, no matter if from China or not.”

background: light purple wall; Kimberly, light-skinned Korean American, wears black long sleeved sweatshirt and red glasses. Her long brown hair is in a ponytail. She is standing in front of a light purple wall.

“From schools, commutes to work, trips to the grocery store, Asian-Americans have experienced verbal and physical attacks with getting dirty looks, being coughed at, spat on, blocked from getting in motels, gas stations, getting services, Asian restaurants and businesses suffer huge loss of customers and money.

This is also called xenophobia (black font text that reads, “Xenophobia” is shown on upper left - this text pops up as Kimberly fingerspells the term and fades away) and sinophobia (black font text that reads, “Sinophobia” is shown on upper left - this text pops up as Kimberly fingerspells the term and fades away.

Means what? Fear and hatred of foreigners, people from different cultures. A negative sentiment against China, its people, overseas Chinese, or Chinese culture.”

Background: Lina, a light-skinned Chinese-Taiwanese-American cis woman, appears in a solid black top. Her hair is pulled back in a low ponytail. She is seated on a stool (not shown in this video) with a white wall as the backdrop.

“Federal law enforcement/FBI recently announced a warning of hate crimes against Asian people that is increasing in the US. Online reports on racial & xenophobic attacks counted more than 1,000 incidents in less than two weeks. Also, there are estimates of an average of 100 per day all over the country, from LA to NYC to Texas. Surprising fact is that 61% of those reports were from non-Chinese people.

(cropped close up image of a SouthEast Asian male with his face stitched showed up in upper left - this image remains in the video as Lina retells this incident) In West Texas, a 19 year old teenager stabbed a Southeast Asian family members and slashed across their face, including a 2 year old and a 6 year old. Why? He thought the family is Chinese and infecting people with coronavirus.”

Nayo is a deaf queer Korean adoptee cisgender womxn with black short hair. She is wearing a black v-neck long sleeved shirt and is seated on a dark brown/black high stool in front of dark gray drawn curtains.

“A 16 year old Asian boy was bullied & physically assaulted by high schoolers in California and ended up in the Emergency Room.

(On the upper left, a cropped image that is split into two images is being shown. Left split is close up image of an elder Chinese man visibly distressed; right image of an elder Chinese man in black jacket and pants with light grey hat, holding a white bag in the middle of a couple of folks surrounding him) A 68 year old elder Chinese man was robbed, attacked and was struck in the back of his head in SF while collecting recycled cans.

(On the upper left, three images shown in one image is being shown. Left image is of male in black clothes in the subway and right image is of Chinese woman with orange face mask and black hooded jacket. In the lower image that is inbetween these two images shows the physical alternation between these two individuals) An Asian woman was attacked out of the blue and was kicked, punched & hit with an umbrella by a man in NYC at the subway station for wearing a face mask, calling her a “diseased bitch.”

(On the upper left, an image of three individuals surrounding a Filipno man in a store) A Filipino man in Bay Area California was harassed because he coughed at Target.

(On the upper left, an image is split into three images is shown. Left image is a close up image of the person holding a camera, while holding a sanitizer with another hand; with a partial view of an elderly Korean woman. Middle image is a close up image of an elderly Korean woman being harrassed. Right image is a close up image of a person holding a camera attempting to sanitize an elderly Korean woman within face distance) An elderly Korean woman was chased around and was told to “Sanitize Your Ass!”

(On the upper left, an image is of a screenshot from a night vision camera that shows a woman putting out a trash in front of the house with an assailant wearing a hooded jacket behind her and is pouring something on her. This image is shown as Nayo narrarates this incident) Just outside of her Brooklyn home, an Asian woman suffered burns on her face, body, and hands after an unknown assailant approached her from behind and poured an unknown substance over her head.

Many stories like this are happening all over US reported in various media. You know, this is not new?”

Janele, a Flilipina American womxn, is wearing a black long sleeve with her hair wrapped in a bun and strands of hair in front of her face. She is also wearing brown acrylic geometric earrings. Janele is signing with a light brown wall behind her.

“For more than 200 years, Asian Americans have been denied equal rights, experienced harassment, had their rights revoked, and imprisoned for no justifiable reason, physically attacked, and murdered. The last 20 years or so has seen Asian Americans become the fastest-growing targets for hate crimes and violence.

Throughout U.S. history, whenever there is a problem, political or economic like the public health crisis or, in wartime, there always seems to be the need for a scapegoat to unjustifiably blame and target with severe hostility. And, certainly, that's been the experience of Asian-Americans, Muslims, Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities.

Aside from being blamed, Black and Brown bodies have been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic. We need to acknowledge as well that more Black and Brown people are dying from COVID-19.”

Anna is a relatively light-skinned Filipino/Chinese/Taiwanese/Spanish queer cisgender deaf female immigrant with long, dark curly hair parted in the middle. She has on red lipstick and a gray v-neck sweater and is seated on a brown/black high stool in front of dark gray drawn curtains.

“Because of the stereotype of Asian Americans as quiet, weak, and powerless, more and more Asian Americans are victimized, not just today but for many, many years.

(On the upper left, an image is of a comic strip that demonstrates Uncle Sam holding up a government bill while kicking Chinese people, which were drawn as offensive caricature, off the cliff.) For example, Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was passed to forbid Chinese people from entering the country, and it lasted for a total of 20 years.

(On the upper left, an image of an older, faded black background with white handwritten text that reads, “x Get rid of all Filipinos or we’ll burn this town down) The Watsonville Riots of 1930 involved white men committing violent acts against Filipinos and killing Fermin Tobera.

(On the upper left, B&W image of Japanese Americans being imprisoned at the internment camps is shown here) During World World Two in 1942, about 120,000 Japanese Americans were imprisoned in the internment camps for about four years.

(On the upper left, B&W image of Vincent Chin smiling for the camera is shown here) In 1982, Vincent Chin, a Chinese American was beaten to death by two White men who were enraged by the Japanese auto industry causing the closure of their car plants. They assumed Vincent is Japanese. They had no jail time at all.”

Background: light grey wall; Leang, Khmer-American womxn, is wearing a dark grey sweatshirt with medium length dark brown hair down. She signs as she is standing in front of a light grey wall.

“I am sure it is also happening to people we already know, and who are in the signing community.

The Covid-19 spread is already scary for everyone but in the last two months, with the increasing violence toward Asian Americans, is it justified to add additional fear in our lives as Asian individuals because the virus happened to be first discovered in China? Or because President Trump declared this disease to be called Chinese Virus or Kung Flu?

So how does attacking Asian people help stop the spread of the coronavirus? Does blaming us for what is happening to us help you feel better?”

(this section has a brief compiled video clip, which shows an individual signing a word, to demonstrate this sentence: “No, I am not a virus.”)

Nayo: “No,”; Kimberly, “I am,”; Lina: “not”; Desiree: “a virus”; Anna: “No,”; Noel: “I am,”; Leang: “not,’; Janele: “a virus.”

The narrator, Desiree, is a Chinese-Vietnamese Deaf Amerian cisgender womxn with dark borwn long hair and she is wearing a black top with ¾ sleeves. Behind Desiree is a black background and she is sitting on her light grey chair.

“So there've been over 100 hate crimes reported a day against Asian Americans.

More than 260 civil rights groups demanded Congress to step up in countering this rise of violence. Means, we do need more leaders out there to take a stand in solidarity to defend the safety of Asian Americans’ lives. Our community must come together to raise the alarms about racism that is actually contagious and put a stop to it. Xenophobia will not make our communities safer. Listen to your doctor and public health officials.

When you see it happening in public, do you choose to be a bystander and turn your head away? It might be easy for you to dismiss racism when it does not impact you. But this is about people’s safety and it is affecting our lives.

We need to address Anti-Asian racism as a society.”

background: white wall; Korean-American female with short black hair and dark purple long sleeve shirt is sitting on dark brown chair.

“Remember, the danger is if we don't speak up for each other, the number of people being targeted is going to be expanding and if they don't intervene, that kind of violence or that kind of incident becomes normalized. No, we are not the virus. Hate is the virus. If you step up to put a stop to this to show that the harassment and attacks should not be tolerated, together we can move forward to heal as a safer and healthier community.” (this section has a brief compiled video clip, which shows an individual signing a word, to demonstrate this sentence: ““With love / and hope / and justice / and solidarity, Your Asian / friends, / family, / community””) Kimberly: “With love,”; Lina: “and hope,”; Nayo: “and justice,”; Janele: “and solidarity,”; Anna, “Your Asian,”; Leang: “friends,”; Desiree: “family,”; and Noel: “community.” (slowly fading to black with white font text for rolling credits which reads, “In order of appearance: Noel King Kimberly Han Lina Hou Nayo Lim Franck Janele Alarcon Anna Lim Franck Leang Ngov Desiree Duong. *Thank you so much for your collaboration & participation in this video * Dragon Grrrls Production Written & Edited: Nayo Lim Franck Anna Lim Franck Leang Ngov Lina Hou © April 15, 2020]

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