Asian hate
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| The set of ESPN Gameday as San Jose State University takes on hated rival Asian Hate at San Jose. SJSU fans show their signs with the iconic slogan "Stop Asian Hate". The fans booed as Lee Corso picked Asian Hate to win, donning the Asian Hate mascot head, simply a bust of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. SJSU, one of the worst Division IA universities in the country, destroyed #3 ranked Asian Hate 72-2. // photo by Jason Leung |
Stop Asian hate.
What does that mean, exactly?
Let's examine the word "Asian".
Though it technically describes a person (in this case) from the continent of Asia, that's not typically what is meant in common parlance. When describing Indians, for example, people typically don't use the word Asian, despite being from a country in Asia. Neither are Eastern Russians, Israelis, and Yemeni really included in the group when people discuss Asians.
Turning to "official", meaning "government", definitions is an even less illuminating endeavor, as the US Census categorizes Iranians as white while categorizing Pakistanis as Asian, a structure that can not be considered as anything other than arbitrary.
When people use the word "Asian", it is generally used to refer to people from Eastern Asia. The word does not quite reflect this, but that's what is generally accepted in US vernacular. People from places like Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, China, The Phillipines, Thailand, Singapore, and where my parents are from, Taiwan, are generally considered Asian. Even more narrowly, perhaps due specifically to populations in the United States, the word often seems to refer primarily to Han Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, excluding the Southeastern Asian populations.
Even using the most narrowly defined groups of the word above, the word plays no more a defined grouping of common characteristics than categorizing all cars by color. The Japanese have a culture and characteristics more similar to Germans than they do with the Chinese, as a blue SUV has more to do with a silver SUV than it does with a blue coupe.
If racism is a grouping and judging of people as a collective, ignoring subcultures and individuality, would not the blanket word "Asian" itself be a racist term if utilized to group people together despite sharing little resemblance to one another? Racism is, after all, a collectivist notion. Boil away all racism and all we are left with are individuals. All collective ideologies from Communism all the way to Fascism, from left to right, all carry some form of racism. Only one political ideology champions the erosion of all racist and collective tendencies and focuses on the individual. Libertarianism.
I am not, of course, calling everyone who uses the word to be a racist. I use the word quite often, myself. The word can be useful. But consistently using it as a blanket term, particularly with the intent to group dissimilar people into one group as a policy or as an ideal is a great way to be blind to the world as it truly is. I do think this becomes somewhat apparent in the violent events that we have seen unfold in the past year.
Now let's examine the word "hate".
The incident that really brought this to the media spotlight was, ironically, the mass shooting in Georgia that left eight people dead. I refuse to repeat mass shooters' names, preferring their identities are left off the annals of history and fade into anonymity. We shall call him...Dingleberry McMud. Many media outlets immediately assumed the motive was due to racism or white supremacy, even though two of the victims were white. It was not. It turns out Dingleberry had been a Christian Evangelical, who had long attended local sexual purity camps. He had gotten it into his head that sexual desires are evil and his inability to control his desires drove him to excruciating self-hate and it eventually manifested itself in a tragic shooting of what he considered were driving him to sin. This is a result of evangelical religious puritanism making people hate themselves for who they are, not race.
The massage parlors where McMud had murdered the people had been targets for prostitution in the past and had shown up in online reviews. The shooter's own remarks rebut that race was a motivating factor and he was focused on "helping" other people with sex addiction in his murderous rampage. Shooter manifestos in such shootings pretty much always accurately reflect the true feelings of the shooter. People who do these kinds of acts typically have a specific grievance and want to make their grievances known by committing these kinds of horrific acts. Lying about it in their manifesto while committing an act done, at least in part, to attract attention, simply doesn't make sense.
While there is the argument that Asian women are sexualized in culture, it is difficult to pin this on racism and more specifically as it's been stated, white supremacy. How would an ideology, at least for the latter, that is centered on segregating races be responsible for interracial relationships? More specifically with this incident, how do we know that this wasn't just the most accessible sexual release for Dingleberry? These need to be established before just pulling the trigger on the race card, and to my knowledge, neither has been addressed. Even then, this rationalization is tenuous, relying on the slippery slope fallacy.
Nevertheless, crimes targeted against Asians have been an issue for years (not that Asians are the only recipients of racially motivated violence) and it has increased in the past year, something we've known for months now. Many of the violent incidents have been perpetrated on the elderly and women and typically done in a sucker-punch manner, indicating that the perpetrators overwhelmingly are complete cowards. If these were done in "retaliation" to the Coronavirus, the fact that many of the victims were not Chinese, and were, for example, Thai, indicates that the perpetrators are also complete idiots, something probably assisted by the continued lumping of all Asians into one "race". That some of these attacks were just unprovoked random acts of violence with no other apparent motive or in multiple attacks with the only seeming connection between the victims being their broader race or done cruising around Chinatowns looking for trouble makes racial motivation plausible.
Still, it doesn't mean we should go around looking for racial motivation in places where it doesn't exist. It, in reality, weakens the cause by adding false positives, diluting the legitimacy of the claims.
Now let's examine the word "stop".
There are many people who earnestly care about the "Stop Asian hate" mantra. There are also many who are rabid career race warriors who have never seen a situation they don't think has some racial angle to it, with injecting racism somehow as their prescription for reducing racism. I have no issue with the former. The people in the latter category can go have procreative relations with themselves. Your concern trolling is not fooling me. Just a few months ago, those of you in California were climbing all over yourselves to pass Prop 16, which would have severely impeded Asian acceptance rates in California colleges. Those of you in Virginia are trying to implement rules that would decrease Asian enrollment in highly ranked public schools by 42 percentage points; enrollment that would instead go largely to white students by somewhere along the lines of 37 percentage points. All those woke Harvard socialites can perhaps have a moment of self-reflection in the interstices of their sesquipedalian persiflages and realize the lawsuits by Asian students against their beloved institution come from a place of true grievance. None of them have ever cared about this violence in the past, nor have they shown any real interest in the social marginalization of the Asian population. Those taking on this new mantra are trying to score cheap political points while at the same time trying to screw over that same population and labeling us "white-adjacent", consistent with their Critical Race Theory outlook on society. Those of us in the Asian population should be wary of allying with a group that has been so subliminally hostile to us.
Those three words, "Stop Asian hate", therefore, are far more complex than it seems on the surface, once the necessary nuance is added to make the phrase relevant to reality.
As people try to analyze the cause of the uptick in violence, the only thing that becomes clearer is that many have a preconceived notion of the cause and try to ram the triangular peg of their theory into the circular hole of reality.
CNN, for example, published an "analysis" by Stephen Collinson (Stephen, to be clear, you're included in the group above that can go procreate with themselves) that claims the increase in violence against Asians is due to white supremacy. In it, he claims Asians live in fear, stoked by prominent national figures, most notably Donald Trump. As proof, he links to another CNN article...that doesn't mention Trump at all, nor does it mention any national figure stoking anything. He goes on to attempt to link Trump to the rising violence, with his strongest "proof" being him calling the Coronavirus the "Chinese Virus" or "Kungflu". He then claimed Trump "often refused to unequivocally condemn white supremacy", which just isn't truthful. Maybe he didn't as much as Collinson would like to have, but to paint it as if Trump had never done it or imply that he condoned it was a complete fabrication. If the perception that Trump did not condemn white supremacy really did have anything to do with it, it rests squarely on the shoulders of people like Collinson who continually perpetuate the falsehood to create that perception.
While Trump's continued insistence of calling the pandemic those names was rather ill-advised, it is unclear how Collinson concludes that those names are evidence of white supremacy, especially when the rhetoric was primarily focused on the Chinese government, not the people. Just because a white person utilized the terminology does not make it white supremacy. Lest they forget, white supremacy is an ideology that insists the white race is superior to all other races. It's a pretty far stretch to suggest calling a virus by the country of origin is indicative of thinking the white race is superior to others.
Notably, Collinson completely failed to indicate that a disproportionate amount (relative to demographics) of perpetrators of the attacks or otherwise racist gestures toward Asians in the past year appear to be by black people in overwhelmingly progressive cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and particularly New York City where the vast majority of arrests for anti-Asian hate crimes were black. While it's true that there are more Asians in these cities than many others, these areas are not exactly Trump-fan central. The black vote is also not exactly known to be a reliable Trump-voting block.
I was able to find one statistic that claimed white people accounted for 90% of incidents against Asians (which appears to include nonviolent incidents which is misleading if the topic at hand is physical violence, which it overwhelmingly is) while black people accounted for just 5%. However, this was just someone claiming the statistic and sourcing it from an unnamed researcher at the University of Michigan. No specific study was cited. This seems to fly in the face of reports seen in the news as well as the many comments by Asians seen in the comments section of columns, though anecdotes are not evidence, and neither are all of those incidences clearly and specifically race-motivated. I have been lucky enough to not be a victim of racism over the past year (and really, my whole life so far has been fairly devoid of racist attacks and slurs) so I can't speak to this personally.
For that, we can try looking at crime statistics from 2018 which reveal the statistics on racial groups in violent crime in the past. Under Table 14, victim and offender races are categorized. It lists three general ethnicities: white, black, Hispanic, and Asian. For each ethnicity, its own ethnicity was its own biggest offender, by a quite large amount. Except for Asians. The largest offending category of Asian victims...were not white (24.1%), but black (27.5%). Percentage-wise, that's not a whole lot of difference, but considering the population difference between white (76.3%) and black (13.4%), that's a pretty stark difference. Looking at the one other category of victims that is neither white nor black, Hispanic, the black offenders (15.3%) dwindle underneath white offenders (28.2%).
The 2019 edition of the report conspicuously omits Asians from the racial groups so unfortunately, it's not so easy to see the trend, but it did say that Asian victimization in violent crime declined. The 2020 edition has not been released yet to my knowledge, but it would be the key statistic to see.
To be clear, this does not mean the statistics show any kind of racist intent in black on Asian crime. Asians are stereotypically considered to be wealthier, hold cash or precious metals at home, and easier targets so the majority are likely theft-related, not race-related. And since there are many logically challenged people in the political realm, no, I am not saying the black population is inherently bad or that only black people are committing the attacks. The vast majority of black people are good people. Many of them are speaking out against the violence against Asians. I live in a black neighborhood and I've never sensed any racial slight against me whatsoever. My entire point above was to show that the white supremacy angle is completely bereft of reality.
Some have conceded the above but still take to 4D chess maneuvers to claim the crimes were done through a white supremacy proxy.
Black on Asian crimes only occur because of our system of white supremacy that strips African Americans of their economic opportunities while taking respect and dignity away from Asian Americans. Also, white people in power are experts at dividing and conquering to stay in power.
— Eugene Gu, MD (@eugenegu) March 30, 2021
Conservatives were quick to blast the Tweet in its entirety, but Gu wasn't completely wrong. The government has stripped African Americans of their economic opportunities with policies like the minimum wage and occupational licensing. The government has taken away respect and dignity from Asian Americans with laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese internment, and affirmative action. The government has divided people by getting people to go at each other's throats over petty and made up differences between Democrats and Republicans. It's just that Gu has completely misdiagnosed the perpetrator. The common denominator is the government, not specifically white people. Many of the laws above have been perpetrated by Gu's politically preferred side.
Additionally, some others have taken even less nuance, absolving all violence from other minority groups by claiming white supremacy telepathically goaded them into doing it. This position is, of course, incredibly racist in itself, as the claim is that minorities lack so much independent thought and autonomy that white people can essentially use them as puppets on a string. To anyone who uses this line of thinking: black people, Latinos, and all other minority groups are way smarter and way more capable than you think, while white people are not an entire population of Professor X with mind-control capabilities. You think they wouldn't realize that the virus originated from China if Trump didn't say it? It is you who are racist for thinking so little of them. You are not helping.
You know what else isn't helping? Alleging racism when it isn't there like the Enguillado family and the San Francisco Chronicle writing the incendiary and misleading headline in its article of the incident. The 18 year old Enguillado was told by his father to sit at a bar as the family ordered pizza from next door. Rossi, the owner of the bar, told him he had to leave because he was under 21 and by law, people under 21 cannot be in a bar. After refusing to leave following multiple requests, a patron, who should probably be charged for assault, then came up and punched the 18 year old in the face. Rossi had to intervene and hold Lawlor, the attacker, back. Everything that transpired points to a misunderstanding between two people and someone, maybe drunk, engaging in a bar fight. The bar owner did nothing wrong by asking an 18 year old to leave the bar. The 18 year old shouldn't have been there, though it was likely an innocent mistake, but refusing to leave after being told to leave by the owner makes him a trespasser. Nothing in here remotely points to an anti-Asian attack, but SFChron still put that in its click-bait headline. The mother puts a video on TikTok which fueled a viral outrage against the bar because people prefer pitchforks and torches over rational thought. People mobbed Yelp to brigade and tarnish the bar owner's reputation. Do they think this helps things? When people read stories like this and see through the bullshit, do you think that helps or hurts racial relations? When you drive people to walk on eggshells when they're near certain people, what do you think that does to people's psyches?
We can open our eyes to what's really happening out there, or we can shut our eyes closed out of fear of offending certain groups of people, or in other cases, fear of their worldview being disproven, and never head toward any kind of resolution to the animus.
While it, unfortunately, appears that on a societal and political level, things won't get resolved any time soon, there may be hope on the individual level. It has been good to see an uptick in Asian people buying more guns over the past year in response to protect themselves and their families, even as Biden makes it more difficult for people to defend themselves.
As an example of defensive gun use, in Chinatown, San Francisco, an Asian store owner response to an assault outside his shop and diffuses the situation by flashing his sidearm. I just have one question for him: How in the actual hell was he able to obtain a concealed carry permit in California???? California isn't exactly known as a state that is friendly to allowing people to protect themselves, minority or no.
Allowing people to protect themselves is the best way to curb violence like this. Violent assholes are much less likely to assault an elderly Chinese woman if it's known that they tend to pack heat. Recommend that to a race warrior and watch their heads explode.
