Relatives mourn for victims of a mass shooting in San Jose, California, the United States, May 27, 2021. (Xinhua/Wu Xiaoling)
RISING DISCRIMINATION AGAINST ETHNIC MINORITIES
African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans and other ethnic minorities in the United States have been suffering blatant racial discrimination since the COVID-19 pandemic broke out.
According to an NBC News report, one in four Asian American youths experience racially motivated bullying. Those irresponsible remarks by some Washington politicians have sharply incited hatred and resentment towards Asian Americans. The UN human rights independent expert Tendayi Achiume said media and political leaders who have inflamed the rise of xenophobia and racial hatred amid the pandemic are "entrepreneurs of intolerance," a UN tweet said.
An FBI report released in 2020 showed that 57.6 percent of the 8,302 single-bias hate crime offenses reported by law enforcement agencies in 2019 were motivated by issues concerning race, ethnicity, or ancestry. Among the 4,930 victims of racial hate crimes, as many as 2,391 were of African descent.
African Americans make up 13 percent of the U.S. population but account for 28 percent of those killed by U.S. police in 2020, which are approximately three times more likely to be killed than their white peers, according to Mapping Police Violence, a collection of interactive tools, maps, and figures that illustrate police violence in the United States.
During the pandemic, incidence and death rates in the United States showed significant racial differences, with incidence, hospitalization, and death rates among African Americans being three times, five times, and twice that of their white peers respectively, according to a report submitted on August 21, 2020 by the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent to the UN Human Rights Council.
RAGING GUN VIOLENCE
Vowing to crack down on gun violence has already become a procedural political show of successive U.S. governments.
Politicians shed tears for the victims, denounced the criminals, and pledged to take measures to prevent the crimes from happening again, none of which has managed to stop gun violence from escalating to a new high.
According to data from Gun Violence Archive, an online site that collects gun violence statistics in the United States, more than 41,500 Americans died from gun violence in 2020, or more than 110 on a daily basis, setting a new record for gun violence casualties. And there were 592 mass shootings nationwide, equivalent to a daily average of more than 1.6.
In 2021, the momentum of gun violence has shown no sign of deceleration. Gun Violence Archive's data shows that as of Sunday, about 20,611 people have died from gun violence, and more than 290 mass shootings have occurred nationwide.
As one of the deadliest shootings this year, nine people including the suspect, were killed and at least another injured last month after a shooting at a Valley Transportation Authority yard north of downtown San Jose in the U.S. state of California.
