“CHINESE officials often try to portray racism as primarily a Western problem. Yet there is a widespread tendency in China to look down on other races, especially black people. Two years ago a television ad for a laundry detergent showed a young Chinese woman luring a black man closer, triumphantly popping a detergent capsule into his mouth and stuffing him into a washing machine. At the end of the cycle, out came a fresh-faced Chinese man, over whom the woman swooned. Among the tens of thousands of Africans living in a neighborhood of Guangzhou known as ‘Chocolate City,’ many report racist slights.” (Kenyans Say Chinese Investment Brings Racism and Discrimination, The New York Times, Oct. 15 2018)
“While most Americans were busy celebrating Labor Day, Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte was busy insulting their president.
After Obama criticized Duterte’s human rights record at a press conference over the long weekend, Duterte called him a ‘son of a w**re.’ Duterte apologized, but it was too late: On Tuesday morning, Obama canceled a planned summit between the two presidents.
This isn’t the first time Duterte has done something like this. In 2015, after a papal visit caused a traffic jam in Manila, Duterte called Pope Francis—you guessed it—a ‘son of a w**re.’ Just last month, he referred to US Ambassador Philip Goldberg as the ‘gay ambassador, the son of a w**re.’ (“Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippines’s less racist but more murderous Donald Trump, explained;” VOX, Sept. 7, 2016)
During his impromptu press conference last week about the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) scare, President Duterte was in his usual rambling and incoherent self. It wouldn’t have been anything out of the ordinarily crazy things he has already done since coming into power, except that this one sounded uncharacteristically un-Duterte.
Not that he was now starting to speak like Obama. He was still rambling and incoherent as usual, but this time he seemed to have sprouted a heart. He urged Filipinos to be more “humanitarian” towards the mainland Chinese, calling the country’s fright over the 2019-nCoV as nothing but “xenophobia.”
If I had never heard Duterte speak before, and if he were still running for office, I probably would have been persuaded to vote for him. Except that I have, and unfortunately, he is now our President.
This was a President, remember, whose solution to the country’s drug problem was simply to get rid of the addicts. No drug addicts, no drug problem. And now he accuses his countrymen of being un-humanitarian? Talk about the pot calling the kettle black, eh?
Like the rantings of a crazy drunk accusing his sober neighbors of drinking too much, the President’s appeals elicited nothing but derision, to be sure. Any shred of moral authority he may once have held simply by virtue of being President has long since disappeared without a trace, forgotten in the wake of his curses hurled against America, the pope, opposition politicians and everybody else who did not share his weird and sick sense of humor, if it can even be called that.
Same too with the pleas of the Chinese, who now complain that the world is being racist to them, in the midst of the 2019-nCoV scare. The same country that considers a TV commercial featuring an African person being laundered into a Chinese man “normal,” now has the audacity to cry racism when many nations closed their borders to its citizens in the wake of the virus scare.
No one should condone racism, and we cannot allow ourselves to be without sympathy for those who are suffering, the Chinese included. But people are just people, and they have long memories.
For their president to call them racist when he himself has been everything but, is not only an insult, but also—quite frankly—downright outrageous. The same goes with the Chinese, who now plead victimization, after playing the racist bully for so long.
So let this be a lesson to all future leaders and bully nation-states. You reap what you sow; you cannot just plead for mercy whenever you feel like it. If you invest in kindness, only then will you be rewarded with everyone’s compassion.