Anti-Asian Hate Crimes: What’s Going On?

On May 20, President Biden signed a bill meant to address hate crimes against Asian-Americans. It was supported overwhelmingly (364-62) by both sides of the aisle. It wasn’t clear from anything I read whether the bill has any realistic mechanisms to achieve its goal. We’ll have to see about that. In the press conference that accompanied the signing, Biden referenced this year’s mass shooting in the Atlanta area that left six Asian-American women dead. It wasn’t an anti-Asian attack. It was an attack on three particular jerk-off parlors by a nutcase that patronized them. He blamed the shops for his sex addiction – and when he went on his rampage, he killed everyone in them indiscriminately. Asian, White, and Black. If it was a hate crime, it was a self-hate crime. The script that Biden read that day referenced the ubiquity of video clips on the internet displaying these attacks in ugly detail. From The Washington Post:

Many Americans have been shocked by publicized surveillance or cellphone video released in the last year of Asian-Americans, many of them elderly, being accosted and beaten by strangers on the streets of US cities, as well as by reports of people spitting on, cursing at, or refusing to serve Asian-Americans and accusing them of causing the pandemic.

I checked out about two dozen of those videos. (There are literally hundreds of them.) As a group, they don’t support the Biden administration narrative: that the attacks were caused by Trump’s rhetoric on the “Chinese virus.” The great majority – and I mean about 90% of them – were not perpetuated by White men in red hats but by Black people, men and women. This is obvious to anyone that looks at the videos, but it is something one is not allowed to say. But I’ve said it. So it begs an answer to the question: Are Blacks in America more anti-Asian than white people? I doubt it. I suspect the prevalence of Black-on-Asian attacks is about proximity – about the fact that Asians are more likely to be the owners or employees of stores situated in Black neighborhoods. In fact, most of the videos I saw were about theft: either Asians being beaten on the streets as they were robbed or, less frequently, Blacks upset by what they believed was racial profiling by Asian store owners. But don’t take my word for it. Decide for yourself: Bystanders Step in to Protect Asian Man in New York City Two Witnesses Save Asian Man From Brutal Attack in Oakland Man Threatened to Stab Undercover Asian NYPD Police Officer Woman Charged With Hate Crime in Attack on Asian Beauty Store Owner Asian Man Repeatedly Punched on Manhattan Sidewalk 67-Year-Old Lyft Driver Is Beaten and Robbed at Gas Station Man Threatened to Stab Undercover Asian NYPD Officer