by Thomas Lee
Racism isn’t exclusively about what someone said or did. Sometimes, racism is what isn’t said or done.
During Donald Trump’s recent debate with Kamala Harris, the former President repeated a false claim that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating dogs and cats.
That’s not what surprised me. I’ve grown used to Trump’s unhinged, fact-challenged rants. What grabbed my attention was how few, if any, journalists connected the claim to an insidious and popular stereotype about Asians.
Yes, Trump was specifically speaking about people from Haiti, using a time-honored strategy to portray immigrants and foreigners as less than human. But consuming dogs is a particularly hurtful lie often hurled at the Asian American community.
Instead, we get this sentence from the Associated Press:
“Officials have said there have been no credible or detailed reports about the claims, even as Trump and his allies use them to amplify racist stereotypes about Black and brown immigrants.”
Black and brown immigrants. Not a word about Asians.
The whole episode triggered a personal memory of an event that occurred more than a decade ago.
It was 2011 and I was a reporter for the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. I was also an officer with the Asian American Journalists Association.
I got word of an “investigative” story aired on local television station WCCO, a CBS affiliate. The piece mostly concerned a sketchy Minnesota breeder selling dogs to pet shops in New York without a license.
Okay, seems pretty straightforward enough.
But here’s what made the story really juicy (no pun intended):
“When we kept digging,” the anchor introducing the piece said, “that’s when things got disturbing. We went undercover to see the Canine Cultural Center ourselves. We found a meat market at the same address. A worker there says they only sell dogs — to eat.”
What happened next was some of the worst journalism I’ve ever witnessed. The reporter, a white man named James Schugel, laid out his smoking gun evidence. He called the meat market and questioned an unidentified Chinese man with spotty English.
“Do you sell dogs?” Schugel said.
“Yeah, we sell dog,” the station claimed the man said without providing the actual audio.
“Dogs for people to eat?” Schugel asked.
“Uh yeah. We sell many kinds of meat,” the man allegedly said.
Only the Chinese man didn’t say that. As the station later acknowledged, the man actually said “duck,” not “dog.”
Wow. Just wow.
As an AAJA officer, I demanded that WCCO issue a retraction and an apology to the Asian American community. But after meeting with the station’s general manager and a CBS corporate counsel, WCCO refused.
The station claimed that most of the story was correct, failing to recognize that the false dog-eating claim was the most salacious part of the segment and highlighted at the story’s beginning.
Eventually, the station issued a statement, admitting that the Chinese man had actually said “duck” instead of “dog.” But without any context, including information about how Asian people have long been stereotyped as eating dogs, the statement really meant nothing.
The episode, along with a reaction to Trump’s recent claims, shows that Asian Americans continue to remain invisible.
I regret not doing more to press the matter with WCCO. Perhaps I could have organized a fundraiser to benefit AAJA.
For instance, we could have sold t-shirts with words that perfectly describe the world we live in.
“It’s a real dog-eat-duck world out there.”
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