The surge in anti Asian-American hate crimes

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en Amanda Nguyen saw the video, she was horrified. In the Jan. 28 security footage, 84-year-old Vicha Ratanapakdee was shoved to the ground while taking his morning walk in San Francisco; just two days after the assault, he died. (Nineteen-year-old Antoine Watson has since been charged with and pleaded not guilty to murder and elder abuse.) It was one of several incidents of physical violence against Asian American elders in recent weeks across the U.S., but Nguyen had yet to see coverage by a major news outlet about the concerning increase in violence towards the Asian American and Pacific Islander community, following a year of xenophobic rhetoric and racist attacks amid the pandemic.

“I was mad, like blood boiling through my veins now, watching my community get slaughtered,” says Nguyen, a civil rights activist who was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for her work in advocating for sexual assault survivors. “How many more people need to be killed in order for the news outlets, especially mainstream ones, to think that we’re worthy of a story?”

In response, Nguyen made an Instagram video where she implored her viewers to speak out about Ratanapakdee’s death, as well as the assault of a 64-year-old Vietnamese grandmother who was assaulted and robbed in San Jose, Calif., and the attack on a 61-year-old Filipino man whose face was slashed with a box cutter on a New York City subway. Nguyen’s video went viral as more reports of violent attacks and robberies emerged, including one of a 91-year-old man who was caught on camera being thrown to the ground in Oakland Chinatown, where there have been upwards of 20 violent attacks and robberies reported since January.

Since the start of the pandemic last spring, Asian Americans have faced racist violence at a much higher rate than previous years. The NYPD reported that hate crimes motivated by anti-Asian sentiment jumped 1,900% in New York City in 2020. Stop AAPI Hate, a reporting database created at the beginning of the pandemic as a response to the increase in racial violence, received 2,808 reports of anti-Asian discrimination between March 19 and December 31, 2020. The violence has continued into 2021, and President Joe Biden signed an executive order denouncing anti-Asian discrimination shortly after taking office in January. While anti-Asian violence has taken place nationwide and particularly in major cities, the uptick in attacks in 2021 has been particularly focused in the Bay Area, especially in San Francisco and Oakland’s Chinatowns.

Many attribute the 2020 uptick to the xenophobic rhetoric of Biden’s predecessor; former President Trump repeatedly referred to COVID-19 as “the China virus,” blaming the country for the pandemic. In doing so, Trump followed in a long American history of using diseases to justify anti-Asian xenophobia, one that dates back to the 19th and 20th centuries and has helped to shape perception of Asian Americans as “perpetual foreigners.”

“There’s a clear correlation between President Trump’s incendiary comments, his insistence on using the term ‘Chinese virus’ and the subsequent hate speech spread on social media and the hate violence directed towards us,” says Russell Jeung, a co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate and a professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University.

Many have pointed out that racial violence against Asian Americans often goes overlooked because of persistent stereotypes about the community. “There is a stereotype and an assumption that Asian Americans have class privilege, that they have high socioeconomic status and education, and that any discrimination doesn’t really happen or feel legitimate,” says Bianca Mabute-Louie, a racial justice educator. “There are these assumptions about ways that Asian Americans have ‘succeeded’ in this country.”

Mabute-Louie cites the pervasiveness of the model minority myth as a large contributing factor to the current climate. That false idea, constructed during the Civil Rights era to stymie racial justice movements, suggests that Asian Americans are more successful than other ethnic minorities because of hard work, education and inherently law-abiding natures. “This contributes to erasing the very real interpersonal violence that we see happening in these videos, and that Asian Americans experience from the day-to-day, things that don’t get reported and the things that don’t get filmed.”

Because the model minority myth suggests upward mobility, it creates a fallacy that Asian Americans don’t experience struggle or racial discrimination, a stereotype that’s been bolstered by limited (and in some cases, flawed) media representation like the film Crazy Rich Asians and more recently, Netflix’s Bling Empire. In reality, the community is America’s most economically divided: a 2018 study by the Pew Research Center found that Asian Americans experience the largest income inequality gap as an ethnic and racial group in the U.S. and a 2016 report from NYC Mayor’s Office of Operations found that Asian immigrants have the highest poverty rates in the city.

High-profile Asian Americans have helped draw attention to the recent surge in hate crimes: actors Daniel Dae Kim and Daniel Wu shared the video of the 91-year-old man being pushed down in Oakland Chinatown on Twitter, offering a $25,000 reward to anyone who could provide “information leading to the arrest and conviction” of the attacker, who had also pushed down a 60-year-old man, as well as a 55-year-old woman, who was left unconscious from the attack.

Kim’s tweet brought up mixed feelings for many in the AAPI community. On one hand, Kim identified a longtime grievance for many Asian Americans—that violence against them has often been dismissed and that their struggles and even their existence often feel invisible to others in this country.

At the same time, however, Kim’s offer of a reward for identifying the person who attacked Asian American elders underscored another problem with addressing racial injustice in the U.S.: how to tackle anti-Asian violence without relying on law enforcement institutions that have historically targeted Black and brown communities. Many in the AAPI community were troubled by the actor’s social media post, given that the alleged attacker was a Black man. Kim Tran, a consultant and writer, voiced her disagreement with this tactic on Twitter.

“Listen, if you don’t understand why it’s problematic to offer 25k for information about a Black man in Oakland, I need you to stay off all the goddamned panels,” Tran wrote in a series of tweets

That perspective is informed by a long and complicated history between the Asian American and Black communities in the U.S., which has included both solidarity—like the Third World Liberation Front, which helped create equal education opportunities for students of color and the creation of ethnic studies—as well as interracial conflict. Mabute-Louie makes the case that fostering anti-Black sentiment or focusing on interracial conflict in this moment takes away from recognizing that racism is a result of white supremacy.

Jeung, the Stop AAPI Hate co-founder, says community efforts and solidarity are the only ways to curb racist attacks. J

A crowd of about 200 New Yorkers gathered Saturday in Foley Square to denounce a wave of anti-Asian violence that they say is fueled by racism and ignorance about the COVID-19 pandemic.

The throng heard community leaders and a parade of top political leaders vow to end the shocking spat of attacks and seemingly unending torment of slurs that have dramatically worsened the pandemic.

We are fighting a global pandemic but we are also fighting racism ... We are getting spat on, shoved, punched, slashed, stabbed,” said Jo-Ann Yoo of the Asian American Federation. “Right now Asian Americans are scared, we are outraged, and we are devastated.”

The crowd gave a rousing reception to Noel Quintana, 61, a Filipino-American who was slashed in the face on the L train this week.

Many New Yorkers were stunned to see a viral video of an Asian-American woman being slammed to the sidewalk last week in an unprovoked attack in Flushing, Queens.

Rep. Grace Meng (D-N.Y.) said the attacks are the tip of an iceberg of hate crimes, many of which go unreported. She vowed that Asian-Americans would no longer settle for being “invisible” victims.

“Too many people who are afraid to leave their homes,” said Meng, whose district includes Flushing. “Not just because of the virus, but because of bigotry.”

Asian-American leaders say they are regularly targeted for verbal and physical abuse by people who blame them for the pandemic.

While there are some violent perpetrators who are white, conservative, or Trump supporters, FBI statistics suggest that most anti-Asian violence has come from black perpetrators. Refusing to look at these statistics represents a refusal to take seriously the lives and security of Asian Americans.

Source: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/anti-asian-violence-cant-be-blamed-on-trump-supporters

In linked statistics used in article (https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv18.pdf), Tables 14 (page 13) and 15 (page 14) are quite interesting, but only go to 2018, so it would be interesting to know if there were updated statistics available somewhere to see how\if this has changed...

When victims were
Asian, there were no statistically significant differences
between the percentage of incidents in which the
offender was perceived as Asian (24%), white (24%), or
black (27%).

3% is reported as a statistically insignificant difference.

Some are saying this is because of fewer tourists, because of COVID.

Likely, tourism crime statistics are way down.

Now the criminals go after locals.

People across the U.S. participated in rallies Saturday to condemn attacks against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders after the shooting rampage in Atlanta that left eight people dead.

From San Francisco to Pittsburgh and points in between, men, women and children marched and spoke out against the surge in hate crimes on members of the AAPI community, which came to a head Tuesday when a shooter targeted three Atlanta-area spas. Six of those killed were women of Asian descent.

"I've dealt with words and looks and stuff my whole life," Ann Johns told NBC News at an Atlanta rally. "My family doesn't want me to go anywhere by myself"

In Pittsburgh, actor Sandra Oh told protesters that she is "proud to be Asian," NBC affiliate WXPI reported.

“For many of us in our community, this is the first time we are able to voice our fear and anger, and I am so grateful for everyone willing to listen,” Oh said.

Looking further into the numbers, this indicates roughly the same number of people from each of these categories commit the crimes. From the provided data, we see:

(from table 14) - 182,230 violent incidents involving Asian victims.
Averaging 25% each for Asian, Black, and White perpetrators comes to about 45,000 each.

Then looking at the population breakdown for the United States (Table 12)
From this it appears there are roughly 5 times as many "White" people in the community (171 million) as there are "Black" (33 million), and twice as many "Black" as "Asian" (17 million).
Working on the basis of a different person committing each crime, we have (as a percentage of the "offender's population):
White perpetrator - 0.026% of White population
Black perpetrator - 0.136% of Black population
Asian perpetrator - 0.264% of Asian population

So, based on these numbers:
An Asian person is roughly 2x more likely to commit a violent crime against an Asian person than a Black person would be.
An Asian person is roughly 10x more likely to commit a violent crime against an Asian person than a White person would be.
A Black person is roughly 5x more likely to commit a violent crime against an Asian person than a White person would be.

It would be expected to have a higher number of violent crimes within a community where the victim and offender shared the same "race", as "family"\"domestic" crimes would be more likely (though not exclusively) to be of this type, while "random" incidents would (at least in theory) have the same ratio across all groups.

That is one of the reasons more recent data would be useful, in order to seee if those numbers have changed...

As with domestic violence data, much of the anti-Asian hate crimes are not reported. Secondly most of these statistics relate to violent assault which is relatively rare compared to verbal assault.

It's my educated guess that
1. Most Asians are fearful to go the police after a white person throws racial slurs at them because a) the police are white and b) it happens so frequently it doesn't warrant the effort
2, The discrepancy with black violence over white is because 99% of black crime involves theft rather than hate crimes where blacks see Asians as targets because Asians tend to carry cash/valuables

In Melbourne since the end of lockdown I have witnessed/counted 5 different incidents of racial slurs being thrown against Asians and all the perpatrators are white. In one incident I had to intervene as the Asian lady was elderly and she told me the other woman regularly taunts her as they shop on the same days in our local store. I can't recall witnessing one incident of anti-asian slurs prior to COVID.

These things do come and go in waves. I recall the anti-Indian sentiment a few years ago when young Aussie males thought it was funny to bash Indian students who were often working 2-3 jobs when they were trying to catch trains. The term "curry bashing" was coined. That evaporated when Indian associations formed vigilante groups to man train stations to protect young Indians who were working late. The racists slipped back into their holes. I also suspect this precipitated the introduction of PSOs on trains as it was a national embarrassment for the Australian government who trying to engage with India for international trade and attract foreign students.

My guess something similar is happening now

I hope the Indian associations had a chance to give the racist trash a good beating before they scurried away with their tails between their legs.

I recall the trains were manned by 6 foot tall sikhs in orange fluorescent vests specifically to protect Indian women who were also being harassed. They had signs that anybody wanted one of them would accompany them on the train. It was all volunteering,

The racists weren't going to make a peep with a sikh standing at the stations. As usual they are cowards.

Objectives. To examine the extent to which the phrases, “COVID-19” and “Chinese virus” were associated with anti-Asian sentiments.

Methods. Data were collected from Twitter’s Application Programming Interface, which included the hashtags “#covid19” or “#chinesevirus.” We analyzed tweets from March 9 to 23, 2020, corresponding to the week before and the week after President Donald J. Trump’s tweet with the phrase, “Chinese Virus.” Our analysis focused on 1 273 141 hashtags.

Results. One fifth (19.7%) of the 495 289 hashtags with #covid19 showed anti-Asian sentiment, compared with half (50.4%) of the 777 852 hashtags with #chinesevirus. When comparing the week before March 16, 2020, to the week after, there was a significantly greater increase in anti-Asian hashtags associated with #chinesevirus compared with #covid19 (P < .001).

Conclusions. Our data provide new empirical evidence supporting recommendations to use the less-stigmatizing term “COVID-19,” instead of “Chinese virus.”