Who’s Assaulting Asians?

For at least the last few months a major focus of the national media has been on the increase in assaults on Asians.  The narrative, featured here by CNN, is that white supremacists egged on by President Trump’s characterization of Covid-19 as the China virus, are engaging in random violent attacks against Asians.  Setting aside the fact no credible scientist denies that the virus originated from Wuhan, China, there is little evidence that people randomly attacked Asians after the Hong Kong Flu killed roughly 4 million in 1968, or that Spaniards were set upon after the Spanish Flu killed over 20 million in 1918, what proof does the media offer for its latest narrative regarding attacks on Asians?  Damn little.  In fact most of the available evidence points in a different direction.

Because 2020 just ended, little hard data exists for that year, meaning there is little support for the media’s “white supremacist” narrative, but there is some empirical evidence.  Security cameras.  In February CBS News released video of two attacks on Asians showing that both of the attackers were African Americans.  KPIX reported on the two caught on video attacking an Asian man in San Francisco.  Both were African American.   Finally here’s a photo of the suspect who knocked an elderly Asian man to the ground in Oakland last February and another of the man (in the pink sportcoat) caught on video knocking down and kicking an Asian woman in Manhattan on March 29th.

But these are just a few pictures you might ask.  And what about Robert Long,  the white man arrested last week for the March 16 murders of eight women in Atlanta massage parlors, including six Asians?  The New York times suggests that the shootings might be evidence of anti-Asian bias.  The police don’t think so, determining that Long was acting out against sex workers at the parlors he frequented, where most of the sex workers were Asian.

Hard data doesn’t support the narrative either.  The most recent Crime Victimization Survey from the Bureau of Justice Statistics is for 2018, which means that claimed the anti-Asian bias due to Covid-19 could not have been a factor.  But the data tells a story.  As reported by Jared Taylor in the American Renaissance,  Asians were more than 2 1/2 times more likely to be attacked by an African American than by a white or Hispanic, while Asians almost never attacked African Americans.  But this is not new information.

In 2010 the San Francisco Chronicle, hardly a bastion of conservative thought, reported what C.W. Nevius called the “Dirty Secret of Black on Asian Violence.”  “San Francisco’s hidden truth is out. That’s what community organizer Carol Mo calls the realization that Asian residents are being targeted for robberies, burglaries and intimidation by young black men.”  The article cited a 2008 SFPD survey  which found that in 85 percent of the physical assault crimes, the victims were Asian and the perpetrators were African American.

Black on Asian violence is not limited to San Francisco, as the Chronicle piece notes, “There’s a deep divide between the two communities.” Edward Chang, who lectures on civil unrest and race relations at U.C. Riverside, has studied the contentious history of Korean-African American relations in Los Angeles when Korean store owners moved into black neighborhoods.  “There was this sense of being invaded by someone else,” Chang said. “There was a sense of needing to protect and defend their turf.”

Unfortunately most of today’s mainstream media reporters behave more like teen-aged girls chasing gossip than journalists reporting facts.  They invest themselves in a narrative, usually involving race, gender or sexual preference, then rush to conform news stories to that agenda, usually with few if any facts to support their spin.  When the facts do come out, they aren’t acknowledged as the gossiping mob run to another breaking story that might confirm their biases.