By now, we’re pretty used to media outlets and left-wing politicians focusing on racism and bigotry as the driving forces of disparity and injustice in America. But in the last few weeks, we have seen an almost-total shift in focus from the racism against African Americans and Hispanics, a familiar subject of coverage, to coverage of racism against a different minority group: Asian Americans. A recent Atlanta shooting in which a white male killed several Asian Americans has served to reinforce this narrative. But while it is true that Asian Americans have faced prejudice in the United States, and still do, the narrative being pushed of suddenly resurgent anti-Asian sentiment is highly misleading.
Asian Americans have undoubtedly been the target of hatred ever since they came to the U.S. Chinese were among the earliest immigrants from this group to come to North America, largely serving as laborers in the Western U.S. They were, at best, treated as indentured servants; at worst, almost like slaves. Japanese and other far eastern Asian groups slowly arrived in the following decades, with similar results. South Asians, including Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis, didn’t start arriving in significant numbers until the 1960s. Their immigration was quite different, because it was more dependent on higher education than on labor needs. Each group had to face its own unique threats from racism, however. For example, after 9/11, many South Asian individuals (myself included) faced targeting as potential terrorist threats, because we ‘looked’ like the hijackers. In recent years, there has been clear evidence of targeting of other groups, including Sikhs and Koreans.
It’s worth remembering, as we discuss this, that the term “Asian Americans” fails to capture the variety it is meant to describe. Even the U.S. Census Bureau has had trouble accurately defining it. Neither race, religion, nor geography clearly delineates what it means to be Asian American. Much of the Middle East is exempt from the broad definition, as is the entire eastern two-thirds of Russia, which is part of Asia. The definition has somehow been limited to nationalities and racial groups in Asia that reside south of the current Russian state, and East of Iran. And even this definition raises questions. How, for example, are China (with a population of 1.5 billion) and India (population 1.2 billion) included in a single subset of definitions of race, while Native American/American Indians as well as Pacific/Hawaiian Islanders both have their own individual subset, with a much smaller population for each? Indeed, India alone has more linguistic and ethnic diversity than all of Europe.
Even with this history of prejudice, and even with all the groups contained within the “Asian-American” demographic, the contemporary evidence that Asian Americans specifically are being targeted at a greater rate than other minorities remains unproven. The recent shift in narratives began with a study the media pounced on from the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism. It studied 16 U.S. cities and concluded that Asian Americans reported 150 percent more crimes in the last year than in prior years. But the numbers are so small as to be statistically meaningless. San Diego, for example, saw a grand total of one hate crime in 2020, without any in 2019. Large cities such as Chicago, Phoenix, and Houston had similar numbers. In fact, of the 122 total anti-Asian hate crime cases in 2020, 28 came from New York City, 15 from Los Angeles, and 14 from Boston. A credible or honest researcher would consider this more of a problem specific to those large urban centers than a nationwide problem. But such intellectual integrity is lacking among journalists.
