SPLC - Two years ago today, eight people – six of whom were women of Asian descent – were murdered by a gunman who attacked three spas in Atlanta.

On this second anniversary of the shootings, the Southern Poverty Law Center joins community leaders at Asian Americans Advancing Justice - Atlanta to reverently remember the lives taken in that act of hate-inspired violence and to remember that their loss is felt deeply by their families and communities.

As we reflect on the pain and loss that continues to reverberate from that day, we remain steadfast in the pursuit of racial, economic, gender and social justice. In chorus with Advancing Justice-Atlanta, we seek safety, not surveillance; opportunity, not incarceration; and healing, not policing.

But much work remains to be done.

Recently updated FBI hate crime statistics show that there were 789 attacks against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) in 2021, the same year the Atlanta shootings took place. That number was almost 500 more hate crimes – a 168% increase – over the 2020 figures and, by far, the highest number of reported hate crimes against AAPI community members and institutions since the FBI data collection program began in 1991.

In the year following the attack in Atlanta, Stop AAPI Hate documented nearly 5,000 hate incidents targeting the AAPI community. The group’s data collection from March 19, 2020, to March 31, 2022, showed that female, nonbinary or LGBTQ+ individuals are often targeted for the multiple immutable characteristics they embody. At least 63% of the 11,467 incidents recorded from March 2020 to March 2022 were reported by individuals from those gender identities and sexual orientations.

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Newsweek - Neo-Nazi groups across the United States are planning a national "Day of Hate" against Jewish communities on Saturday, according to antisemitism watchdogs and police documents.

A leaked internal memo by the New York City Police Department's Intelligence and Counterterrorism Bureau, online organizers are "instructing likeminded individuals to drop banners, place stickers and flyers, or scrawl graffiti as a form of biased so-called action."

Jewish groups and police urged Jews to remain vigilant during the Sabbath. There will be additional patrols around synagogues in New York and New Jersey.

Researchers at the Counter Extremism Project (CEP), an international policy organization, said on Thursday that extremist groups had been promoting the day of action through Telegram posts, and identified the National Socialist Movement as one of the organizers.

According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the National Socialist Movement is the largest neo-Nazi group in the U.S., though it has experienced a decline in membership in recent years. It is currently led by Burt Colucci.

The group was behind the recent neo-Nazi demonstration at the opening of Parade, a Broadway show about a Jewish man who was lynched, the CEP said. It stated that two regional chapters in Iowa and California, as well as a small group in New York, were planning to participate in the Day of Hate.

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Black police chiefs face intense pushback from officers as they press for reform and anger from citizens scarred by a history of mistreatment by police.

USAToday - John Drake remembers disliking the police during his youth in Nashville, Tennessee. One of his earliest interactions with the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department was being falsely accused of the brutal rape of an 89-year-old woman, despite bearing little resemblance to the description of the assailant.

Drake is now chief of that same police department. And his story is similar to those of other Black police leaders.

Daniel Hahn, the former police chief in Sacramento, California, grew up in the city’s impoverished Oak Park neighborhood and was arrested at 16 years old. He said it was for assaulting an officer. He didn’t hate police, he said, but when he was in college, he brushed off police recruiters multiple times.

Boston Police Commissioner Michael Cox said becoming a police officer had never seemed like a possibility to him because there were so few people of color in the department. In 1995, a few years after he joined the force in Boston, Cox was beaten by fellow officers who mistook him for a suspect, an incident that was covered up until Cox won more than $1 million in a civil rights lawsuit.

Despite such negative encounters, all three men persevered to lead law enforcement in their hometowns.

“My upbringing prepared me for all of it,” Hahn said. “It gave me perspective and gave me compassion. I’m in both worlds and so I can understand fully.”

Drake and Cox agree that their racial identity informs their work as they take on the challenge of repairing police relationships with communities of color. Still, many Black police chiefs face say they intense pushback from their own officers as they press for reform, and often see anger directed at them from citizens scarred by a history of mistreatment at the hands of police — tensions again inflamed by the murder of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis in 2020 and subsequent nationwide protests for social justice.

“I was supposed to solve all the world’s issues, at least the Black issues, with the snap of my finger,” said Hahn, who led the Sacramento department during the protests over the killing of Stephon Clark by police in that city in 2018. “I’d be called a coon, a sellout, Uncle Tom by the Black community. I’d be discriminated against in many different ways by non-Black communities.”

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Reuters - A deadly gun rampage at northern California mushroom farms likely stemmed from a workplace grievance, authorities said on Tuesday, as new details emerged about the latest of two back-to-back mass shootings that claimed 18 lives in total.

In apparently unrelated acts of mass murder, 7 people were killed on Monday in an attack on farm workers, many of them immigrants, in the seaside town of Half Moon Bay near San Francisco while 11 people were shot to death on Saturday night at a Los Angeles-area dance hall frequented mostly by older patrons of Asian descent.

The suspects in both attacks were men of retirement age, much older than typical perpetrators of deadly mass shootings that have become all too common in the United States.

Authorities said the two men, Huu Can Tran, 72, and Chunli Zhao, 66, each used a semi-automatic pistol. The victims of both attacks came from immigrant communities. Tran fired on ballroom dancers celebrating the Lunar New Year in Monterey Park near Los Angeles, and Zhao sprayed bullets at farm workers of Hispanic and Asian origin 380 miles (610 km) north in Half Moon Bay.

Tran tried to attack a second dance studio on Saturday night but was disarmed without firing a shot in a struggle with the club's operator. The next morning, he shot himself to death in the driver's seat of his getaway vehicle as police closed in.

Zhao was arrested on Monday evening outside a sheriff's station where authorities said he had driven shortly after the Half Moon Bay shootings, apparently to surrender.

As of Tuesday, authorities said they had yet to determine precisely what sparked either shooting. Circumstances surrounding the Half Moon Bay carnage pointed to some type of work-related disgruntlement, officials said.

"All of the evidence we have points to this being the instance of workplace violence," San Mateo Sheriff Christina Corpus told reporters on Tuesday. She said Zhao had been employed at Mountain Mushroom Farm, one of two sites he is accused of attacking. The other, Concord Farms, is about a mile (1.6 km) away.

That theory seemed buttressed by court records, obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle, showing that a restaurant co-worker had obtained a restraining order against Zhao after accusing Zhao of assault and death threats, the newspaper reported on Tuesday. The court order is no longer in effect.

San Mateo County jail records showed Zhao was booked on suspicion of premeditated murder, attempted murder and firearms offenses. He was expected to be formally charged on Wednesday, when he was due to make his first court appearance in Redwood City.

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UCLA.edu - UCLA’s new Initiative to Study Hate represents a critical effort to root out what’s causing the alarming rise in hate across the country — and what we can do to stop it.

As a scholar of Jewish history, David Myers has more than a passing interest in the mechanisms of hate.

For years, the distinguished professor of history and founding director of the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy has studied antisemitism and the persistence of anti-Jewish sentiment. But he’s also looked beyond those boundaries.

“I’ve been repeatedly struck by the seemingly endless transmission of hate toward Jews, including in places where there are no Jews,” Myers says. “What gives rise to that hate? How does it take root not just in an individual, but in a group of individuals brought together by a shared sense of history or common destiny? How important is hate as a cohesive agent for that group?”

Such questions take on greater urgency at a time when long-simmering manifestations of hate seem to be increasingly pervasive. The U.S. Department of Justice has seen steady rises in hate crimes nationwide from year to year. News reports on any given day carry stories about white nationalist rallies, physical attacks against Asian Americans, violence against LGBTQ people, and vandalizing of Latino- or Black-owned businesses. Bombings, shootings and other acts of hate are taking place around the world.

It all leads to the question no one seems able to tidily answer: What can we do about it?

The seeds for UCLA’s new Initiative to Study Hate were planted about three years ago, when Myers and Chancellor Gene Block began engaging in a series of conversations in the wake of protests and student activism around outbreaks of violence in Israel and Palestine.

“This was a source of considerable tension on campus. At various points, the chancellor called to ask, ‘What’s your sense of the temperature on campus? Do you sense that antisemitism is part of this?’” Myers says. “These happen to be very tricky questions that rest in part on how you define antisemitism. After several rounds of conversations, the chancellor asked what I thought there was to be done. I responded that what we do at UCLA is study things, so perhaps we could set up a program to study antisemitism.”

That initial plan was soon modified. “We thought, ‘What about Islamophobia? What about anti-Black racism, which is so deeply entrenched in American society? What about anti-LGBTQ+ expression or anti-Asian hate? How could we undertake an initiative to bring together the resources of the university to study hate and exclude these cases?’” Myers recalls. “That’s really the moment at which we took a significant imaginative leap. We asked ourselves: What if we started an initiative to study hate writ large? First, we thought about hate as it takes rise in groups — and then, when we recalled new advances in brain sciences, we thought about the prospect of studying hate as it takes rise in individuals.”

The Initiative to Study Hate was born.

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Intercept - Asian American Voters, who could decide close elections in states like Pennsylvania, are being deluged with incendiary, misleading ads sent to their mailboxes, phones, and screens by former Trump aides, including Stephen Miller, in the closing days of the campaign.

Leaders of the Asian American and Pacific Islander community in Pennsylvania have denounced the flood of digital ads and direct mail from Republican groups — which seek to blame Democrats for the spike in anti-Asian hate crimes since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and cast efforts to combat anti-Black racism as a form of discrimination against white and Asian communities.

“Asian Americans, like many other communities of color and immigrant and refugee communities have had to fight through many barriers to vote — especially misinformation,” Wei Chen, an organizer in the Chinese American community in Philadelphia said in an interview on Friday. “The ads are new; the tricks are not.”

Chen, who co-founded the state’s Asian Pacific Islander Political Alliance, or API PA, said that mailers from Miller’s group America First Legal, falsely claiming that the Biden administration discriminates against Asian Americans, have started appearing in the Philadelphia suburbs.

The flyers, which rely heavily on misleading headlines and text from right-wing news outlets, appeared after former Trump aides, who also work with Miller’s foundation, produced a deeply dishonest digital ad. That ad sought to blame President Joe Biden for the rise in racist attacks on Asian Americans, which first spiked in March 2020 when then-President Donald Trump started calling Covid-19 “the Chinese virus” and “the kung flu.”

The flyers from Miller’s group have been mailed to Asian American households in other states too, but the effort seems particularly intense in Pennsylvania, where more than 250,000 Asian Americans are eligible to vote, and turnout among the heavily Democratic community spiked to over 75 percent in 2020. Asian Americans are the fastest-growing demographic in the United States and make up 45 percent of newly naturalized citizens in Pennsylvania, according to data from Chen’s group.

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Pew - More than a year after the murder of George Floyd and the national protests, debate and political promises that ensued, 65% of Black Americans say the increased national attention on racial inequality has not led to changes that improved their lives. And 44% say equality for Black people in the United States is not likely to be achieved, according to newly released findings from an October 2021 survey of Black Americans by Pew Research Center.

This is somewhat of a reversal in views from September 2020, when half of Black adults said the increased national focus on issues of race would lead to major policy changes to address racial inequality in the country and 56% expected changes that would make their lives better.

At the same time, many Black Americans are concerned about racial discrimination and its impact. Roughly eight-in-ten say they have personally experienced discrimination because of their race or ethnicity (79%), and most also say discrimination is the main reason many Black people cannot get ahead (68%).  

Even so, Black Americans have a clear vision for how to achieve change when it comes to racial inequality. This includes support for significant reforms to or complete overhauls of several U.S. institutions to ensure fair treatment, particularly the criminal justice system; political engagement, primarily in the form of voting; support for Black businesses to advance Black communities; and reparations in the forms of educational, business and homeownership assistance. Yet alongside their assessments of inequality and ideas about progress exists pessimism about whether U.S. society and its institutions will change in ways that would reduce racism.

These findings emerge from an extensive Pew Research Center survey of 3,912 Black Americans conducted online Oct. 4-17, 2021. The survey explores how Black Americans assess their position in U.S. society and their ideas about social change. Overall, Black Americans are clear on what they think the problems are facing the country and how to remedy them. However, they are skeptical that meaningful changes will take place in their lifetime.

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