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Comment by yumraj | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer: I'm an Indian, so a person of color. [Edited: I had said Asian before and there was some resistance to that]

Is there data to support that these are indeed racially motivated and not something else, especially due to economy and unemployment and just the fact that seniors are easy targets?

How many such muggings and incidents happened during the same period against people of other races? Was the rate of crimes against other races the same and only increased against the Asians?

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A few years ago, the black rapper YG was criticized by the Chinese-American community in the Bay Area for writing songs about robbing Asians. The stereotype has been around for a while. There are other stereotypes about Asians being easy victims floating about.

>First, you find a house and scope it out.

>Find a Chinese neighborhood, cause they don’t believe in bank accounts.

>Second, you find a crew and a driver, someone who ring the doorbell. And someone that ain’t scared to do what it do.

>Third, you pull up at the spot. Park, watch, ring the doorbell and knock.

https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/10/15/chinese-america...

I really think a lot is economic motivation. Asians tend to carry more cash and seniors are easy targets. If you look at recent home robberies in the Bay Area, most that were targeted are Asian, particularly Indians because they usually have a lot of jewelry/gold.

Watch this video: https://www.ktvu.com/news/suspect-arrested-in-deadly-attack-.... Does economic motivation explain that?

If there were current examples of this type of violence against South Asians too, I think your use of the generic term would have been more accepted.

The 84 year old was from Thailand, which is just as far south as India.

Thailand is interesting. It's in South East Asia, and yet friends I've talked to don't consider it a part of East Asia nor South Asia.

Historically Siam was part of Indochina; a confluence. Like the rivers.

Conflating the South East as a part of the South or East Asia because it has both names is as someone saying Texas is not West or Eastern US while being in the "middle" geographically.

South East Asia is markedly different to South or East Asia. It's a melting pot of both cultures + Melayu and other groups. South East Asians that descended from South Asia (Ex: Malaysian/Singaporean with Indian ancestry) mostly identifies as South East Asians. Same with people who have East Asian ancestry (Ex: mainly Chinese ancestry across SEA). The immigration happened hundreds or even thousands of years ago and some are very distinct groups and cultures from their origins due to time and separation.

> Disclaimer: I'm an Indian, so an Asian.

That's not exactly how "Asian" works.

Last I checked India was in Asia.

Secondly, I'm in the Bay Area, if that was not evident.

Third, Manju Kulkarni quoted in the article as Manju Kulkarni, executive director of the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council is also of Indian decent.

So, yes, I'm an Asian.

BTW, if you go to UK, people from Indian sub-continent are referred to as Asians..

Sure, but aren’t East and Southeast Asians mainly at issue here?

genetically i'd say indians are more caucasian than asian

This makes no sense, because Indians are literally and indisputably from Asia. What is Asian genetics but the genetics of people who live in Asia? Asian is not a specific nationality or people, and applies to the people of any Asian country.

sure, i'm not saying indians aren't asian. but in the context of this article, when the attacks are based on people looking a certain way, indians don't fit that mold.

FYI this isn't how gene pools work, mathematically; there's no specific profiles of genes which are "Caucasian" or "Asian". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedigree_collapse will get you started on a better understanding.

The link doesn't support that you are saying, it illustrates there must overlap between ancestry else the growth is exponential. But doesn't prove that there aren't groups or clusters of gene pools

Genes have physical loci, sure, but there's no partition of humans into haves and have-nots which prohibits gene transfer; humans aren't Sneeches [0] and our offspring often inherit a spectrum of possible features. Pedigree collapse is one of the two main reasons why we are not even as genetically diverse as chimpanzees [1], with the other main reason being that our parliament of genes [2] is very homogenous and rejects many sorts of non-hereditary gene transfer.

Ironically, humans form only one race because our genes are in strong agreement with one another and work to reject any radical gene changes, which is likely because human population had a bottleneck in recent history [3]. We haven't had enough time to speciate; we haven't even had enough time to genetically specialize to a degree which would allow speciation to be a possibility.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sneetches_and_Other_Storie...

[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/10/why-are-apes-more-ge...

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13169-3

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory#Geneti...

> Last I checked India was in Asia.

So is Russia. The objection isn't that you're calling yourself Asian but that your definition is likely different from that in the article, so using that description to associate yourself with the article can come across as misleading/wrong.

I could be wrong but I've always seen Russians identify themselves as Europeans than as Asians, even though large part of Russia falls in Asia.

Sorry, what? Indian = Asian. How is it "supposed" to work??

I know HN is nitpicky, but whether you like it or not, "asian" refers to "east asian" in terms of US pop-culture racial discourse. It may not be right but it's the way it is.

Agreed - it's a great opportunity for "HN" to realise, whether they like it or not, that "asian" does not only relate to "east asian".

It is appalling that the commenter above had to edit their own comment based on these responses.

Thanks. TBH the only reason I decided to edit that was because it had started distracting from my main comment...

Is US pop-culture racial discourse really the arbiter of truth for discussions on HN? I understand that it can appear slightly confusing to people here in the united states, but over a billion people who you don't consider asian, refer to themselves as asian.

"US pop-culture racial discourse" is a generous way of representing the de facto racial caste system in America as some kind of consensus.

Because people get browner the further southwest in Asia you go, a distinction is made.

Though its most fascinating that in America only recent immigrants would be referred to as European-American, if not their by their specific ethnicity, even though the majority of the country is European-descent; they're called "white" instead. "White" is a racial caste designation, European indicates a person descends from the people in a specific place on Earth; "white" is not a place on Earth.

And yet everyone who is not white gets referred to by where they're ancestors are from

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