Left Out of the Narrative

Richard Fernandez:

Everybody recognizes the names of Michael Brown and Darren Wilson in connection with the riots in Ferguson.  But here’s a question.  What was the name of the manager of the convenience store who Michael Brown strongarmed?  We may not be able to cite a name, but Joe Biden ^[1] can put us in the ballpark.  ”You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.”

We know that whatever his name was it was of Indian ^[2] derivation.

The Ferguson Market, where Brown allegedly grabbed a handful of cigars before his deadly encounter with police, looters twice targeted the store owned by a Patel family along with several other Asian-American owned stores, according to the Daily Beast.

At least eight stores were looted in nearby Dellwood too with Pakistani American Mumtaz Lalani’s Dellwood Market among those ransacked and almost burnt down by dozens of looters, according to South Asian Times.

It’s not just convenience stores. The low-cost motel industry is also largely Indian. The Times of India ^[3] notes: “the hotel industry in the United States, particularly the budget hotels segment, is dominated by people of Indian origin. Some 60 per cent of all budget hotels, typically called motels, are owned by Indians. Their predominance has led to the term ”Potel Motels” because they are usually run by Gujaratis with the last name Patel.”  So whenever a night motel clerk is robbed or a convenience store is looted in a low income neighborhood the guy at the losing end was probably called something like Patel.

The race problem is usually defined in terms of black versus white. But it’s not really that simple. I asked one South African Indian what life was like before and after apartheid. He answered that  ”during apartheid the problem of South African Indians was that they weren’t white. Afterward their problem was that they weren’t black.”

Recently Harvard University has been accused of “disappearing” Asians. “Asian Americans are invisible,” writes Tim Mak in the Daily Beast ^[4].

That, at least, is the contention of Students for Fair Admissions, an organization alleging in an anti-discrimination lawsuit that Harvard systematically excludes Asian Americans through its “holistic” admissions process. The argument is that by considering information about an applicant other than test scores and GPA, the school is trying to limit the number of Asian Americans in attendance—and that the result is a form of affirmative action for non-Asians.

The media’s ability to define the narrative is so enormously powerful it almost distorts reality. Take Ebola. Everybody knows that the epidemic is over because it’s no longer reported. But asDeutsche Welle ^[4] notes, it isn’t. The apparent drop is an artifact of the way the disease has been reported.

The World Health Organization has dramatically revised the death toll from the Ebola outbreak. Almost 7,000 have died from the virus – adding 1,200 more to a count released days ago. …

It is an abrupt increase of just over 1,200 deaths compared to its previous report, released days ago. A WHO spokesman said the steep hike in fatalities, mainly in Liberia, was mainly “a reconciliation of historical numbers” and not due to new deaths in recent days.

The UN’s health agency has previously said it believes there are far more deaths than actually registered.

Virology Down Under ^[5] has an informative graphic which shows how significant this “reconciliation” is. Writing at the start of November, Dr Bruce Aylward wrote that the weird numbers coming out of the WHO reflected the fact that they were catching up with unreported or misreported cases.  It went away and now it’s back because the numbers went away and now they’re back.

The World Health Organization (WHO) Ebola virus disease (EVD)case numbers that came out on 29-Oct were pretty big (see graph on the left). As if there weren’t already enough new cases and deaths every 2-5 days, now there is this bolus of 3,562 cases added to the total. And a net change in deaths of -2? What the heck? …

In terms of the jump in the number of cases, one of things that we’ve talked about in the past on this is that with the huge surge in cases in certain countries, particularly in September and October, people got behind on their data.

It’s like the Indian convenience store managers in Ferguson, it’s not that the ‘reconciled’ Ebola fatalities don’t exist; it’s just that we don’t see them due to reporting problems. Yet the victims are as dead as the stores are burned. But it’s not just a problem of Potels or individuals with the Wong name. Oblivion can happen to white guys too. Chuck Hagel has disappeared from the news, which is remarkable because he’s still Secretary of Defense. But we have to rely on the ever retentive ^[6] Joe Biden to recollect this forgotten man.

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