US has atrocious human rights record

Koon Yew Yin 27 March 2021 

At the US-China meeting in Alaska, the first high-level meeting between U.S.-Chinese officials under the new Biden administration got off to a chilly start with senior American diplomats accusing China of the ill treatment of the people in Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan and the Chinese officials alleging America is a human rights hypocrite due to its mistreatment of Black citizens.

US Secretary of State must remember when he points 1 finger at China, his 3 other fingers are pointing at himself. US has the most atrocious human right track record. How can the US criticise China?  

US track record on human rights 

Ethnic minority groups in the United States faced systematic and continuous racial discrimination in 2020, according to the latest report on human rights violations in the U.S. 

Higher death rates of African Americans

African Americans were three times as likely as whites to be infected by COVID-19, twice as likely to die from the coronavirus, and three times as likely to be killed by the police, the report said.

George Floyd, a 46-year-old unarmed African American, died in May 2020 after a white police officer in Minneapolis knelt on his neck for several minutes, sparking a global outcry. Before that, Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman, was shot eight times and killed by police in her Louisville, Kentucky home on March 13, 2020.

Later in August, 29-year-old Jacob Blake was severely injured after police officers shot him seven times in the back as he was getting into his car in Wisconsin. The incident happened in front of the man’s three kids who were in the vehicle.

According to data from Mapping Police Violence, a research group, U.S. police shot and killed a total of 1,127 people last year, and African Americans accounted for 28 percent of them.

Covid 19 pandemic 

In addition, the pandemic in the U.S. has disproportionately impacted people of color. The infection rate, hospitalization rate and death rate of African Americans were respectively three times, five times and twice that of their white counterparts, according to a report by the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent to the UN Human Rights Council in August 2020.

Violence against Asian Americans on the rise

Since the onset of the pandemic, the incidents of Asian Americans being humiliated and assaulted in public have accelerated and some American politicians have misled the public on purpose, the report said. 

Eight people, six of whom were Asian women, were killed in shootings at three different spas in Atlanta, Georgia, last week. A 21-year-old white man has been charged with these murders.

Gun Violence among Americans 

Every day, more than 100 Americans are killed with guns and more than 230 are shot and wounded. The effects of gun violence in America extend far beyond these casualties—gun violence shapes the lives of millions of Americans who witness it, know someone who was shot, or live-in fear of the next shooting.

In order to illustrate the magnitude of everyday gun violence Everytown has gathered the most comprehensive, publicly available data. Still, significant data gaps remain—a result of underfunded, incomplete data collection at the state and federal levels. Filling these gaps is necessary to truly understand the full impact of gun violence in America.