From 2021:
Race and False Hate Crime Narratives
"The reaction to the mass shootings in Boulder, Colorado, and Atlanta, Georgia, over the last week has revealed how invested the Democratic establishment is in one all-powerful narrative. Both shootings produced an immediate response from the media, Democratic politicians, and activists—that the slaughters were the result of white supremacy and that white Americans are the biggest threat facing the US. That interpretation was reached, in the case of the Boulder shooting, on the slimmest of evidence, and in the case of the Atlanta shooting, in the face of contradictory facts.
After the Boulder supermarket attacks, social media lit up with gloating pronouncements that the shooter was a violent white male and part of what Vice President Kamala Harris’s niece declared (in a since-deleted tweet) to be the “greatest terrorist threat to our country.” (Video of the handcuffed shooter being led away by the police appeared to show a white male.) Now that the shooter’s identity has been revealed as Syrian-American and his tirades against the “Islamophobia industry” unearthed, that line of thought has been quietly retired and replaced with the stand-by Democratic response to mass shootings—demands for gun control.
But the false narrative about the Atlanta spa shootings still has legs. It represents a double lie—first, that the massacre was the product of Trump-inspired xenophobic hatred, and second, that whites are the biggest perpetrators of violence against Asians. The most striking aspect of these untruths is the fact that they were fabricated in plain sight and in open defiance of reality...
[Robert Aaron] Long told the police that he had targeted the three Atlanta spas to purge himself of his lust and his addiction to pornography. This explanation is wholly credible. All three establishments have been investigated for prostitution, and Long had frequented at least two of them. Customer reviews of the massage parlors attest to their provision of sexual services. Long has said nothing about Asian responsibility for the coronavirus. Indeed, if he were upset by a supposed connection between Asians and the pandemic, one would expect him to have avoided close contact with Asians. By all accounts, Long was tormented by an inability to control his sexual thoughts and behavior, which he believed to be a violation of his Christian faith. He also said nothing about hatred of Asians... Long intended to target a business in Florida next that made pornography, he told police. The employees there were unlikely to be Asian.
The uncontradicted evidence for Long’s motivation and the absence of evidence for a white supremacist impulse were no impediment to the narrative. Anyone who doubted that narrative was complicit in white supremacy. Reuters was reprimanded on social media for the headline: “Sex addiction, not racial hatred, may have driven suspect in Georgia spa shootings.” The news organization’s revised attempt—“Motive in Georgia spa shootings uncertain, but Asian-Americans fearful”—earned it no absolution. “We don’t let mass casualty shooters diagnose themselves,” sniffed a terrorism expert at Georgia State University. Needless to say, had Long told the police that he was seeking revenge on Asians for COVID, his self-diagnosis would have been taken as definitive proof.
Both Harris and Biden obliquely referred to the question of motive while dismissing its relevance...
If the fact that 75 percent of Long’s victims were Asian turns the shootings into an anti-Asian hate crime, then the fact that 100 percent of Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa’s victims in Boulder were white should turn that shooting into an anti-white hate crime...
Nowhere was the compulsion to buttress the meme about white supremacist violence clearer than in the treatment of the actual street violence that Asians have long suffered...
In March 2020, four teenage girls assaulted a 51-year-old woman on a bus in the Bronx, hitting her with an umbrella and accusing her of spreading the coronavirus. Here was a more promising story of Trump-inspired COVID xenophobia, if only the girls had been a different race.
In fact, the suspects in all of these cases were black; the news reports rarely mentioned that detail. Had the suspects been white, their race would have led each news report, as it did for Robert Aaron Long. A former member of the Oakland police department’s robbery undercover suppression team tells me that this racial pattern of attack and its lack of coverage is longstanding. No one cares about Asian robbery victims, he says, “We used to follow around elderly Asians, waiting for the bad guys to start circling. This has been one of my long-term frustrations. They are pretending to care now but ironically blaming it on white supremacy”—even though the suspects in Asian robbery attacks are almost exclusively, in this cop’s experience, black.
The New York Police Department compiles the most extensive data on hate crimes in the country. These data confirm the Oakland officer’s observation. A black New Yorker is over six times as likely to commit a hate crime against an Asian as a white New Yorker...
Inner-city animus against Asian small business owners is also longstanding, as the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the 1990 Big Apple grocery boycott in New York City recall. The predominantly black character of the attacks on elderly Asians may be euphemistically acknowledged in only one context: disparate impact. Racial justice advocates oppose a law enforcement response to those attacks because, the New York Times explained, going to the police would have a disparate impact on “Black and Latino communities.” Actors Daniel Kim and Daniel Wu had offered a $25,000 reward to anyone who helped find the assailant in the January 31st assault on the 91-year-old man and two other Asians in Oakland. Teen Vogue contributor Kim Tran criticized them both for failing to understand “why it’s problematic to offer 25k for information about a Black man in Oakland.” In response to a polite objection, she added: “this looks a lot like a bounty on a Black person funded by Asian American celebrities.” According to Time magazine, the reward underscored the problem of how to “tackle anti-Asian violence without relying on law enforcement institutions that have historically targeted Black and brown communities.” Neither Time nor Kim Tran explicitly said that anti-Asian violence is predominantly black—we are left to infer that for ourselves.
In disparate impact analysis, it is the government response to antisocial behavior that is the problem, not the behavior itself. A supervising attorney with the Racial Justice Unit at Legal Aid in New York City told the New York Times: “I’ve rarely seen people who are more socially privileged be the ones accused of hate crimes. Often what you end up seeing is people of color being accused of hate crimes.” Maybe that is because those are the people disproportionately committing hate crimes. But that possibility must not be granted. Biden chastised the country for its silence about anti-Asian violence. The reason for that silence, however, is that blacks are the primary drivers of this violence. Acknowledging these assaults only became acceptable when there was a white perpetrator, even if his motive did not fit the story being told.
Two other strategies have emerged for ducking the reality of anti-Asian violence. The first of these is a retreat into denial. Claire Jean Kim, a professor of political science and Asian American studies at the University of California, Irvine, told Slate that she was asked by Asian reporters if black people are going after Asians. Those reporters had apparently seen the videos. Kim pushed back against what is patently obvious. “I kept asking them, What’s the evidence? Are there other videos? There was a rush to judgment about these cases all being about Black people going after Asians, and when you think about the tendency in American society to criminalize Black people, it’s a problem to reach for that frame and apply it before the evidence warrants it.” [emphasis in original] A COVID-xenophobic frame was applied to Long before the evidence warranted it, but never mind.
The second strategy is simply to change the subject. In a Los Angeles Times column, Erika D. Smith notes that activists are “blaming white supremacy, systemic racism and the societal constructs that support them” for “racially motivated crimes,” rather than “focusing on individual perpetrators and demanding more policing.” In her Slate interview, Claire Jean Kim complained that focusing on the “Asian-Black thing” takes “attention away from the larger structures of power in which they’re embedded.” A racial justice educator, Bianca Mabute-Louie, warned about focusing on interracial (i.e., black-Asian) conflict, since doing so would deflect from recognizing that “racism is a result of white supremacy,” as Time put it. It turns out that white supremacy has been bashing frail Asians over the head, not individual criminals.
White supremacy is also apparently getting whites beaten up. Blacks commit 88 percent of all interracial violence between whites and blacks, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Yet on March 22nd, 2021, CNN ran a special entitled “Afraid: Fear in America’s Communities of Color,” as if whites were putting US minorities at risk. The move to blame white supremacy for black-perpetrated attacks on Asians results in a strange linguistic divide. Press reports refer to activists condemning “anti-Asian racism” and fighting anti-Asian “hate.” The intended referent in such observations is whites. But the actual referent is blacks.
The lie about white supremacist violence is not innocuous. It forms the
basis of the Biden administration’s policy in national security and in a
host of domestic welfare programs. It is the pretext for Big Tech and
Big Media’s silencing of speech. And the shamelessness with which that
lie is constructed grows more brazen by the day. It must be fought with
facts before it irrevocably alters our culture."
