The US Is Seeing a Spike in Anti-Asian Hate Crimes | Hacker News Reader

The US Is Seeing a Spike in Anti-Asian Hate Crimes

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130 pointsjbegley112 comments

Indian-American here. One thing I often find irritating about the phrase "Asian-American" is that it's usually used to refer to people with East Asian heritage (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, etc). Somehow people with South Asian heritage, like myself, often aren't included in that category, to the point that my girlfriend was surprised to hear that Indian-Americans count as Asian-American.

While a valid point, perhaps this article isn't the most appropriate place to raise it...

Russians are also Asian.

I was seeing a woman from Tatarstan, the double eyelid phenotypes were pronounces along with some other features that are even more common in East Asia. There are a lot of people in Russia like that.

I had never heard of that place while in the US, its just “Russia” and an image of the part bordering the EU

Why are you being downvoted? Russians east of the urals look asian too!

Yes, Some are, given that Russia "stretches over a vast expanse of Europe and Northern Asia" [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_Russia

The fact that Chinese and other East Asian people look far more similar and are the stereotypical "Asian" than Indians and other South Asians is responsible for that. Likewise, there's another comment here about the Russians (North Asians). To the average American, Indian and Russian are probably separate categories from Asian.

I think this is a symptom of the continent of Asia being so extremely large and diverse. To wit, every definition of Asia also includes the Arabian Peninsula, but most people would probably not intuitively classify Arab Americans as Asian Americans. The appropriation of "Asian American" to almost universally mean "East Asian Americans" is probably due to the lack of a specific, pre-existing demonym to describe people from that region. It's like how South Americans can be rightfully irritated that "American" gets used to refer to someone from the US, which is also partly due to the fact that no more precise demonym ever emerged (not in English, anyway).

> how South Americans can be rightfully irritated that "American" gets used to refer to someone from the US

USA is the only country which has America in its name.

> To wit, every definition of Asia also includes the Arabian Peninsula

Specifically the first definition, it refers to Anatolia or the Persian empire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_continent_name_etymolo...) and the definition expanded from there as more and more land was being discovered. Then our terrible and arbitrary definitions of a continent got thrown into the mix.

India is considered its own subcontinent - by every definition. It features a lot of diversity in its own right.

The land bridge from Alaska into Russia means Americans are Asians.

Ain't no one calling Iranians and Israelis asians.

https://www.worldometers.info/geography/how-many-countries-i...

If we want to be truly correct we should include Russians then as well?

While not disputing the core point about escalating violence against Asian Americans, this article seems to view any crime or violence as racially motivated. There is a robbery in there, for example, which suggest an alternate motivation. Would be useful to be more clear on what the author considers a hate crime vs crime whose victim is Asian.

The article didn’t add any specific facts to suggest any of these crimes would be charged as “hate crimes” which is generally just an additional penalty to another crime and usually requires at least an acknowledgement of the protected class during the commission of the underlying crime suggesting the victims status as a member of the protected class was material to the criminal act.

The specific victims mentioned were all elderly which is also disturbing and seems to be a growing trend in itself. Since the BLM protests/riots there have been a lot of videos surfacing where a senior citizen is walking solo and gets senselessly sucker-punched and/or knocked out without warning by a lone wolf. I suppose when the elderly victim is Asian, it’s easy to conclude such an assault must be a hate crime, because they are so brutal and otherwise senseless.

I don’t like the idea of mass surveillance but these seem like the ideal types of cases to get a warrant to pinpoint the suspect’s phone to ID them.

There is semi-hidden animosity between the black and some Asian communities.

Chinese immigrants are often the ones first moving into and then buying out people in black neighborhoods.

Asian kids do disproportionately well in urban schools. Lowell High School is moving from a scoring based system to a lottery. Asian parents see this as unfair while black parents see the previous system as unfair.

Chinese are traditionally not seen as fighting back. Some criminals see elderly as easy marks due to the tendency to carry cash and due to their frailty.

The trade war with China has spread to demonization of Asians.

BLM riots and the lack of persecution and then the defund the police emboldened criminal activity including physical attacks.

This cycle of animosity and violence last occurred roughly 30 years ago.

I’m getting a gun.

> I’m getting a gun.

good luck. ammo sold out across country.

If you are willing to pay there are overpriced sales and limited purchase options at your local gun store. There are four million new gun owners and it will take a while for the industry to catch up.

Make minicrossbows fashionable again.

I’m getting a gun.

If violent people are anything like wild animals, pepper spray is safer and more effective. You actually have a good chance of hitting your attacker with a stream pepper spray, unlike with a tiny bullet. Your attacker (in the case of, say, a moose) is more likely to run away when hit with pepper than with a bullet. And you are less likely to have collateral damage.

Just throwing out there violent people are not like wild amnimals, and in 94% of cases simply drawing a firearm is enough to cause an attacker to flee.

Have you ever been involved with pepper spray? It’s generally terrible for self defense. An attacker isn’t instantly incapacitated — they are still deadly until the full effects of the spray kick in. In the Army, I was trained to keep operating even amongst tear gas. It is horrible, but a violent assailant, especially multiple violent assailants aren’t going to immediately drop to the ground or run away. Being trained and proficient with a firearm is a far better strategy than hoping the attacker happens to be downwind and hoping they aren’t on meth or other drugs that make them seemingly impervious to pepper spray.

Here is one example of why pepper spray is not ideal: https://mynbc15.com/news/local/mobile-woman-shot-after-peppe...

Had the lady shot the suspect, it’s unlikely that she would have been hurt.

Pepper spray is nothing; former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien puts pepper on his plate, he had us know.

https://www.cbc.ca/archives/when-protest-met-pepper-spray-at...

If this is true, then we should disarm every cop.

Semi-hidden? Tensions between black & korean-americans was a huge part of the 1992 LA Riots.

Also a sub-theme in Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing from the late 1980s.

All ethnicities go to war with each other in LA, it's such a hell hole. Certain Mexican gangs in the 90s were targeting blacks with extreme violence, not to say that it doesn't go both ways. Still to this day there is a lot of tension between Sureno gangs and Black gangs.

Westside is still good ... right?

> The trade war with China has spread to demonization of Asians.

Has it really though? I agree with pretty much everything else you said (though I’m unsure if getting a gun is warranted).

I don’t think a trade war with China will spur too much in the way of anti-Asian sentiment. Americans were generally able to differentiate between Russians and their government during the Cold War.

I’m not saying there won’t be notable stories that pop here or there, but I don’t think this country is actually as Nativist as the press makes it out to be.

We’ll see I guess.

Stay safe!

What do you even mean if you call the US nativist? Native American Supremacist?

"Nativist" is a common historical term in the United States to mean someone who is anti-immigration and (usually) anti-immigrant, and tends to be strongly associated with white supremacy.

> Americans were generally able to differentiate between Russians and their government during the Cold War.

And just 20 years before that the Japanese internment camps happened.

Sharp contrast between concentration camps for Japanese and Japanese Americans with the treatment of Germans and Nazi sympathizers

That was because the Allies expected the Germans to obey "rules of war" in the European tradition, and knew that the Japanese wouldn't. An American GI would be much happier as a POW of Germany than of Japan.

Some German Americans were actually interned[1]. About 1/10th the amount of Japanese that were interned, but also not nothing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_German_Americans

Hackernews starting to read like Blind App

Pretty reasonable take overall.

People shouldn’t forget about the African-American and Korean animosity during the LA riots. This stuff goes way back.

For most of 2020 the US gov (and much of the media) emphasized covid being not only from China but "a China virus". They never rejected or downplayed the baseless conspiracy theories that it was man made or a deliberate attack by the Chinese. The US actively promoted the equally baseless fear of espionage through tiktok or wechat (lmao) to the point of trying to ban these apps. Rather than quell peoples' fears and doubts in the midst of a national crisis, fuel was added to the fire. And now the xenophobia is in full force.

The man made "conspiracy theories" are not baseless. There is a substantial amount of evidence that it is at least a possibility. There is also a substantial amount of evidence that China intentionally or unintentionally flubbed the handling of this pandemic at the beginning, and is at least partly responsibly for it's rapid spread.

>Many blame....

Who are these "many", apart from the post author (the Royal "We", maybe), and why are these opinions supposedly worth noting in a factual news article? One can hope that one day that journalistic norms will preclude such weasel-word editorializations.

This isn't attempting to be a "factual news article" and therefore isn't betraying any "journalistic norms". I think a big part of this country's lack of faith in journalism is due to a basic ignorance of the different forms of journalism and how they each have different norms.

You can blame journalists for that. When hard news stories get littered with opinion and bias, the line between opinion and news gets so blurred as to become non-existent.

I‘m pretty sure it would be quite easy to find a reasonable number of people to agree with the statement to qualify as „many“.

Assuming we agree that the pandemic is motivating this violence, it also doesn’t seem particularly controversial that a president going out of his way to highlight the geographic origin of the virus may be a contributing factor.

Interesting how no mainstream media is reporting this. They sure were quick to label BLM rioters burning down Asian businesses as "peaceful protestors".

New York Magazine is mainstream media, no? Although as someone else noted there is an ethnocultural factor in these incidents that is conveniently under-emphasized because it's real awkward for everyone.

Within the last few months, it's been on ABC News, CNN, the Financial Times, PBS, USA Today, VOA, The Los Angeles Times, and many others.

My anecdotal experience suggests this seems to be a Cali phenomenon. In Seattle, even with our insane number homeless, addicts, and the uptick in crime this year, we’ve had only a handful of attacks against our Asian citizens. All of which were dealt with swiftly and harshly.

Oakland and SF are especially bad right now. I fear for many of my friends and their families.

NY, San Francisco, San Jose, the 3 examples all happened in deep blue cities.

> Many blame the Trump administration for inciting this violence; Trump and numerous other members of his White House staff embraced racist and xenophobic anti-Asian rhetoric...

> NYPD date showed that there has been a 1,900 percent increase anti-Asian hate crimes in New York City in the past year... An 84-year-old Thai American man, Vicha Ratanapakdee, was killed in an unprovoked attack in San Francisco; a 64-year-old Vietnamese American woman was assaulted in broad daylight in San Jose... caught on camera shoving a 91-year-old man in Oakland’s Chinatown

Trump only won 20% of the votes in New York City. Only 13% of the votes in San Francisco. Only 25% of the votes in San Jose. And 16% of the votes in Oakland. All of the examples cited occurred in some of the least Trump-supportive areas of the country.

How much longer can we blame trump for everything before realising America has problems deeper than one person.

Well that would perhaps lead to solving some of the problems, which is not in any politician's interest. Having the problems, and blaming them someone else, is far more useful.

The least Trump-supportive areas are also the areas where the Trump followers who do exist are most likely to interact with Asian people.

> All of the examples cited occurred in some of the least Trump-supportive areas of the country.

So? Do you think Trump supporters are more likely to feel persecuted and lash out in rage against vulnerable targets outside of government-sanctioned mechanisms where they are a majority and control local government and institutions or where they are a small minority with little influence on local government and institutions?

And do you think that, even that general factor aside, when looking specifically at attacks on Asians by Trump supporters, the number of Trump supporters in the area is really more important than the frequency of interaction between Trump supporters and Asians?

>Trump only won 20% of the votes in New York City

That's like 600,000 people...

People are downvoting this because the facts make them uncomfortable. Funny how when you posts stats it makes them angry.

Perpetrators of racist attacks tend not to be accurate representations of the local population.

And the fact that CA and NY are mentioned rather than Oklahoma and Idaho is far more likely to be the result of there actually being Asian people in New York and California.

Plus, of course, these two states are among the most populated. There are far more Trump voters in California than the Dakotas.

There are 90,000 Asian Americans in Oklahoma. There are over a million in Texas. And more than half a million in Florida. Certainly enough for a pre-mediated act of political terrorism to find a target.

You're constructing a false dichotomy where you assume all Red counties are rural, white, and low-population. That's definitely not true outside the coastal states. If the trend is being primarily driven by Republican voters, the Trump-stronghold of Houston (which has one of the largest Asian-American populations of any American city) should be a hotbed of hate crimes. Yet far more seem to occur in San Francisco. Clearly there's an x-factor that goes beyond Trump.

> There are 90,000 Asian Americans in Oklahoma

There's about 300,000 in the City of San Francisco.

Heck, there's more of both Asians and Trump supporters in California than any red state, and probably far more of both in just red counties in California than in Oklahoma.

> You're constructing a false dichotomy where you assume all Red counties are rural, white, and low-population.

No, you’re constructing a dichotomy where blue states consist entirely of blue counties and blue voters.

> If the trend is being primarily driven by Republican voters

What if it's driven primarily by Republican voters who are lashing out at highly visible targets outside of official channels where they don't control local and state governments and therefore feel disempowered?

> Yet far more seem to occur in San Francisco

San Francisco has about twice as many Asians as Houston, with about 1/3 the total population, for about 6 times the concentration. The average Trump supporter in SF (where, sure, there are fewer) is going to encounter a lot more Asians in daily life than in Houston.

Antoine Watson

Yahya Muslim

Yep, definitely sounds like average Trump supporter names...

There's a flagged-to-death response here that really deserves a response:

> It's Trump's fault Blacks in CA and NY are attacking Asians?

To the extent that it is blacks attacking Asians this is more plausible than it superficially might seem: people here love to cite the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect, but if you think that that is a significant force dealing with content of intellectual interest in a single news source, you probably ought to recognize how much more powerful it is for messages playing on out-group fear relayed through multiple social channels.

Sure, the ground is prepped for it by preexisting background racial animosity, but then even if not Trump specifically, a lot of that is also from racist propaganda of a white supremacist origin permeating society and turning nonwhite groups against each other.

I don't think this is fully do to coronavirus. Media across the entire American political spectrum is beating the same drum: China is the enemy, and they need to be dealt with. Any Asian-American can tell you that the average American's ability to distinguish between people of Chinese ancestry vs. not is essentially nonexistent, so really this is just establishing that people who look East Asian are the enemy.

You'll see the above-mentioned drum beat in this very thread, where a suggestion that China is not the enemy will be met with accusations of being a genocide apologist. I suggest it is worth considering what dogpile you want to join in on, and who is served by you jumping in that dogpile. Consent is being manufactured.

I doubt that the teenagers running up to Asian elders to push them over are motivated by hawkish sentiment toward China. I'd be surprised if they have any awareness of geopolitics whatsoever.

This phenomenon isn't limited to dry discussion of foreign policy. You see it as an endless barrage of distorted, negative articles about every aspect of China posted all over social media. Try opening a reddit thread about China sometime. You won't have to scroll very far before you see someone wishing death upon some Chinese people.

First of all, you underestimate the intelligence of teens and their ability to perceive/think about the world. Second, if there's a pattern of attacks on Asian elders in America as discussed in the article, that isn't any accident. They are being identified and targeted because of their race, motivated by fearmongering about traditional nativist myths and the 'coronavirus made by Asians' myth.

Nah, it has much more to do with long-standing tensions between the black (Black?) and Asian communities.

I've often wondered if observing teens and even say ten-year-olds isn't indeed among the better ways of intuiting what attitudes and sentiments actually inhabit a community. Adults are likely to self-censor far more, whereas a young teen or eleven-year-old may simply echo what they've heard behind closed doors.

I have no good opinion on whether or not China, the nation and its government, should be considered an "enemy". But reasonable people can believe a government is an antagonist, while not blaming individuals from that nation.

If people are getting confused, or are just plain racist, and are blaming individuals for the sins of a government, then that's the problem to solve.

But the way to solve it isn't by avoiding uncomfortable truths about governments (or about anything).

This "I hate the government, not the people" schtick is a cop out. The Chinese people overwhelmingly support the actions of their government.

Beyond that, the idea that the media can wash their hands of this because people should know they're talking about the Chinese government, not Chinese people, is just incredibly generous to a class of people who absolutely know what they are doing.

The Chinese people overwhelmingly support the actions of their government.

How is that relevant? A person who disagrees with me isn't my enemy.

Beyond that, the idea that the media can wash their hands of this because people should know they're talking about the Chinese government, not Chinese people, is just incredibly generous to a class of people who absolutely know what they are doing.

I can't figure out what you're saying here. What do they know they're doing? And do you have any evidence of your claim?

What they are doing is establishing a shared belief among Americans that Chinese people are deserving of punishment (implied: via military means). For evidence I refer you to the book Manufacturing Consent by well-known computer scientist & political activist Noam Chomsky, who details how the US media again and again has used a strategy of selective reporting to categorize the world's people as deserving or undeserving victims in line with America's foreign policy goals.

The media are colluding to purposefully shift the mindset of American citizens toward believing that Chinese people deserve punishment?

This has the ring of a full-on conspiracy theory. Sorry, but I don't believe for a second that the media could effectively collude on anything of that nature. Certainly not to the point of effectively gradually shifting American sentiment.

Conspiracy theories are a dime a dozen these days. No one has time to read every book by every conspiracy theorist.

Chomsky's model does not rely on a conspiracy for the media to function the way it does. It simply follows from incentives. Cribbing from the wikipedia article, we have:

The propaganda model for the manufacture of public consent describes five editorially distorting filters, which are applied to the reporting of news in mass communications media. These five filters of editorial bias are:

(1) Size, ownership, and profit orientation: The dominant mass-media outlets are large profit-based operations, and therefore they must cater to the financial interests of the owners such as corporations and controlling investors. The size of a media company is a consequence of the investment capital required for the mass-communications technology required to reach a mass audience of viewers, listeners, and readers.

(2) The advertising license to do business: Since the majority of the revenue of major media outlets derives from advertising (not from sales or subscriptions), advertisers have acquired a "de facto licensing authority."[11] Media outlets are not commercially viable without the support of advertisers. News media must therefore cater to the political prejudices and economic desires of their advertisers. This has weakened the working class press, for example, and also helps explain the attrition in the number of newspapers.

(3) Sourcing mass media news: Herman and Chomsky argue that "the large bureaucracies of the powerful subsidize the mass media, and gain special access [to the news], by their contribution to reducing the media's costs of acquiring [...] and producing, news. The large entities that provide this subsidy become 'routine' news sources and have privileged access to the gates. Non-routine sources must struggle for access, and may be ignored by the arbitrary decision of the gatekeepers." Editorial distortion is aggravated by the news media's dependence upon private and governmental news sources. If a given newspaper, television station, magazine, etc., incurs disfavor from the sources, it is subtly excluded from access to information. Consequently, it loses readers or viewers, and ultimately, advertisers. To minimize such financial danger, news media businesses editorially distort their reporting to favor government and corporate policies in order to stay in business.[12]

(4) Flak and the enforcers: "Flak" refers to negative responses to a media statement or program (e.g. letters, complaints, lawsuits, or legislative actions). Flak can be expensive to the media, either due to loss of advertising revenue, or due to the costs of legal defense or defense of the media outlet's public image. Flak can be organized by powerful, private influence groups (e.g. think tanks). The prospect of eliciting flak can be a deterrent to the reporting of certain kinds of facts or opinions.[12]

(5) Anti-communism/war on terror: Anti-communism was included as a filter in the original 1988 edition of the book, but Chomsky argues that since the end of the Cold War (1945–91) anticommunism was replaced by the "war on terror" as the major social control mechanism.

Also it must be remarked: calling Chomsky a conspiracy theorist? On hacker news? Come on, man. This is an extensively researched, respected, and cited work.

You.... forgot to talk about China.

In fact, laughably, you offered an argument that suggests anticommunism has been replaced.

Speaking of Chomsky, I believe he was very critical of Israel was he not? and I believe he was called an anti-semite for it, was he not?

I suppose you can be anti-Israel, but not be an anti-semite, but you can't be anti-CCP without being anti-asian?

Huh, anything skeptical of American media is borderline conspiracy these days.

After Weiss, Greenwald exposes, you still don't believe they're capable of colluding to stir division or drive certain narratives?

> But reasonable people can believe a government is an antagonist, while not blaming individuals from that nation.

That's the exception, not the rule, from my experience. It takes very little to go from "fuck China" to "fuck Chinese people".

> If people are getting confused, or are just plain racist, and are blaming individuals for the sins of a government, then that's the problem to solve.

Is this seen as a problem for the powers that be? Will it ever be addressed? It's just collateral damage from what I can see- same as how brown people were treated during the War on Terror. I'm glad that there's a bit more visibility on this topic, but it's nowhere near solved. I doubt it can ever be solved, cynical as it sounds.

Does anyone know what factors are leading to this? Is it just viewing China as an enemy in the USA?

More likely they're seen as vulnerable demographic or unwelcome in certain neighborhoods. The people perpetrating these crimes are not the sort of people tracking the US-China relations.

COVID plus a former social media influencer constantly complaining about China. I’d be more specific but the guy never got beyond „China has been SO UNFAIR to the America“.

The probability of this post being [flagged] (due to it being terrible for the narrative) is approximately 1.

EDIT: Like clockwork.

I'm afraid so. There is this weird double standard when it comes to diversity. It's almost always exclusive of non-dark skin minorities.

ex) Ivy League admissions, quotas in professional schools, etc.

Now the above is real systematic racism. Speaking the truth is dangerous these days.

>Manjusha Kulkarni, executive director of the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council said: “Our data and evidence of the real-life stories confirm that Asian Americans are facing increasing racist and xenophobic attacks, catalyzed by rhetoric from the president and other government leadership.”

Wow I hope Biden does something about this.

Based on the slew of videos floating around this week, I strongly disagree that Trump supporters are behind this.

> Many blame the Trump administration for inciting this violence; Trump and numerous other members of his White House staff embraced racist and xenophobic anti-Asian rhetoric language early on in the pandemic, repeatedly referring to COVID-19 as the “China virus” and the “Wuhan virus.”

First of all, geographic names for diseases is a very common pattern. There is no such outrage over Zika, Ebola, or West Nile, or even German Measles. The contrived name COVID was created out of deference to the Chinese Communist Party by the head of the WHO, who, as a former Minister in Ethiopia was the beneficiary of several billion dollars in Chinese investment. Note how he ignored Taiwan’s data and warnings in December 2019 and furthered CCP propaganda early in the pandemic despite independent evidence that contradicted the CCP statements. To suggest the WHO is immune from deep corruption among its top official is to ignore just how corrupt Ethiopia is and the vast influence of China over large swaths of Africa.

And secondly, the majority of these hate crime attacks are in deeply Democrat cities. I doubt Oakland feature many Trump acolytes nor does San Francisco or New York. There is a significant (mostly Vietnamese) population in East Texas and Louisiana (the heart of “redneck Trump country,” yet hate crimes against Asians are rare if they happen at all. So blaming Trump is just conveniently avoiding the racism of so-called liberals. The Jesse Smollett “attack” was in the middle of Chicago at night, yet initially it was blamed on Trump supporters. Is there a single Trump supporter in all of Chicago? How many are in downtown Oakland? Rhetorical question, but the point is that in deeply red areas, how many Asian hate crimes have occurred relative to those in deep blue areas?

Hate crimes against anyone is never over ok. Actually any crime is never ok. But blaming Trump is just lazy. Redneck bubbas aren’t the ones doing these crimes in general. People don’t want to confront the strong racism exhibited by minorities against other minorities. It’s always caused by white Trump supporters apparently.

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