A recently released video showed a 35-year-old man kick a 65-year-old Asian-American woman to a New York City sidewalk and while she was down repeatedly kick her in the head. From an adjacent building security guards looked on, not only failing to render aid but also closing the building’s door to her as she struggled, with a fractured pelvis, to regain her feet after the attack. The Manhattan district attorney’s office was quoted as reporting that the suspect, who was on “lifetime parole” after serving time for killing his mother, had been heard to say, “F--- you, you don’t belong here, you Asian.”
That appalling video was just one of a great many reports that together paint a picture of increasing anti-Asian violence and ill-feeling. We have no evidence that this picture is illusory, and we have ample reason to find it plausible. But by emphasizing speculation while omitting context the press may be distorting the picture. So, particularly in view of the misconceptions that underlay last year’s black-lives-matter events, some caution is in order.
The most notorious of the recently reported incidents was a string of killings at three Atlanta establishments respectively known as Aromatherapy Spa, Young’s Asian Massage, and Gold Spa. The shooter said he had an “addiction to sex” and attacked those places because he saw them as occasions of sin. He also denied that the killings were motivated by racial animus. Six women of Asian descent were among the eight dead, however, and in this case the perpetrator was white instead of, as in the video, black. As the City Journal observed, press reports therefore largely concentrated on race.
For example, a syndicated piece quoted an Asian activist as saying, “We know exactly what this racialized misogyny looks like, and to think that someone targeted three Asian-owned businesses that were staffed by Asian American women . . . and didn’t have race or gender in mind is just absurd.” Also, there was a lot of academic and media resistance to requiring actual evidence before attributing violence to race hatred or “white supremacy.”
The shooting followed a number of articles the Indianapolis Star had run about crimes against Asian-Americans, including one entitled “‘Stop killing us’: Attacks on Asian Americans highlight rise in hate incidents amid COVID-19.” After reporting that the perpetrator of an Oakland assault had been apprehended, it added that “In less than a week, a Thai man was attacked and killed in San Francisco, a Vietnamese woman was assaulted and robbed of $1,000 in San Jose, and a Filipino man was attacked with a box cutter on the subway in New York City.”
Even though that article admitted that motives weren’t clear in any of those cases, it quoted a San Francisco State University academic named Russell Jeung as saying that “Violence against Asian Americans sharply increased in March as COVID-19 began spreading across the country, and some politicians, including former President Donald Trump, blamed China for the pandemic.” Jeung apparently based that on a self-reporting tool provided by his Web site, Stop AAPI Hate.
A result of such incidents seems to be fear among Asian-Americans. “Acts of racist violence lead to increased anxiety and fear in a population that already has higher rates of anxiety and depression related to COVID-19 than other racial groups, Jeung said.” And the quote in that piece’s headline came from a video made by a woman named Amanda Nguyễn. “It’s so absurd that I have to say ‘Stop killing us,’” it quoted her as saying, “We are literally fearing for our lives as we walk out of our door, and your silence, your silence rings through our heads.”
Once the Atlanta shootings had occurred, the Star’s initial report was followed by one that emphasized the hate-crime question (even though two of the victims were white). It quoted California Congresswoman Judy Chu as saying that the attacks were “beyond terrifying, but it just brings home to so many Asian Americans that they are fearful of their lives and circumstances.” Even the paper’s restaurant section got in on the act: “Foodie fundraisers are on tap Saturday to help combat anti-Asian violence.”
Anti-Asian violence has indeed been a perennial problem. As Thomas Sowell observed shortly after Barack Obama’s election, resentment of ethnic Chinese in particular is neither new nor an exclusively American phenomenon. But the way in which the press covers it entitles us to reservations about the nature and severity of its increase. Much of the coverage seems motivated by a desire to blame yet another problem on “white supremacy.” Somehow white supremacy is responsible for the fact that, as Heather MacDonald ably explained, blacks are the ones who disproportionately target Asians. An example of such mental gymnastics:
That [model-minority] myth has long been used by white Americans to pit and separate Asian Americans from other people of color, and to justify institutional racism. It may also account for the fact that according to one of the few existing research reports on anti-Asian hate, published this January in the U.S. National Library of Medicine, Asian Americans have a relatively higher chance than Blacks or Latinos of experiencing hate crimes perpetrated by non-white offenders.
And solutions to which the press devotes its attention tend to be vague or of questionable value. One Star piece reported that a petition by a group called National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum (“NAPAWF”) asked the governor “to implement programs and resources to support the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities in Indiana without escalating law enforcement and to condemn these hate crimes publicly.” What those “programs and resources” might be wasn’t clear. It seems unlikely, moreover, that the governor’s public condemnation would cause a change of heart in the type of person who commits hate crimes. Meanwhile, “escalating law enforcement,” which might actually move the needle, is the one measure that NAPAWF opposes.
None of this is to deny that the problem deserves coverage. But it’s not our only problem, and the type of coverage it’s been given may divert our attention from problems we might have more ability to affect. How, for example, should an Asian-American reader respond to the piece about the Thai man killed in San Francisco, the Vietnamese woman assaulted in San Jose, and the Filipino man attacked New York City, all in “less than a week.” Do those incidents suggest that he should further restrict his daughter’s activities in order to keep her safe?
By themselves they probably don’t. Even half a dozen incidents per week in a country of over twenty-two million Asian-Americans would mean his daughter is about ten times as likely to get killed in an automobile accident as to encounter that type of crime. If that’s the extent of the problem, then maybe the reader should be more concerned about the fact it will be many times as hard for her to get into an elite college as it is for non-Asians—and that efforts to reduce that type of discrimination have recently been abandoned.
Now, one Star piece did make a stab at being more quantitative. For one thing, it cited a Stop AAPI Hate report that claimed “3,795 incidents received by the Stop AAPI Hate reporting center from March 19, 2020 to February 28, 2021.” But that group’s definition of “hate incident” seems capacious. An example: “One of my professors was talking about the public health response to COVID-19 and explicitly called it the ‘China Virus’ and that ‘we've gotta be very careful about that country and what they'd do to us.’” (We hasten to add that not all Asian-Americans thus confuse criticism of China with anti-Asian sentiment.) It also stated that “there was an average of 204,600 hate crimes experienced by the public.” But that statement, too, was less informative than it might have been.
To give that hate-crime number more meaning the Star should have explained it further, beginning with the fact that 204,600 is an extrapolation based on how survey respondents perceived perpetrators’ motivations. Specifically, a Bureau of Justice Statistics report gave it as the average annual number of hate crimes inferred for the period 2013-17 from the National Criminal Victimization Survey. Of that 204,600, the Star could have said, about 57%, or 116,600, were attributed to hate based on race or ethnicity. And, if the FBI’s hate-crime statistics for 2018 and 2019 are any guide, about (297 + 230 out of 4954 + 4784 =) 5.4% of those, or 6300, were directed against Asians or Pacific Islanders.
In deciding whether that quantity justifies further restrictions on his daughter’s activities, the reader might have benefited from knowing that in 2018 and 2019 Asian-Americans suffered an annual average of 186,285 violent incidents according the National Crime Victimization Survey; the estimated 6300 hate crimes barely exceeded 5% of that total. So even a significant increase in anti-Asian hate crimes might translate to only a small uptick in Asian victims generally.
It would also have been helpful to know that the ratio borne by the 123,400-violent-incident value to the survey’s figure of 17,401,410 Asian-Americans twelve years old or older is 7.1 per thousand: considerably lower than the 19.7 per thousand for the twelve-or-over population in general. Now, these values exhibit some volatility, as Fig. 1 shows. But they don’t make a very strong case for the proposition that Asian-Americans have the most reason to be “literally fearing for our lives as we walk out of our door.”
It’s true, of course, that the pandemic is what the press seems to associate with a rise in violence, whereas the period Fig. 1 is based on preceded the pandemic. So perhaps we’ll see a different picture when last year’s final numbers become available. Again, though, anti-Asian sentiment seems to account for only a relatively small fraction of the overall violence that Asian-Americans suffer, so even a high-percentage increase in anti-Asian hate crime could result in only a low-percentage increase in overall violence against Asians.
Even a small increase is unwelcome, of course. But so are the fear, mistrust, and bad feeling that the Star and other newspapers may be causing by fixating on race. Consider a Denver woman named Helen Oh, who recounted what happened when she passed an older couple on a sidewalk. “The woman made a show of detouring around her, she said. ‘The woman literally walked off the sidewalk to be as far from me as possible,’ Oh said. “There was no one else around and it was so obnoxious.’ . . . It was clear, she said, that she was being targeted because she is Asian.”
Now, perhaps Ms. Oh’s perception was completely accurate. But many of us who have done a lot of walking during the pandemic know we’ve “literally walked off the sidewalk” quite often so as not to crowd other walkers’ six-foot space. If some of those other walkers were Asian, did coverage of the type the Star provides make them interpret as hate what we meant as courtesy? How often have press-induced misconceptions made perfectly benign actions reinforce perceptions that the country is a seething cauldron of anti-Asian bigotry?
Such perceptions can end up narrowing people’s lives. Ms. Oh, for instance, was quoted as saying, “I avoided going out by myself for a while.” Another Star piece similarly reported that “Sunny Shuai, 44, said Asian Hoosiers have been scared to go out in public since the pandemic started due to the rise in discrimination.”
Now, in considering the (at least perceived) “rise in discrimination” we may be dealing with a rapidly evolving situation. And we’re particularly handicapped by the relative paucity of data specific to Asian-Americans. But we have much more data about blacks and whites, and if they’re any indication we’re probably laboring under some misconceptions.
Consider last year’s black-lives-matter unrest, for example. It seemed that any Indianapolis residential block was as likely as not to include a “Black lives matter” sign in at least one yard. At the same time, charges of racism or worse would confront those who responded that white lives matter, too. Such a toxic climate might not have prevailed if the Star had provided more context.
Note in this connection that a major purpose of such signs was to draw attention to police killings of black people. But if those killings make black-lives-matter signs appropriate, police killings of whites make it appropriate to respond that white lives also matter. As Columbia professor John McWhorter has observed, press selectivity is largely responsible for the popular belief that police tend to target blacks for killing.
Specifically, Washington Post data indicate that police kill more white people than black people.
True, police kill blacks disproportionately to blacks’ share of the population:
But that disproportion isn’t necessarily evidence of bias. After all, police kill men disproportionately, too, and we don’t have people painting “Male lives matter” signs on the streets.
Presumably that’s because people attribute the disproportion not to bias but to the facts that (1) men are violent much more often than women are and (2) when they’re violent they’re more likely to place police officers’ lives in the level of danger that provokes shooting. Similarly, police may kill a higher proportion of blacks because, tending to live in higher-crime areas, blacks interact with police disproportionately.
In an attempt to adjust for that factor, let’s look at the ratios that according to FBI records the numbers of killings by police bear to the numbers of homicides, rapes, robberies, and assaults the two races commit:
If anything, this comparison suggests that it’s whites whom police kill disproportionately.
Of course, we don’t know how good the respective races’ numbers of violent crimes are as proxies for the frequency of their interactions with the police or of their actions that might make officers resort to shooting. But it may be relevant that the disparity increases when the comparison is based on murders instead of other violent crime:
This doesn’t necessarily prove that police aren’t biased against blacks. But it rather undermines the notion that such prejudice as there is causes police to kill blacks disproportionately.
Another black-lives-matter theme seems to be that whites as a group don’t value black lives highly enough. And perhaps they don’t; people in general probably don’t regard others as highly as they should. If whites’ disregard for black lives exceeds blacks’ disregard for white lives, though, the murder rates don’t show it:
The number of whites killed by blacks far exceeds the number of blacks killed by whites. And an FBI study of non-homicide violent crime makes the point even more strongly:
In short, the facts tended to undermine much of the rationale for last year’s black-lives matter unrest, which might have been less severe if those facts had been more widely disseminated.
Returning to the apparent increase in anti-Asian violence, we’re navigating through a fog; the data are sparser. As Fig. 1 illustrated, though, what little data we have seen suggest that some of the conflict, fear, and division we’ve recently suffered may similarly be based on misconceptions. Perhaps this is another instance in which the press has done the country a disservice.