Column Creates Rumblings Along Racial Fault Line

Ted Fang, AsianWeek's editor at large, foreground right, and the Rev. Amos Brown, left, president of the San Francisco chapter of the NAACP, talk to reporters about writer Kenneth Eng's "Why I Hate Blacks" column published in Fang's paper. (By Jeff Chiu -- Associated Press)

SAN FRANCISCO -- Two black ministers, an Asian newspaper publisher, a rabbi and an imam gathered with other members of a rainbow-type coalition at the Third Baptist Church in San Francisco and peered into a brace of television cameras. In earnest tones, they proclaimed their abiding tolerance for one another, all in an effort to tamp down the raw feelings sparked by an essay packed with negative stereotypes of black people that recently ran in a local Asian newspaper.

The column, written by a 22-year-old and titled "Why I Hate Blacks," prompted an apology from AsianWeek owner Ted Fang, conciliatory speeches from the city's African American and Chinese immigrant communities, and plans for a town hall meeting on Friday.

It also highlighted strains between the city's ethnic groups that rumble beneath the surface -- even at the church love fest.

Several African American leaders pointed to tensions with Asians over the ethnic makeup of some schools and neighborhoods and expressed alarm about the city's shrinking black population. They pointed to racist sentiments often murmured sotto voce by some young people and recent immigrants.

"We have a problem in the human family of San Francisco," the Rev. Amos Brown, president of San Francisco's NAACP chapter, said at the news conference at his church earlier this week.

The issue in question was a column in the AsianWeek in which the author, Kenneth Eng, lists reasons "why we should discriminate against blacks," including:

"Blacks hate us . . . blacks are weak-willed. They are the only race that has been enslaved for 300 years. . . . Blacks are easy to coerce . . . they spend much of their time whining."

AsianWeek, which is aimed at the Bay Area's Asian community and has a circulation of 48,505, ran earlier columns by Eng titled "Why I Hate Asians" and "Proof that Whites Inherently Hate Us." According to an online essay he recently wrote, Eng encountered discrimination as a screenwriting student at New York University after he expressed his "negative views on America, religion and African Americans."

The Asian Law Caucus, Asian American Justice Center and Chinese for Affirmative Action issued a statement calling for an apology and saying that the most recent piece was "deeply hurtful." This week the San Francisco's Board of Supervisors passed a resolution condemning the column, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) issued a statement calling for tolerance.

Fang called the column's publication "an insensitive and callous mistake that should never have been allowed to go forward" and said that Eng would not write for the newspaper again.

AsianWeek "has tried to provide opportunities for many new young writers and artists," Fang said. "In this case, we made a mistake." He did not answer questions about how Eng's columns were able to pass editorial muster. The process "will be reviewed to make sure this doesn't happen again," Fang said.

Eng, who recently moved to San Francisco from New York, could not be located for comment and has not commented publicly on the column.

The Rev. Arnold Townsend, an area pastor, told reporters that because of the flight of African Americans from San Francisco, he is not surprised by the attitude expressed in Eng's column.

Between 2000 and 2005, the city's black population fell 25 percent, from 60,515 to 45,444. In neighborhoods such as Bayview-Hunters Point and the Fillmore District, where blacks were once dominant, high housing prices have encouraged some longtime African American residents to sell. And Asian families have snapped up some of that real estate.

There has also been tension between blacks and Asians over a 2001 plan, developed after a lawsuit by Chinese American parents, that has allowed more parental choice in city schools. As a result of the program, the school system has become more segregated.

Taeku Lee, a professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley who studies race relations, said the demographic changes are important but dismissed Eng's column as the result of "an opportunist, trying to be too clever by half, and saying things that are supposed to sound like things Asians actually think but don't say." "A lot of immigrants come here with a real sense of where African Americans are in the social hierarchy," Lee said. "There's always been a reference point of who we're not like in the U.S."

Yet "it's important to distinguish [San Francisco] from Los Angeles, or Queens in the 1990s, where sparks set off really inflammatory relationships," Lee said. "Cooperation is more of what characterizes Asian Americans and African Americans in the Bay Area."