By Pradheep J. Shanker
Tuesday, March 23, 2021
By now, we’re pretty used to media outlets and
left-wing politicians focusing on racism and bigotry as the driving forces of
disparity and injustice in America. But in the last few weeks, we have seen an
almost-total shift in focus from the racism against African Americans and
Hispanics, a familiar subject of coverage, to coverage of racism against a
different minority group: Asian Americans. A recent Atlanta shooting in
which a white male killed several Asian Americans has served to reinforce this
narrative. But while it is true that Asian Americans have faced prejudice in
the United States, and still do, the narrative being pushed of suddenly
resurgent anti-Asian sentiment is highly misleading.
Asian Americans have undoubtedly been the target of
hatred ever since they came to the U.S. Chinese were among the earliest
immigrants from this group to come to North America, largely serving as
laborers in the Western U.S. They were, at best, treated as indentured
servants; at worst, almost like slaves. Japanese and other far eastern Asian
groups slowly arrived in the following decades, with similar results. South
Asians, including Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis, didn’t start arriving
in significant numbers until the 1960s. Their immigration was quite different,
because it was more dependent on higher education than on labor needs. Each
group had to face its own unique threats from racism, however. For example,
after 9/11, many South Asian individuals (myself included) faced targeting as
potential terrorist threats, because we ‘looked’ like the hijackers. In recent
years, there has been clear evidence of targeting of other groups,
including Sikhs and Koreans.
It’s worth remembering, as we discuss this, that the term
“Asian Americans” fails to capture the variety it is meant to describe. Even
the U.S. Census Bureau has had trouble accurately defining it. Neither race,
religion, nor geography clearly delineates what it means to be Asian American.
Much of the Middle East is exempt from the broad definition, as is the entire
eastern two-thirds of Russia, which is part of Asia. The definition has somehow
been limited to nationalities and racial groups in Asia that reside south of
the current Russian state, and East of Iran. And even this definition raises
questions. How, for example, are China (with a population of 1.5 billion) and
India (population 1.2 billion) included in a single subset of definitions of
race, while Native American/American Indians as well as Pacific/Hawaiian
Islanders both have their own individual subset, with a much smaller population
for each? Indeed, India alone has more linguistic and ethnic diversity than all
of Europe.
Even with this history of prejudice, and even with all
the groups contained within the “Asian-American” demographic, the contemporary
evidence that Asian Americans specifically are being targeted at a greater rate
than other minorities remains unproven. The recent shift in narratives began
with a study the media pounced on from the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism. It studied 16
U.S. cities and concluded that Asian Americans reported 150 percent more crimes
in the last year than in prior years. But the numbers are so small as to be
statistically meaningless. San Diego, for example, saw a grand total of one hate
crime in 2020, without any in 2019. Large cities such as Chicago, Phoenix, and
Houston had similar numbers. In fact, of the 122 total anti-Asian hate crime
cases in 2020, 28 came from New York City, 15 from Los Angeles, and 14 from
Boston. A credible or honest researcher would consider this more of a problem
specific to those large urban centers than a nationwide problem. But such
intellectual integrity is lacking among journalists.
Another source for this trend is Stop AAPI Hate, an Asian-American action group. The group
says it recorded 3,795 ‘incidents of hate’ during the COVID pandemic. It
counted 68.1 percent of those as verbal harassment, and 20.5 percent of them as
‘shunning.’ The problem, of course, is there is no historical baseline data. We
have no significant evidence that there has been an interval increase in these
acts after the start of the coronavirus pandemic, although the media have
assumed exactly that fact.
The mainstream media have not shown any real level of
skepticism or professionalism when investigating these issues. On March 16, a
21-year-old white man entered several spas and massage parlors in metro Atlanta
and killed eight people, six of whom were Asian women. The media instantly
reported that this was likely an act of racism against Asians. However, neither
local police, nor President Biden’s own FBI, have shown any evidence of such racist intent. So, has
CNN or MSNBC issued a correction? Not at all. In fact, the narrative has been
accelerating, with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris hosting
a town hall in Atlanta late last week to fight the scourge of racist attacks .
. . that remains unproven by even their own administration.
This is not to deny that racism and hatred toward Asian
Americans is a persistent concern. Just as the groups encompassing the overall
definition of Asian Americans in the United States are broad and diverse,
so are the types of attacks these groups are now facing. Whether there has or
has not been a short-term increase in these acts doesn’t change the reality
that there was always prejudice against Asian groups. The problem, however, has
been that the acts themselves are not as predictable as many think, and the
harassers’ identities are, to say the very least, inconvenient for the
narrative being pushed on the country today.
White supremacists, who are universally despised for
their philosophy of hatred, are an easy target for trying to solve racism and
violence. However, the data don’t support blaming them for the vast majority of
crimes against Asians. FBI statistics show consistently over the decades that
young African-American males are far more likely to be the culprits of these
hate crimes than whites, Hispanics, or other groups. As Robert Cherry wrote in
the Spectator:
Using 2019 FBI statistics — the most recently available data — I
computed black and white perpetrators of hate crimes as a percentage of men 18
to 44 years old in their populations. The black rate was 40 percent, 76 percent
and 303 percent higher than the white rate for hate crimes against the
Asian/Pacific Island, Latino and LGBTQ communities respectively. Even more
troubling, black rates for hate-crime assaults were 94 percent higher while for
property destruction and vandalism, they were 14 percent lower than white
rates.
White supremacists are a problem, but more so with
property damage than with violent attacks. On the other hand, bodily attacks on
Asian Americans are far more likely to be perpetrated by members of other
minority groups. As a 2021 study in the American Journal of Criminal Justice put it:
Findings of this study, however,
also provide support to the minority-specific model, which assumes that hate
crimes against different racial minority groups are likely to show significant
differences. First, the race of offenders differs significantly across hate
crimes against Asian Americans, African Americans, and Hispanics. Specifically,
hate crimes against Asian Americans are more likely than hate crimes against
either African Americans or Hispanics to be committed by non-White offenders.
This finding may be attributed to animosity toward the “model minority” from
other minority groups.
Again, this doesn’t prove or disprove the thesis that
hate crimes are increasing against Asian Americans, nor does it dismiss the
need for dialogue and communication. But it is useful for the next steps. For
example, Asian Americans are more likely to be victims of hate crimes committed
by strangers than African Americans and Hispanics. This changes how we must
respond to these crimes. If our response is to target anonymous white bigots,
when they may not represent the majority of those committing these crimes, we
will obviously fail to achieve our goals.
The suggestion by the above study that the “model
minority” stereotype potentially causes more violence and antipathy is worth
considering. Asians as a group have excelled economically, academically, and
politically in the U.S., most particularly among the Indian-American community,
which is currently the wealthiest minority group in America. The study found
that Asian Americans are more likely to be the target of hate crimes in
educational environments.
Yet noticeably absent from the current media narrative is
any exploration of institutional or personal discrimination against Asian
Americans in left-wing environments, or of its possible ramifications.
Universities have long been allowed to practice a form of ‘reverse
discrimination’ against many Asian groups. For years, whites have argued that
affirmative-action policies were unfair to them. Their results in courts have
been mixed. Asian Americans recently made the same case, in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. The SFFA
filed a federal lawsuit against Harvard University, claiming that the school
imposes soft racial quotas purposely structured to restrict admission of Asian-
American students. The plaintiffs demonstrated that Harvard consistently ranks
Asians lower in vague, subjective traits such as personality, likability, and
kindness, with little to no evidence to support the ratings. Experts testified
that the Asian-American students with the exact same test scores and grades
would have a marginally lower chance of being admitted to Harvard than their
white fellow students, and would have been upwards of 95 percent less likely to
be admitted compared with African-American applicants. A leaked document from
an internal university investigation showed Harvard consistently penalized Asian-American students.
Ultimately Harvard successfully convinced the First
Circuit Court of Appeals that its policy was legal and constitutional. What
Harvard did here looks to many like a purposeful effort by the educated classes
to keep Asian-Americans numbers to a minimum at elite institutions, regardless
of what Harvard and other members of the liberal intelligentsia have long said
concerning the worthiness of diversity as a goal in and of itself. If the media
narrative about resurgent anti-Asian prejudice were honest, it would have at
least touched upon this hypocritical instance of discrimination in our elite
institutions. But that is less politically convenient, as those are largely
left-wing environments.
Diversity is an honorable and legitimate goal for a
modern society. But emphasizing it unevenly, or to the exclusion of what unites
us, can have pernicious effects. Indeed, we can only wonder what repercussions
such inconsistent and dangerous policies might have in society. The
government’s focus on racial characteristics and backgrounds, instead of
economic ones, provides an incentive and rationale for certain groups to attack
others, instead of providing a cohesive economic group mentality that wants to
try to raise all boats, regardless of race.
Two years ago, liberals tried to blame Trump and ‘white
supremacists’ for anti-Semitic attacks against Orthodox Jews, predominantly in
New York City. Only later did we learn that these crimes were mostly
perpetrated by other minorities. The same appears to be occurring now with
racial incidents against Asian Americans. In Atlanta, a horrific murder spree
was insinuated, without evidence, to be caused by racism. Time and again, we
use knee-jerk reactions, instead of evidence and data, to determine the status
of racism in our society. It is no wonder that time and again, we scream for
solutions, but never see any improvement.
If we are really interested in moving forward to a more
just, multicultural society, we must make policies based on evidence and data,
not emotion and reflex. Politicians, journalists, and others who immediately
claim an act of violence is racism, without spending any time being skeptical,
are doing the nation a great disservice. There is no hope to face the
irrational reality of racism if our response denies reality, and is also
irrational in turn.
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