What happened to the fight for racial justice under Biden?

Under the Biden administration, it looks like activism has paused. Unfortunately, injustices and racism toward minorities have not. 

As we reflect on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s contributions to African Americans, American civil society and even humanity this week, it is important to recognize his efforts and express gratitude for hard-fought rights and not take them for granted. It is vital to continue to fight the good fight while not getting caught up in the partisanship in Washington.  

While Trump’s policies had moved the GOP to the farther right, the Democratic party has taken it upon itself to play just the role of custodian of liberalism and the critic of the GOP’s policies since the Trump era. As a result, it has created an artificial immunity to its own track record of maintaining racial and societal harmony.  

A case in point is the increase in police shootings in 2021 to record highs, the spurt in anti-Asian hate crimes and the persisting stagnation in immigration reform.  

Advocacy for policing overhauls intensified since the murder of George Floyd by police officers in 2020. More than 400 bills were introduced in state legislatures in 2021 to address officers’ use of force. Police departments partnered with mental health experts to respond to people in crisis. Cities even established civilian review boards for use-of-force incidents. While the number of shootings has not significantly gone up, it has neither decreased. 

Social and racial justice are increasingly seen as partisan political issues that will be addressed once the Democratic party is in power. Data says otherwise.  

Similarly, while the Biden administration is the most diverse administration in history, policies and actions have not reflected that diversity. A case in point is the increase in hate crimes against the Asian-American community. Between March 2020 and March 2022, more than 11,000 hate crimes against Asian Americans were reported in the U.S. The year started on a sad note for the community with a homeless veteran by the name of Christopher McCormack in New York City attacking an Asian woman and making an anti-Asian comment before fleeing the scene. The most recent hate crime in Indiana where an 18-year-old Indiana University student was stabbed multiple times in the head while riding a bus in Bloomington, has left the community grieving.  

Another adjacent challenge is the stagnation in immigration reform. While Republican-led states continue to send buses of undocumented immigrants to Democratic cities, and Democratic leadership scrambles to provide them with shelter and winter supplies, the debate surrounding legal immigration has stalled.  

Legal immigration is a controversial topic and Washington has little to no appetite for radical reform. It is, unfortunately, one of those debated issues that sees very little in actual reform.  

While the massacre of Native Americans and the enslavement of African Americans are major blots in American history, so is its immigration policy that was largely inspired and driven by eugenicists since the early part of the 20th century, paving the way for othering people of different ethnicities.   

For instance, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was not repealed until 1943. This regulation barred Chinese people from becoming U.S. citizens and limited immigration from China. In the early 20th century, a similar agreement with Japan stopped most Japanese immigration to the U.S. From 1920 to World War II, racism was employed to bar certain immigrants from the United States.  

This bigotry was reflected in subsequent immigration laws such as the Immigration Act of 1924 and the Emergency Quota Act of 1921. Asians and Africans were virtually barred from immigration under this law with few exceptions.

Finally, in 1965, thanks to the efforts of Dr. King and others, the Immigration and Nationality Act tried to correct the ethnic and racially-based immigration system that had been established in the 1920s. It set a 20,000 per country limit and a yearly ceiling of 170,000 for admissions for the Eastern Hemisphere. It removed the barriers to Asian immigration, which eventually led to more immigrants arriving from Asia than from Europe.  

Amongst immigrant groups, Asian Americans have benefited the most from Dr. King’s activism. Interestingly, they are also the ones often pitted against Hispanic Americans and African Americans by conservative pundits. Conservative punditry uses the Asian American community as fodder to deny racism perpetrated against African American and Hispanic American communities.  

It is time that the community that has gained support amongst conservative pundits as the “model minority” wakes up to conservatives’ intentions of dividing and discouraging increased cohesion amongst various minority communities. In 2022, conservative pundit Ann Coulter tweeted an inflammatory message inferring that Indians were stealing the jobs of African Americans.  

Recently, Lana Lokteff, host of the YouTube channel Red Ice TV,  spouted inflammatory messages toward the Indian community by evoking the “great replacement theory” and inferring that the community is replacing white America.  

These are not isolated incidents. In 2022, University of Pennsylvania professor Amy Wax went on a similar rant about the Indian community on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News.  

Notably, this tactic is not limited to pitting Asian Americans against African Americans. They’ve managed to also pit African Americans against Asian Americans. In the lawsuit against Harvard, conservative groups have supported the select members of the Asian American community filing a lawsuit for alleged discriminatory practices borne out of affirmative action policies designed to increase the number of African American students.  

Since the days of the British empire, colonialists and white supremacists have used the time-tested strategy of “divide and rule” to prevent social cohesion amongst different groups in countries they colonized in order to prevent united resistance to the empire. That policy lives on through these far-right talk show hosts, professors and commentators. 

Therefore, it is incumbent upon every person of color in America to express gratitude to Dr. King and not be complacent in 2023. We should continue our activism taking inspiration from his line “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.… We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

Akhil Ramesh is a fellow with the Pacific Forum. He has worked with governments, risk consulting firms and think tanks in the United States and India. Follow him on Twitter: Akhil_oldsoul.