Foreign exploitation of American race relations
Foreign rivals of the United States, mainly Russia and China, have attempted to weaken American race relations as a geopolitical strategy.
[1][2] In 2019, Chinese government official Lijian Zhao posted a thread on Twitter about racism in America in response to Donald Trump signing bills supporting the 2019 Hong Kong protests.
[2] In 2021, pro-China fake accounts on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter called for Asian Americans to protest racial injustice in the country.
[3][4] In 2023, CNN found that China had the world's largest known online disinformation campaign, using it to harass U.S. "residents, politicians, and businesses" with thousands of social media posts, many of which include racial slurs.
The discussion of George Floyd lead to the Department of Justice filing a complaint against Chinese officials, alleging that they were attempting to undermine the 2022 U.S. midterm elections.
[5] Also in 2023, Microsoft claimed China was posting AI photos relating to Black Lives Matter to social media.
[6] In 2017, Facebook removed Iranian-linked fake social media accounts that had posted content about topics including race, which experts said was copying Russia's method to create divisions in the United States.
[13] In 1928, the Soviet Union's Comintern initiated a plan to spread Communism throughout the world, and targeted African-Americans in the South, pushing "self-determination for the Black Belt".
This referenced the case of the Scottsboro Boys, nine Black teenagers in Alabama who were falsely accused of raping two white women, and were wrongly convicted by an all-white jury.
[17] The Soviets exploited race and the Great Depression for their own economic benefit, by advertising themselves as "a racial utopia" where "ethnic, national, and religious divisions didn't exist".
[14] During the Cold War, the U.S. was influenced to improve its race relations, as they thought they "couldn't lead the world if it was seen as repressing people of color", writes legal historian Mary Dudziak.
[14][18][19][20][17] The Komsomolskaya Pravda, the Soviet Union's communist youth organization newspaper, ran a story titled "Troops Advance Against Children!".
Izvestia, another major newspaper, extensively covered the Little Rock Crisis, saying: "right now, behind the facade of the so-called ‘American democracy,’ a tragedy is unfolding which cannot but arouse ire and indignation in the heart of every honest man".
[22] Western governments during the Cold War also pushed the idea that African or Black liberation movements were associated with Soviet or communist propaganda.
The committee found that Russian government agencies had more than 11 million engagements with Facebook users, and mobilized the signing of petitions against racism.
[15] In 2019, documents were revealed detailing conversations between associates of Russian government-linked Yevgeny Prigozhin, discussing plans to manipulate and radicalize Black Americans.
The recruits would then be sent back to the U.S. to do violence and attempt to establish a Pan-African state in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina.
[31] In March 2020, Twitter released a data set showing 39,964 tweets from 71 accounts which were associated with the Russian government and claimed to be in the United States.
[20] At an April 2016 protest march, a speech was given by Diane Butler, the mother of Tyrone West, who died in police custody after being pulled over during a traffic stop.
They tricked activist Conrad James into creating a September 2016 rally to honor Keith Lamont Scott, a Black man who was shot by police in Charlotte, North Carolina.
A woman named "Stephanie Williamson", who was allegedly the organization's spokeswoman, gave James a bank card to pay for the rally expenses.
They organized two protests in July 2016: one in Saint Paul, Minnesota, regarding the police killing of Philando Castile, and one in Baltimore, regarding the death of Freddie Gray.
In January 2016, the International Press Foundation (IPF), an organization of journalism students and trainees, interviewed a man named "Daniel Reed", who claimed to be the Chief Editor of the group's website, "DoNotShoot.Us".
[37] Foreign Policy magazine criticized discussion of the campaign for an alleged assumption that Black Americans could be easily swayed by the propaganda.
[38][39][40] In late May 2020, protests regarding police brutality started around the United States,[15] in response to the recent killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor.
