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this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2023
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the_dunk_tank
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It's the dunk tank.
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I have very mixed feelings about the Roof Koreans. While their imagery has definitely be coopted as a canard for the fantasy of anti-black violence, there has also been some recent attempts to invoke them as the only well-known example of Asian-American armed self-defense in the background of increasingly fanatical anti-Asian racism in the US.
I don't like the fact that they're being used to stoke inter-minority violence, but I also don't like the fact that some people are using them to try to convince Asian-Americans against the necessity of organizing and arming themselves.
Weren't they business owners that didn't want their shops damaged or raided in the riots?
Yeah, a lot of them were. That being said, many of them were small business owners that would not have been much better off materially than people we would all consider to be workers. Asian Americans were also subjected to systematic discrimination in employment, housing, financing, etc which meant that they had no choice but to open up small businesses in economically poor areas.
But of course, that's not to minimize the fact that black people were justified in being outraged by the failure of justice for Latasha Harlins and the beating of Rodney King.
Idk, it's hard to drill down into this because it inevitably just results in more unhelpful interminority conflict that only benefits whitey via divide and conquer.
weren't the shop owners also real shitty to their black customers?
Some Korean shop owners were certainly racist towards black customers, but I've never read any accounts which suggest the protestors were selectively targeting racist shop owners. On the contrary, most accounts I've read seem to suggest people were taking out their anger on Koreans in general.
In principle, I think that collective punishment is wrong. I don't see much conceptual difference between targeting all Korean stores because some owners were racist and targeting Muslims because of a terror attack carried out by one group of islamist radicals.
Taking your second paragraph all the way back around highlights one of the major problems with the Settlers thesis.
Yeah, but the main difference between Koreans and white settlers is that Koreans didn't shape the broken legal and government systems which perpetuate oppression. A Korean person killed a black child, which is utterly indefensible. However, it probably wasn't a Korean judge and a Korean jury who let her off with a slap on the wrist. Wasn't Korean people making the rules that ghettoized African Americans. Wasn't Korean people refusing to hire black folks and Korean folks alike or refusing to give them loans, etc etc.
The white settler has the power as a group to make rules. That means that they also have the collective power to wield said rules to turn minority groups against each other.
Sure, but that's the whole issue with collective punishment -- you're punishing individuals who may have done little to nothing wrong for the crimes "their group" broadly causes. It's an enormous contradiction to say on one hand that the U.S. is a white bourgeois democracy where ordinary people have basically no influence on government, but on the other hand say every powerless white person is accountable for the actions of that bourgeois democracy.
There's a similar contradiction with correctly pointing out that race is a social construct explicitly crafted to divide disenfranchised groups who might otherwise challenge bourgeois rule, but then turning around and saying "actually ordinary white people do have more in common with the white bourgeois than they do with their fellow workers."