A recent edition of The New York Times's “On Politics” newsletter dealt with the latest racist atrocity committed by a Republican: “Republican in Ohio Senate Primary Spoke Offensively About Asians.” The subhead: “Mike Gibbons, a leading contender to succeed Senator Rob Portman, made the comments in a 2013 podcast on doing business in China.”
Of course, they used what Gibbons said to proclaim the GOP has a problem with Asian people.
Blake Hounshell and Leah Askarinam huffed:
The leading Republican candidate in the Ohio Senate primary employed offensive stereotypes about Asian people in a 2013 podcast, citing a widely discredited book, “The Bell Curve,” that has drawn allegations of racism and sloppy research.
The Senate candidate, Mike Gibbons, a financier who has poured millions of dollars of his own money into his campaign, made the comments during a discussion of how to do business in China. The remarks, published here for the first time, come as Republican candidates grapple with how to address a topic that has inflamed their voters, many of whom blame Beijing for a coronavirus pandemic that Donald Trump has referred to as the “Chinese virus.”
Note: The above link went to a ridiculously defensive Times story that attempted to spin the factually accurate description of the coronavirus as a “Chinese virus” as racist.
Going on, they added:
And though Gibbons hasn’t used that terminology, his decade-old comments on China and Asian people could draw fresh scrutiny to a candidate who has received little national media attention despite running in one of the marquee races in this year’s midterm elections.
It will if the Times has anything to say about it, especially during an election year when the Democrats are going to need all the help they can get (click “expand”):
“I’ve often thought that when I’ve run into Asians they’re all -- you know, if you’ve ever read ‘The Bell Curve,’ it’s a book, a very controversial book, I can’t even remember who wrote, I think his name is Murray wrote this book,” Gibbons said in the Nov. 3, 2013, podcast, according to a transcript of his comments reviewed by The New York Times. He was referring to Charles Murray, a co-author of the 1994 book.
Gibbons continued: “And it said that the smartest people in the world as far as measurable I.Q. were Ashkenazi Jews. And then right below them was basically everybody in China, India and, you know, throughout the Asian countries.”
About a minute later, Gibbons, who earned a master’s degree from the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University, described being in a class with “mostly Asians” during graduate school.
Gibbons indeed spoke clumsily to a podcast nine years ago, but it was hardly hateful, much a hate crime.
Yet the paper actually mentioned, for example, a racially motivated hate crime committed in New York City by a black man against an Asian woman as if the incidents were connected (click “expand”):
Russell Jeung, the co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate, a group that monitors incidents of discrimination against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, said Gibbons’s description of Asian intelligence was “part of the dehumanizing rhetoric around AAPIs that has contributed to the surge in racism that harms us today.”
(....)
The pandemic has also been accompanied by an alarming surge in attacks on Asian Americans across the United States. In the most recent example, in Yonkers, N.Y., a security camera captured a man assaulting a 67-year-old woman of Asian descent inside the entry to an apartment building. The video shows him hitting her more than 125 times, stomping on her crumpled body and spitting on her in what law enforcement officials said was a racially motivated incident.
We're being slightly facetious, but it's almost as if the attacker, a 42-year-old black man named Tammel Esco, was motivated to hit an Asian woman 125 times because Gibbons talked about The Bell Curve or because Trump used to say “Chinese virus."
