Less crime, better food

I’m somewhat suspicious of reports that claim Asian Americans “suffer less from violent crime than other racial groups,” since I tend to believe that crimes against Asian Americans are underreported.  But according to this article, that’s the findings from the Justice Department.

In 2006, 360 Asian-Americans were murdered. They were victims of two percent of all US homicides, while accounting for about four percent of the population, the study found.

Sounds a little like the writer thinks we should be catching up.

While she was dying, postscript

Ryan and Tamishia Moats appeared on Good Morning America today.

I have been unable to stop thinking about this story.  Watch the dashcam video, which is here.  You can see Moats is driving cautiously.  He stops at the red light and waits until traffic clears before proceeding.  It’s about one o’clock in the morning, so few drivers are out.  And he appears to be a very short distance from the hospital.

Jero

This is an article about Japanese enka singing sensation Jero (Jerome White, Jr.).  Notice the head on the article reads “Unlikely Japanese Music Star Jero Opens the National Cherry Blossom Festival.”  I had to read the article to find out if it was unlikely that he was a star or what.  Apparently Jero is from Pittsburgh; his grandmother was Japanese.

Dear Jury Administrator

Dear Jury Administrator,

Why do you insist on repeatedly calling me for jury duty?  And where exactly are you getting my name anyway?  Because I note that the last three summonses had three distinct variations of my name.  So I can only guess that I have been given multiple chances at being selected from various databases.

In the ‘I thought he was dead’ category

Along with Mickey Rooney.   Don Rickles:

It’s not often a celebrity can roll off words like J*p and sp*ok without fear of reprimand. Michael Richards surely gone no immunity for his racial slurs. Perhaps Rickles was grandfathered in, maybe even great-grandfathered in, because he’s been using those words in his act for so long.

Source. I actually hear a lot of people say that racism will end when dinosaurs like Rickles die out.  And I often hear racism by old people excused because they’re a “product of their times.”  But I don’t buy either.

N.B.  Words are not masked in original text.

Uh huh.

Trick question

So you’re waiting for your carry-out food when the restaurant gets robbed. What is the appropriate response?

a.  Call the police.

b.  Leave and come back later for your food.

While she was dying

NFL player Ryan Moats was driving his wife and her family to the hospital when he ran a red light.   Understandable.  His wife’s mother was dying.  But he had the bad luck to be stopped by a cop who didn’t care.

Video here.  His wife Tamishia Moats disregarded the police officer’s order to stay in the car and rushed into the hospital.

Her mother died while her husband was being detained.

At one point in the video, the police officer says, “Understand what I can do.”

John Hope Franklin, 1915-2009

John Hope Franklin, one of the most prolific and well-respected chroniclers of America’s torturous racial odyssey, died of congestive heart failure Wednesday in a Durham, N.C., hospital. He was 94.

It was more than Franklin’s voluminous writings that cemented his reputation among academics, politicians and civil rights figures as an inestimable historian. It was the reality that Franklin, a black man, had seen racial horrors up close and thus was able to give his academic work a stinging ballast. Franklin was a young boy when his family lost everything in the Tulsa race riot of 1921. The violence was precipitated by reports that a black youth assaulted a white teenage girl in a downtown elevator. In the end more than 40 people died, mostly blacks, although some reports put the death total much higher.

Et tu, Grace?

Grace Lin (whom I have met, and who is a very nice person and a lovely artist) has a picture book titled “The Red Thread: An Adoption Fairy Tale.”  It’s about a white prince and princess who find they are connected by a red thread to a baby in China:

When they reached the bundle, both stopped in amazement.  Inside the bundle was a baby!

She was laughing and playing and tugging at the red threads tied around each of her ankles.  She looked up at the king and queen and smiled.

‘Whose baby is this?’ the queen asked.  ‘Who does she belong to?’

Her words were strange to the villagers, who chattered a language that the king and queen could not understand.  Finally a wrinkled elder pushed herself forward.

The elder’s bespectacled eyes followed the short red threads connecting the king and queen to the baby.  Her face broke into a broad smile.

‘This baby,’ the old woman said, ‘belongs to you.’

And the moral of this post is?