John Oliver has said that it is “racist” of president Joe Biden to call a shooting in which six Asian women died “un-American”.
Last week, police in Georgia arrested a 21-year-old man after attacks at three Atlanta massage parlours left eight people dead.
Six of the victims of the three shootings, which police believe to be linked, were Asian-American women, along with one white man and one white woman.
Biden had recently commented that rising anti-Asian violence was “wrong” and “un-American”, but appearing on Last Week Tonight on Sunday (21 March), comedian Oliver took issue with this phrasing.
“I am really glad that he condemned hate crimes against Asians there but to say they are un-American, I would love to visit the nation that exists in Joe Biden’s head,” he said.
“Because it’s a place where racism is ‘not who we are’ and racist attacks against Asians are somehow ‘un-American’ despite the fact – and far be it for me to explain this to someone who seems like he’s lived through most of American history – anti-Asian racism has long been a fact of American life.”
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Oliver continued: “Not only are attacks against Asians very much American, so is denying that they’re racist.
“And our long, ugly history of Anti-Asian racism... is the very reason why, just last year, many were loudly warning that Trump calling Covid names like ‘the China virus’ was likely to lead to a rise in violence against people of Asian descent, an argument that at the time, not everyone seemed to find convincing.”
Anti-Asian hate crime in 16 of America’s largest cities increased by 149 per cent in 2020, while overall hate crimes fell by 7 per cent, a study by the Centre for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, found.
