Monday, May 17, 2021

Anti-Asian Violence

Well, that topic dropped off the map pretty quickly, didn't it? This is because it is not supportable even by bogus statistics for more than a minute or two. There was a fleeting opportunity to kick conservatives as racist bigots for a bit, but there was great need to get off the topic quickly, before anyone looked too closely.  Even journalists and college administrators might accidentally notice this didn't add up. Most anti-Asian violence is by urban blacks.  Notice that I specified "urban," where stores and businesses and competition are right in front of people.  There are not angry African-Americans from Randolph, MA* going out and looking for Cambodians to punch in the teeth.  Every group has their unhinged fringe, of the old guys on the upper stories shaking their fist at the sky and the young men walking on the streets taking up too much of the sidewalk looking for a fight, but even that doesn't seem to be black anti-Asian.  It's very local. 

You can make bogus statistics out of anti-gay violence - which turns out to be disproportionately gay boyfriends and lesbian girlfriends being violent; or African-Americans singled out by the police - because if you if you engage in low-level criminal behavior you will be disproportionately suspected of high-level criminality. (WRT mass incarceration, BTW, there actually is a legitimate statistical case, deriving from the legal and cultural focus on the type of substance abuse favored by blacks versus the types favored by whites - pretty clearly an unconscious racism - plus the worse public defenders the poor get. Yet even that explains less than 50%.) But a lot of hate crimes turn out to be hoaxes - about one-third overall and well above 70% on college campuses. 

*Randolph is a Boston suburb that used to be Jewish but is now 40-40-10-10 Black/White/Asian/Other. My father-in-law put his laboratory-installing office there in the late 50s into the 2000s.

5 comments:

Doug said...

For some reason, I always remember his office being near Derby Street in Hingham. Is that not correct? I could have sworn that’s where it was.

Doug said...

For some reason, I always remember his office being near Derby Street in Hingham. Is that not correct? I could have sworn that’s where it was.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Tracy says he had a few, including both Hingham and Randolph. I recalled driving her there before we were married.

Texan99 said...

Even if talking about anti-Asian violence could avoid the pesky problem of all those videos, it would only encourage people to start thinking about anti-Asian bias in college admissions.

ruralcounsel said...

Oh, the anti-Asian violence story hasn't gone away. It's on pause while the voices try to figure out how to contextualize it as still the fault of white supremacy, even when the violence is committed overwhelmingly by blacks.