So, as you’ve probably noticed, the United Airlines incident has been in the news quite a bit, in which an elderly Asian doctor with a somewhat checkered past was asked to leave an airplane due to seats being needed for repairmen to do repairs at the airport that was the destination for the flight. The man refused and was forcibly dragged off the plane, being somewhat bloodied in doing so.
This incident made the news around the world, and as one might expect everybody has their own take on this. Some side with the airline, some side with the good Dr. Dao, and there are a million arguments for each.
Those arguing for the airlines typically speak of a Bentham-esque “greatest good for the greatest number” ideal that posits Dr. Dao was obstructing proper function, whereas those arguing for the doctor have the typical arguments you would expect—blaming corporate greed, dysfunctional police actions, and of course, the alleged anti-Asian racism that just runs rampant throughout the United States. At the very least, that last one is what I see looking at sources run by Asian people, and will likely become the public’s general interpretation of these events.
You are all aware that I generally don’t feel Asians face all that much discrimination in the American mainstream (or at the very least, if they do, then it clearly isn’t affecting them), and they don’t seem to pop up all that often in these corporate malfeasance stories that you see in the news every so often. It is far more likely that you will see, for example, black people protesting alleged discriminatory treatment from vendors, as in this example. For that matter, don’t think this sort of thing doesn’t happen to whites.
Being both an [half] Asian man and a “badthinker”, there’s a couple of angles that I have yet to see explored pertaining to this case:
First of all, despite the fact that the popular memory will likely remember this story as a bunch of “blonde beasts” abusing a poor little minority (once again showing my observation that the Asian-American community is gunning for the victimization racket by pushing forward narratives of the relatively few abuses against them), almost all of the players involved in this story were not white. That includes the victim, at least 2/3 of the police officers that dragged him off the plane (two were definitely black/brown, and one could possibly be white or Hispanic), and the CEO of United Airlines himself. I’ll be the first one to tell you that, generally speaking, Non-Asian Minorities are not particularly fond of Asians, for a variety of reasons. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time blacks decided to bully an Asian person. Should reporters finally learn that Gasp, black people are capable of agency, they might begin to connect the dots, and see that more incidents will come as America becomes increasingly multiracial.
Secondly, these incidents are going to further become more frequent as corporations continue to collude with the government and increase in power. It’s not like corporations and the government haven’t become an intertwined boot stamping on your face, and has been that way since the Reagan administration! And as America has developed such high wealth inequality, has it not encouraged an increase in venal, belligerent behavior? And seeing as multiracialism has repeatedly been shown to decrease public trust and social health, can’t that be argued to have made us all less helpful to one another?
While neither side of this story is particularly heroic, I can’t help but side with Dr. Dao, because an obstinate attitude from one old man hurts a lot less than corporate and government tyranny. If nothing else, Dr. Dao is the proverbial “canary in the coal mine”, showing us all the American future: A bunch of bickering tribes fighting for the same scraps, and everybody gets it in the shorts while the powers that be are allowed to just get bigger and more powerful, in part due to (you guessed it!) the encouragement of the worst sort of multiculturalism and racial tribalism, to prevent any sort of united front against them.
Welcome to modern America.
