The Empty Quarter
Civil Rights icon John Lewis — knowing his place in history — instructed the New York Times to publish these “Last Words” on July 30, 2020, the day of his funeral: “When you see something that’s not right, you must say something.” Well, everyday — day in and day out — Asian Awareness sees something in the New York Times that is not right, or more accurately, we don’t see something that is not right.
White Americans make up 56% of the U.S. population. Black Americans make up 12% of the U.S. population. Hispanics make up 18% of the U.S. population and we Asians make up 7% of the U.S. population. Together, Hispanics and Asians make up one quarter of the U.S. population. Yet, in the New York Times, news stories about American achievement, accomplishments and special features break down very markedly different. In these human interest stories illuminating noteworthy accomplishments, whites are featured 48% of the time, Blacks 48% of the time; and Hispanics and Asians together account for less than 2% of print content. Over the past decade, the Black-white ratio has changed a small bit but the Hispanic and Asian American lack of inclusion has been a constant. In fact, as America’s Hispanic and Asian population has increased, their percentage of appearances in media and advertising has in fact decreased. So, either Hispanics and Asians are contributing next to nothing to this country’s advancement, benefit and culture or something else is afoot.
Yes, granted, the New York Times is an extreme example of “progressive” bias, but it is the long-established “newspaper of record” the presumed archival record of significant events and consequently many other media outlets follow its lead. In geography, one-fourth, one quarter of Saudi Arabia has no oil, no water, and no people. This one-fourth is referred to as Rub’al Khali — translated as the Empty Quarter: a vast wasteland. When it comes to our Quarter of the U.S. population — Hispanics and Asian Americans — both media and television are a vast wasteland. We are 25% of the U.S. population that is pretty much out of the picture and out of print as far as most U.S. media is concerned. And by consistently diminishing Hispanic and Asian American appearances, they implicitly signal we are a lesser part of the American fabric. This is the very definition of structural racism. And as long as this prejudice is tolerated, it will continue. In any other industry, such a pattern of bias would not only be considered loathsome but would invite legal recourse — but because of the First Amendment, the New York Times can discriminate against Hispanics and Asian Americans with complete impunity and no recourse.
But as contemptible as the New York Times and most other mainstream media are in their marginalization and omission of Hispanics and Asians, they are equal opportunity justice warriors when compared to the advertising industry. Here the breakdown is 49% of screen time in ads are whites, 49% of screen time in ads are Blacks and less then 1% of screen time for Hispanics and Asians combined. Moreover, Hispanics and Asian Americans are less likely to be shown working or portrayed as “smart” than Blacks or whites and more likely to be shown in background, subservient or auxiliary roles. These are not our numbers but remarkably from the New York Times itself [June 27, 2020] “Advertisers Grapple with Race.”
When we confronted the New York Times and other major mainstream media outlets about their shortchanging diversity and inclusion of Hispanics and Asian Americans, all we heard back was crickets and dead silence. But when we contacted the nation’s major advertisers, to our surprise, almost all responded — on condition of anonymity, of course — but responded nonetheless. Advertising agencies more than any other industry (with perhaps the exception of life insurance actuarial tables) base their entire industry on who and why. This is what they do all day long. Figure out who to put on screen and why.
When questioned about this exclusion, the reasons the ad agencies proffered pretty much fell into 3 categories. One, Hispanics and Asian Americans just don’t apply themselves and don’t apply for these positions. Two, the squeaky wheel gets the grease defense: Hispanics and Asians are compliant, don’t complain and thus don’t get these parts. But the third reason given was the most common answer: socio-economic identity politics. That Blacks and whites will preferably purchase products featuring Blacks and whites but Hispanics and Asians exhibit no such prejudice. Advertisers say they simply follow the data they’ve been collecting for decades, day in day out, year in year out. Next time you read a newspaper or watch TV, just be AWARE. One advertising executive told us: “If you’re Black or white, you’re all right. If you’re yellow or brown, stick around and around and around.”
As evidence of this discrimination, the ad agencies cited politics. Cities with predominate Hispanic populations will elect Blacks or whites for mayor. But cities with predominate Black populations have NEVER elected an Hispanic mayor. They have occasionally elected a white mayor but NEVER an Hispanic or Asian American. We couldn’t believe this could be true so we checked out the demographics. At first we thought “well, that must be because the city had an overwhelming Black population.” But no, those cities ALWAYS elected Black or white mayors. So we focused ONLY on those cities with majority or plurality Hispanic populations. And to our amazement, the ad agencies were right.
Here is a list of those cities with their demographics. These are just a few examples. Denver is 22% Black and 44% Hispanic and has a Black male mayor. Denver has never had an Hispanic mayor. San Francisco which is 15% Hispanic and 33% Asian has never had an Hispanic mayor. Currently the mayor is a Black woman. Blacks make up only 6% of San Francisco’s population. El Paso is 83% Hispanic and has a white male mayor. Stockton is 40% Hispanic and 22% Asian and 12% Black and has never had an Hispanic or Asian mayor and currently has a male Black mayor. Houston is 45% Hispanic and 22% Black and has never had an Hispanic mayor and currently the mayor is a Black male. San Antonio is 63% Hispanic and 6% Black and currently has a Black female mayor. Chicago is 32% Black and 32% Hispanic. No Hispanic has ever come within a mile of being mayor and currently a Black woman is mayor. Sacramento is 30% Hispanic and 20% Asian and 12% Black and has never had an Hispanic nor Asian mayor and currently the mayor is a white male but before him the mayor was Black. If you need more convincing look up Kansas City, Little Rock, Fresno, Charlotte, St. Paul and New Orleans.
But what the advertising agencies didn’t tell us, and what we soon started to notice, is another pattern. Although many majority white cities have elected Blacks for mayor, no majority white city has ever elected an Hispanic or Asian for mayor. Numbers don’t lie. Most Blacks and whites — especially self-professed liberal whites — will vote for each other but not for Hispanics nor Asians. Call it Hispanic Panic or Yellow Peril or whatever. The numbers and the statistics and the data don’t lie. Conversely, Hispanics and Asian Americans carry no such race preferential voting bias against either Blacks nor whites and will vote for a candidate not based on their race. Look at El Paso with a 83% Hispanic majority electing a white mayor.
21% of Hispanic voters participated in Black Lives Matter marches. Less than 1% — a statistical zero — of Black voters marched in Hispanic and Asian Immigrants’ Rights marches. Although Hispanics outnumber Blacks in the U.S. by a 2:1 margin; by comparison, in the U.S. Congress, Blacks outnumber Hispanics nearly 4:1 [153 Blacks, 41 Hispanics}. By population numbers, Blacks should have half as many representatives as Hispanics and Hispanics should have twice their current number. Both Blacks and whites are “over-represented” in Congress and both Hispanics and Asians are far, far underrepresented.
So why do Hispanics and Asians always draw the short straws? There are two factors at play here. One, Hispanics and Asian Americans — as mentioned earlier — don’t vote as a bloc in favor of their own or any other race. And two, gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is the manipulation of a Congressional district boundary to establish an unfair political advantage for a particular group. Through diluting and packing, Hispanics and Asian Americans have been disfavored and disenfranchised more than any other group. This is a zero-sum game. You cannot create more Congressional seats by law. Gerrymandering is the primest example of conscious bias: knee-capping one group to favor another. It is the Jim Crow of the 21st Century.
So if Black voters ALWAYS favor those of their own identity then why shouldn’t Hispanics and Asians do likewise and our country ends up degenerating into a balkanized Lebanon-style nation. Just about now a little history lesson is in order. Why is it that Blacks in America vote overwhelming monolithically as Joe Biden on August 5, 2020, correctly claimed they do? Blacks are today the Democratic Party’s most reliable voters but this was not always the case.
During the 19th century, Black Americans dutifully voted Republican — the party of Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator. The Democratic Party was the party of the Ku Klux Klan and white segregationist racists. So what happened? Between 1870 and 1935 — for 65 years — EVERY Black member of Congress was a Republican. At the beginning of the 20th century as Blacks in the South started moving north in the Great Migration, Black politicians such as Arthur Mitchell and William Dawson quickly noticed that in the North, the Republican Party was controlled by wealthy White Anglo-Saxon Protestants — the WASPs.
The Democratic Party was controlled by white ethnic Catholic inner city Democrats — mostly Irish and Italians. These early Black political leaders realized that it would be easier to unseat the white ethnic Catholics than to unseat the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment. These Black political leaders saw that the only way they could gain real political power would be by switching their party affiliation from Republican to Democratic. And they did. In 1935 Arthur Mitchell became the first Black Democratic Congressman. Soon followed by William Dawson and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Then for the next 56 years, between 1935 and 1991, EVERY Black member of Congress was a Democrat. So, for the sake of gaining political power, they switched from Lincoln’s party to the party of the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacists. This was a remarkable achievement to get nearly every Black voter in America to switch from the Republican to Democratic Party.
An example of this dynamic is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s family. Pelosi’s father, the mayor of Baltimore, was one of those Catholic Italian inner city Democrats replaced by formerly Republican Black converts to the Democratic Party. Pelosi seeing no future for herself there moved to California to begin her political career. And with her, Pelosi brought a deep understanding of machine politics. Pelosi came up with a successful formula to win back Congress: run suburban, ex-military lesbians. That way she figured she would get the woman’s vote, the suburban vote, the gay vote and the military vote. Not all of those votes, but usually just a 5% swing will win an election and Pelosi knows this of course.
On August 9, 2020, the Sunday New York Times ran a special Styles front page and two additional pages article on Katie Hill, the California Democratic Congresswoman who resigned after a sex scandal with a young female staffer subordinate. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — always the bearer of the double standard — didn’t want Hill to resign even though Hill had violated House rules which Pelosi was instrumental in drafting. (Mistakenly assuming they would only be used against men.) Pelosi’s daughter even gifted Hill her dog. Not once in the thousands of words in the article about Ms. Hill and her career was the fact that she was replaced by an Hispanic Republican male ever even mentioned. Why is that? Which reader is so naïve as to believe that this omission of her replacement was not deliberate.
Beverly D’Angelo addresses this phenomenon in her book White Fragility. To prevent a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, a range of defensive moves is triggered by white liberals. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as guilt and behavior leaving the stress-inducing situations either by supporting Black causes or buying products with Black spokespersons. White liberals not wanting to be seen as racists will typically support Black candidates but not Hispanics nor Asians. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white liberal equilibrium. These are people with only vague convictions of their own but will go with whatever the current fashion is to not disrupt and possibly jeopardize their own privilege. They will follow whatever is in vogue to maintain social capital. They don’t want to be on the wrong side of a PR headache. They request an ally cookie so they can get a virtue signaling pass. They don’t want to stick their necks out and ruffle any feathers lest it jeopardize their children’s white privilege. By supporting Black Lives Matter these self-professed “Progressive” whites with BLM signs in their yards aren’t giving up any of their privileges. They’re securing their own and their children’s privileges while giving up the hopes of working-class Hispanics and Asian Americans.
Both New York City mayor Bill de Blasio’s son Dante and President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, were accepted into Yale and Harvard respectively. Both were mediocre students with low SAT scores who scored big because of de Blasio’s virtue signaling by supporting progressive causes dear to academia and Kushner’s father making illegal contributions to the Democratic party which he later went to prison for. Now, de Blasio wants to get rid of SAT scores because Asian American kids score too high. De Blasio is a textbook example of someone who doesn’t want to give up his own privilege just that of working class Asian Americans.
Before being arrested for child sex trafficking, Ghislaine Maxwell, 58, had already rebranded herself as an oceanic conservationist. No matter that she had no background, no education, no expertise, she founded the Terra Mar project and appointed herself chief executive. It had no offices and gave no grants. But no matter — what she did have was a contact list to friends like Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz and Jeffery Epstein and she insinuated herself to the Council on Foreign Relations (overwhelming comprised of white liberal Ivy Leaguers.) The Ivy League universities long ago discovered a winning formula: pandering and catering to the children of the white “progressive” elite. By admitting the deeply-entitled children of this “liberal” white elite and celebrities, they could insulate themselves and continue to discriminate against Asian kids. And these “liberals” claim they are not discriminating as long as they are the beneficiaries of this discrimination. Harvard and Yale and other Ivy League schools have been practicing structural and systemic racism for decades against Asian Americans and through this “progressive” ploy have gotten away with it. They have created a culture of institutional and entrenched racism while touting diversity.
On August 13, 2020 the United States Justice Department found that Asian American kids have less than “one-tenth the likelihood of admission as African American applicants or white legacy [read: white liberal] applicants with comparable academic credentials. Those who want to erase history or cancel cultures don’t want you to know this. This is observed reality. Institutional racism does exist in the Ivy League against Asian Americans. This is the Progressive Paradox: claiming diversity while advancing discrimination; promoting inclusion while denying fairness.
All we can do is layout the facts and stats and data and let the reader come to their own conclusions. If those conclusions — your conclusions, not ours — don’t comport with what you’ve been taught or wish to believe, then that’s your Progressive privilege. Don’t let the truth get in the way of a good bullshit story you choose to believe.
And Hollywood? Don’t get me started. From the hosts of game shows to reality shows to late night to the Academy Awards; in fact, NO host of ANY television show broadcast for general audience appeal has ever been an Hispanic or Asian American. And as bad as that sounds, even their guest lists are less than 1% Hispanic or Asian American — a statistical zero. And on the “Liberal” Bill Maher show, it is zero. And if you think that’s because we’re just hard to find. Think again. They are not broadcasting from Alaska but FROM HOLLYWOOD and Hollywood and L.A. are both 60% majority Hispanic and Asian American.
There is no discernible end in sight for this Hispanic and Asian omission. To be sure, reform is always a complex difficult process with diverse actors competing to defend their class, their ideas and their interests. But if those who claim to be social justice warriors exclude one-quarter of the U.S. population from participation, shouldn’t they be called out for it and asked why? This stranglehold cannot be countenanced. Donald Trump loves celebrities and always has — especially Black celebrities. Trump wants to bring Blacks back to the Republican Party. Trump has been betting on the wrong horse. That horse has left the barn. At the same time, Donald Trump has done all he possibly can to alienate Hispanics and Asians. Hispanics and Asian Americans are pro-family unit, pro-life, pro-hard work, pro-faith, pro-free enterprise. In other words, they are “natural” Republicans. If Blacks can switch to the party of their chief oppressor of 140 years, can’t Hispanics and Asian Americans switch to the party of their chief kvetcher of 4 years?
Asian Americans and Hispanics will NEVER play a leading role in the Democratic Party. They will always play a subservient or background role. The only way they can possibly play a leading role is by switching parties as Black Americans did nearly a century ago. Ethel Waters the most famous Black entertainer of that time even sang about it in a period film “Once WE WERE Republicans but now WE’RE Democrats.”
Lastly, not one major Hispanic or Asian American Organization self-identifies as POC as in the acronym BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.) It is a neologism cobbled together by the “Progressive” media and academia allied with the Democratic Party apparatus. Its purpose is to relegate Hispanics and Asians to third-class subservient, auxiliary and supportive status. It is marginalizing and downgrading when you blend us all together. It is intentional erasure. It allows for cultural institutions and non-profit organizations and Boards of Directors of Fortune 500 companies — with no Hispanic or Asian American representation — to claim otherwise by condensing our numbers into a formulaic: “How many BIPOC do you have on your board?
Another form of Linguistic Imperialism initiated by academia and the Progressive media is the appellation LatinX. Begun for individuals living on the borderline of gender identity, for non-binary Latins and for transexuals and transvestites, it morphed into a generic term now used by white “Progressives” (such as Senator Elizabeth Warren) to describe all Hispanics. This is a clear-cut and classic case of white cultural appropriation and it silences present and erases past and cancels future long-standing struggles to recognize the significance of gender differences and violence. Not one major Hispanic or Latin organization self-identifies as LatinX. A 2019 poll found that fewer than 2% of Hispanics preferred to use the term. This is a classic case of white appropriation and it silences and erases long-standing struggles to recognize the significance of gender difference and violence.
During his Coronavirus News Conference on July 23, 2020, California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom was astonished when he looked at a chart of California workers broken down by ethnicity and realized that over 90% of the actual physical work in the state was done by the Hispanic minority. This is the case for many other states as well. If they stopped working, the U.S. would shut down entirely. This is not true for any other group. Newsom has shut down nail salons in California forcing salon owners and workers to drive to clients’ homes to survive. Nail salons are owned and operated by Vietnamese Americans and Korean Americans who typically vote Republican. But Newsom has allowed liquor stores — whose owners and workers regularly vote Democratic — to stay open. Where is the science backing his decision? There is none. Newsom’s asymmetry is unfair. It’s pure intentional politics.
Media bias is not only about the story the media chooses. Sometimes it’s about the story the media ignores as with the New York Times ignoring the essential part of the story about sexual predator Democratic Congresswoman Katie Hill being replaced by an Hispanic Republic male. And why not that mention that? Because the New York Times sees the writing on the wall. If Hispanics were to switch parties as Blacks did, then and only then would they be able to achieve REAL political power. Furthermore, everyone agrees that our two party system is necessary for our nation’s survival. And the only way to save the Republican Party is to end Trumpism and create a new Republican majority. In a short historical period, Hispanic and Asian Americans will be the American majority. Then the New York Times and all their cohorts will be judged for their reactive inclusion of currently favored groups and their pro-active exclusion of Hispanics and Asians. It will be interesting to see which monuments get torn down then.
