White supremacy is the root of all race-related violence in the US
Oddly enough, we did see that same attitude pushed here where there was an attempt to frame attacks on Asian Americans as a "black violence" issue, as if there is some underlying hatred that African Americans have toward Asians because they are Asian. Given our media landscape and it's history, it's also not surprising that we see this narrative is completely false:
The real source of the anti-Asian hatred comes from the political and media sources that thrive on demagoguery around the virus. You can see the direct line of this bigotry spread from these sources and end up on forums like this; their bigotry is simply disguised with etiquette to appear less blatant.
Amid the disturbing rise in attacks on Asian Americans since March 2020 is a troubling category of these assaults: Black people are also attacking Asian Americans.
White people are the main perpetrators of anti-Asian racism. But in February 2021, a Black person pushed an elderly Asian man to the ground in San Francisco; the man later died from his injuries. In another video, from New York City on March 29, 2021, a Black person pushes and beats an Asian American woman on the sidewalk in front of a doorway while onlookers observe the attack, then close their door on the woman without intervening or providing aid.
The point I’ve made through all of those experiences is that anti-Asian racism has the same source as anti-Black racism: white supremacy. So when a Black person attacks an Asian person, the encounter is fueled perhaps by racism, but very specifically by white supremacy. White supremacy does not require a white person to perpetuate it.
White supremacy is an ideology, a pattern of values and beliefs that are ingrained in nearly every system and institution in the U.S. It is a belief that to be white is to be human and invested with inalienable universal rights and that to be not-white means you are less than human – a disposable object for others to abuse and misuse.
The dehumanization of Asian people by U.S. society is driven by white supremacy and not by any Black person who may or may not hate Asians.
This same rhetoric of blaming anyone perceived to be Chinese for COVID-19 and attacking them has been found in countless reports of harassment, including one by a Vietnamese American woman who was spat at by a white man as she tried to enter a grocery store in March 2021. Four days later, video footage showed a 76-year-old Chinese woman who was punched in the face by a 39-year-old white man, on the same day that a white man killed eight people, including six Asian women, in Atlanta.
Stories of individual harassment and violence perpetrated against Asian Americans by white assailants don’t always get the same attention as the viral videos of Black aggression toward Asians.
Oddly enough, we did see that same attitude pushed here where there was an attempt to frame attacks on Asian Americans as a "black violence" issue, as if there is some underlying hatred that African Americans have toward Asians because they are Asian. Given our media landscape and it's history, it's also not surprising that we see this narrative is completely false:
DEMBY: OK. So real quick, 'cause now I'm curious, like, what do we know about who was carrying out these attacks on Asian people?
PERRY: So I talked to a researcher from University of Michigan. Her and her team have been tracking all incidents of anti-Asian racism and violence that were reported in the news during all of 2020. I just want to back up and say that these numbers are spotty because a lot of these incidents don't get reported. So what the team did find out is that white people accounted for 90% of anti-Asian incidents in 2020, but only 5% of perpetrators were Black.
MERAJI: Yeah. And before the Atlanta shooting happened, this Black-Asian tension seems like it was dominating a lot of these online conversations.
PERRY: There were other people in these online forums pushing back, though. They were saying, let's stop saying Black people are the reason for these attacks and hatred against Asian Americans. They're not the problem; white supremacy is the problem.
The real source of the anti-Asian hatred comes from the political and media sources that thrive on demagoguery around the virus. You can see the direct line of this bigotry spread from these sources and end up on forums like this; their bigotry is simply disguised with etiquette to appear less blatant.