Few Blacks & Latinos Means No Looting in Japan

That’s the headline of a forum posted in Topix.com, that builds itself as “…the leading news community on the Web, connecting people to the information and discussions that matter to them in every U.S. town and city.” It has spaces for local communities to discuss issues pertinent to them. Not a bad idea, overall (I’m sure they’ll be thrilled to know I just said that…).

When I first came across this forum this morning I disregarded it as meaningless, racist crap. There were three comments on the forum when I last checked; the usual attempts at indirect messaging, none of them especially hateful. But something I can’t and don’t care to pinpoint made me come back to it. I found this in their informational page:

A Top 10 online newspaper destination (comScore, March 2008), the site links news from 50,000 sources to 360,000 lively user-generated forums. Topix also works with the nation’s major media companies to grow and engage their online audiences through forums, classifieds, publishing platforms and RSS feeds.

Based in Palo Alto, Calif., Topix LLC is a privately held company with investment from Gannett Co., Inc. (NYSE: GCI), The McClatchy Company.

Gannett and McClatchy own a part of this thing? The same companies that own USA Today and the Sacramento Bee.

It’s based in Palo Alto, CA. That in itself says little about the company, most Internet company’s are based there. This particular headline and comments are in their Lakewood, CA, forum. Again, there’s little to hook anything on – unless some of you out there know something we should all know about Lakewood. But my question is, why bring this up? Why make this particular comparison? That setting-apart is what seems particularly nasty.

A few of things to consider:

• We don’t have all the information of the conditions in Japan. So any kind of judgement is useless.
• Foreign aid, including US Warships, arrived at the scene of the disaster within hours.
• Japan is more prepared for earthquakes and natural disasters than Haiti or New Orleans.
• There are no reports of a civil authority breakdown or lack of an organized response.

Which brings up an interesting question. How many Latinos are there in Japan?

I found this from about one year ago, from New Tang Dynasty Television: