Conservative media is simmering with outrage about the trial of an 80-year-old San Francisco woman accused of mowing down a whole family at a bus stop and likely facing no jail time for it, but they also all miss the point, which is typical for conservative media. The ethnic considerations of this case cannot be ignored.
Here are the facts: Mary Fong Lau, a Chinese woman, mowed down Diego Cardoso de Oliveira, his wife Matilde Ramos Pinto and their two children, killing them all. The judge, a certain Bruce Chan, who happens to also be part Chinese, has declared that she shouldn’t face prison time because that would be a mean thing to do to an old woman. And naturally, the conservative media all leaped on his “soft on crime” approach, which I am sure was what he intended to happen. Media outlets are also largely ignoring the lawsuit by the victims’ family, who alleged that Lau quietly transferred all of her assets to relatives so it is harder to sue her for damages.
As far as I can tell, no mainstream outlet has asked what should be a very obvious question. Is Chan willing to put a Chinese woman in prison? Another interesting question would be what his excuses would be if Lau wasn’t 80 years old. If she was, say, 16, Chan could say Lau shouldn’t go to prison because her life shouldn’t be ruined over a youthful mistake. If she was 30, he could say she has young children who would suffer if their mother went to prison. And so on. Logically, her age is just a red herring he threw out there and almost everyone took the bait.
Over the last few years it has become much less taboo in right-wing circles to talk about allegations of Jewish nepotism, but at the end of the day, in-group favoritism is a natural human instinct. A country being homogenous mostly eliminates the problem of in-group favoritism. I can only assume Chinese favoritism is not a problem in the Chinese court system. Maybe a Chinese judge sentences minorities too harshly, or a minority judge sentences fellow minorities too lightly, but in terms of raw numbers, such a thing would happen a lot less in a society that is split 90/10 between two groups than in a society that is split 40/60. When a group becomes numerous enough to compete for the levers of power, that’s when diversity is a problem. It is also when a population so polarized into competing groups, luxuries like trial by jury become unworkable.
There are other examples in the USA, and not just in the criminal justice system. The Indian-dominated State Bank of Texas has recently been accused of funneling virtually all SBA loans to other Indians. In response to this wave of accusations, the Trump administration last week banned SBA loans to non-citizens, which Reuters condemned as a “human rights violation.” This is of course the argument of both foreign lobbying groups and the white liberal establishment, that there is actually no such thing as a foreigner; all 8 billion non-US citizens on Earth are just temporarily embarrassed Americans entitled to free money.
Ian Kummer
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