By Guest Contributors: Lakshmi Gandhi (@lakshmigandhi) and Asha Sundararaman (@mixedtck)

We really weren’t planning to talk about Priyanka Chopra so soon after our last gchat conversation. That all changed when our Twitter friend Sharanya Manivannan (pre-order her book!) pointed us towards the controversy surrounding the actress’s photo shoot for the cover of Conde Nast Traveller India. It features Chopra in tank top that’s been described as “insensitive,” “xenophobic,” and “racist” against refugees and other immigrants and we immediately knew that we had to discuss it.

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By Guest Contributor: Lakshmi Gandhi (@LakshmiGandhi)

Before journalist Jarrett Hill broke the story of Melania Trump’s alleged plagiarism of Michelle Obama’s famous 2008 convention speech, it looked like one of the biggest social media moments of the night was the shock and dismay of music fans everywhere as Donald Trump entered the convention stage to the sounds of Queen’s ‘We Are The Champions.’

Reaction to Trump’s music choice was swift.

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Did the RNC send out a memo instructing Republicans to be racially offensive towards Indians and Indian Americans this weekend?

It’s no secret that the GOP is campaigning on a platform of xenophobia this election cycle.

The GOP’s post-2008 autopsy — which recommended a more racially inclusive party platform that might attract new Republican voters of colour — is long forgotten. Instead, the RNC has spent the 2016 election cycle harnessing the politics of fear and nativism to compel White voters to the polls this November; a strategy that seems doomed to failure based on sheer voter math alone.

Nonetheless, Republican politicians have taken to the campaign trail to doggedly race-bait, and communities of colour — including Asian Americans — have found ourselves the routine target of their dogwhistle racism.

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Today marks the 74th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbour, which left nearly 2,500 Americans dead and more than 1,000 wounded. Today, the country will once again engage in our annual tradition of solemnly remembering those who lost their lives in the surprise attack, and the many more servicemen killed when we entered World War II.

We cannot remember Pearl Harbour without remembering its aftermath, and this year in particular it is imperative that we contextualize the attack and what followed in light of contemporary events. The bombing of Pearl Harbour was not only a horrific attack that killed both American military personnel and civilians, but it sparked an immediate and aggressive racial fear and intolerance for America’s Japanese community. Japanese American families, some who could claim generations of living as citizens on American soil, suddenly found themselves treated with suspicion and hatred, suspected to be foreign spies for no other reason than their shared skin colour with America’s declared enemies. Politicians who had already staked their careers on a platform of anti-Asian and anti-immigrant policies decades earlier declared vindication. The US Government issued official propaganda posters that likened Japanese people to terrifying yellow-skinned monsters. Historians document that American soldiers viewed Japanese enemy combatants as “animals”.

The rising crescendo of American xenophobia and anti-Japanese bigotry culminated in the forcible incarceration of thousands of innocent Japanese American citizens and Japanese nationals. Those incarcerees lived under military gunpoint behind barbed wire fences for years before they were finally released, and given little more than a bus ticket in exchange for their freedom.

And eventually, the dehumanization of Japanese Americans reached such a deafening pitch that when the American government dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki vaporizing over 200,000 civilians,  we celebrated.

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This is absolutely disgusting.

58-year-old Sureshbhai Patel was out for a morning walk this February in the neighbourhood where his son lives, when he was stopped by Alabama police officer Eric Parker. Parker was responding to a 911 call about a “suspicious” “skinny Black guy” in the neighbourhood. Dashcam video shows that within minutes of Parker confronting Patel, the police officer senselessly and violently throws Patel to the ground, leaving the elderly man permanently paralyzed (video after the jump).

Parker was charged with excessive police force over the summer. However, last month that first trial ended in a mistrial due to a hung jury: 10 male jury members — none Black — voted to acquit, while the lone hold-outs were the jury’s sole two Black women members.

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