Law enforcement has yet to discern the motivation of the man who horrifically slaughtered eight people at three Atlanta area massage parlors, six of whom were of Asian descent, and all but one of whom were women. Police are speculating whether the gunman, who told police he had a “sexual addiction,” was motivated by conspiracy theories that all Asian-owned massage parlors are a cover for sex work or trafficking. But then the narrative that emerged overnight was that this was an act of white supremacy.
Maybe it was. Even if the assailant was motivated by his desire to eradicate “temptation,” such a sexualization of Asian-owned businesses constitutes its own sort of racism. But even more concerning than the public and the media’s rush to judgment over this attack is their willingness not just to ignore rampant discrimination against Asian Americans in education and attacks in the street but to whitewash this oppression.
When attacks began to skyrocket against Asian Americans, especially in underpoliced urban areas, the media rushed to blame former President Donald Trump. Somehow, they speculated, it must have something to do with his dubbing the novel coronavirus the “China virus.” This ignored several truths. One is that many (if not most) Chinese Americans, nearly two-thirds of whom are foreign-born, come here precisely to flee the horrors of the same Chinese Communist Party that both Trump and President Biden have rightly blamed for exporting the pandemic.
Aside from a few cable packages hemming and hawing over overt assaults of Asian Americans in the streets, the media have attempted to whitewash the travesty. Why? Because the source of the surge in hate crimes isn’t white supremacy. Not only are many prominent suspects black, but the culprit is actually the very sort of underpolicing the Left has been advocating for the past year.
For starters, the violence is concentrated in cities that are underpolicing in response to anti-police activism. Of the 122 anti-Asian American hate crimes documented in our 16 most populous cities last year, more than 72% were in just six cities, and 23% were just in New York. What was going on in New York City and Los Angeles that wasn’t going on in San Diego or Cincinnati (just one anti-Asian American hate crime apiece)?
Furthermore, prominent serial assailants, such as Yahya Muslim, who allegedly attacked three Asian Americans in one day, and Antoine Watson, accused of killing an Asian man in broad daylight, are black. That hasn’t stopped cable news hacks like Kurt Bardella from claiming on MSNBC without evidence that the recent surge in violence is motivated by white supremacy. Websites such as Vox are even trying to rewrite the past, blaming the torching of Koreatown during the 1992 Los Angeles riots on “white supremacy,” not on the black rioters who famously did it.
Even more insulting are those trying to victim-blame. NBC News attempted simultaneously to blame Trump for turning blacks against Asians and to deny that Asian Americans are actually hate crime victims in the first place. “And just as the Asian American community isn’t immune to perpetuating anti-Blackness, the Black community can be vulnerable to absorbing the anti-Asian discourse,” Kimmy Yam writes.
And in case you need further evidence, just log on to Twitter, whose most intellectually dishonest, bad-faith users are pretending that anti-black and anti-Asian racism are actually all the same.
Last night’s shooting & the appalling rise of anti-Asian violence stem frm a sick society where nationalism has again been stoked & normalized. Anti-Black & anti-Asian racism & violence run in tandem in the U.S. Both grps were brought here for labor but never meant to be citizens
— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) March 17, 2021
Locking arms with Asian Americans facing this lethal wave of anti-Asian terror. Their struggle is my struggle. Our struggle is against racism and White supremacist domestic terror. https://t.co/CGFpdk4K9t
— Ibram X. Kendi (@DrIbram) March 17, 2021
As a slogan, Black Lives Matter got one crucial point right: Just as you don’t whine at someone’s funeral that we ought to mourn all of the other people who’ve died, when we discuss the police killings of unarmed black people, there’s no point in mentioning the obvious fact that all lives matter. The Tree of Life shooting wasn’t the time to talk about Islamophobia, just as the Christchurch shooting wasn’t the time to talk about anti-Semitism. The same ought to go for perpetrators.
We don’t have the comprehensive statistics of who is attacking disproportionately older and poorer Asian Americans, and we don’t know if racial animus is a significant motivating factor. But what we do know is that urban underpolicing is a primary cause, and in many cases, the perpetrators are black. We can and should be horrified by the white man responsible for the Atlanta massacre, and directly or indirectly, it does appear that racism was a motivating factor. But if we really care about solidarity with Asian Americans, let’s care even when white supremacy isn’t to blame and not whitewash the cases when that’s true.
