A tough-pressed and mindful district attorney in California is being ridiculed for planning a “ridiculous” press conference to announce his “Chinese name,” months after being accused of being disrespectful to the Asian community.
Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price had been scheduled to host a naming ceremony in Oakland on Tuesday to mark Asian American and Pacific Islander American Heritage Month, but her office canceled her attendance at the last minute without giving a reason. ABC7 reported..
News of the press conference and its abrupt cancellation sparked immediate backlash from critics of cultural appropriation of the Black district attorney, who faces an election to remove him from office in November.
“I think it’s ridiculous. It’s cultural appropriation and pandering of the highest order,” said Charles Huang, president of the local National Association of Asian Pacific Islander Prosecutors.
Local TV reporter Dion Lim said he also had to convince people it was real.
“Someone messaged me asking if this was an April Fool’s joke so I sent them the press release from the DA’s office!” Lim tweeted.
Price was quickly mocked online by local residents as well as others for his checkered history with the Asian community.
“She is deceiving and lying to the Asian community, especially the Chinese community, to try to stop our kind and friendly community from ousting her in the November election,” one user raged on X.
Another wrote: “This is huge pandering. In a Trump administration, this would be called cultural appropriation. But surely many Asians would vote against the recall on this basis. There are plenty of better and more capable DAs out there waiting to do their jobs well. What is so special about Pamela Price?”
“Her virtue signalling knows no bounds,” said one local, while another added: “Shame on the Chinese who support her and tolerate this.”
Local politicians have been adopting Chinese names in the area for several years now in an effort to build closer ties with the local community.
Vice President Kamala Harris was one of the first to do this when she ran for San Francisco district attorney in 2003.
But critics have accused Price of pandering to a recall campaign against him and his controversial history with the Asian community when he took out a full-page ad in the Chinese-language US newspaper The World Journal earlier this year.
Last year, the progressive district attorney was accused by a former staffer of being “condescending and disrespectful” to Asian people, and at least two veteran prosecutors resigned over Price’s radical progressive policies.
“Victims deserve better,” Daniel Hilton, who served as district attorney for nearly three decades, later wrote scathingly in a resignation statement.
Hilton told the district attorney that he could no longer serve in good conscience and argued that Price’s progressive policies were preventing justice for people “devastated by violent crime.”
Meanwhile, Judge Price has infuriated Alameda County’s sizable Asian community by refusing to commit to any increased sentencing or reduced charges in cases involving Asian victims, particularly the 2021 death of a 2-year-old boy who was hit by a stray bullet while riding in a car with his mother in Oakland.
In that case, former District Attorney Nancy O’Malley applied several criminal enhancements to maximize the sentences of three gang members arrested on murder charges, but Price did not swear to uphold them.
According to leaked internal memos, Judge Price instructed staff to avoid criminal increases that increase sentences “to restore balance in sentencing and reduce recidivism.”
In a later message to the “Asian community”, Price said he had not yet decided whether to increase penalties in the case of the two-year-old boy, and accused anonymous sources of spreading “misinformation”.
She also said her office was working with Asian legal organizations to “support Asian American victims of violence and promote greater possibilities for healing and non-prison forms of accountability.”
Prosecutor Rebecca Warren, who served as prosecutor for more than 17 years, argued in her resignation letter that Price’s language was inappropriate “during the discussion of one of the most horrific and tragic murder cases in history.”
“I can no longer tolerate this kind of mistreatment of AAPI people. [Asian American and Pacific Islander] “Leaders in our office have advocated for our community,” Warren, who is of Chinese descent, wrote at the time.
“It’s not just the Asian American community that is feeling anger and traumatized by the shocking number of innocent children killed by gun violence in our county,” she wrote. “The entire community is affected.”
Price, Alameda County’s first African-American district attorney, has previously dismissed criticism of her as due to racism and outdated prosecutorial methods.
