Honesty about hate: America must be truthful about the sources of Anti-Asian violence


Gardiner Anderson/New York Daily News/TNS

Daily News Editorial Board, New York Daily News
Tue, May 31, 2022

Today, the final day of Asian-American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, President Biden is set to address the sharp rise in anti-Asian-American hate crimes and discuss the importance of inclusion and fair representation. But the event will likely be incomplete, filled with vague entreaties for everyone to get along and perhaps a few suggestions that the last president is singularly responsible for opening a Pandora’s Box of bias-related violence.

While Donald Trump did indeed give implicit permission for racists to come out of their hidey-holes, including by gleefully labeling COVID the “Chinese virus,” we in New York City, where anti-Asian-American violence has grown more than anywhere, are fighting off a virus of hate that is more complex than that.

There is no indication that the perpetrators of anti-Asian-American violence here have commonality or affinity with the red-hatted MAGA hordes. That doesn’t accurately describe the man who pushed Michelle Go to her death, or the man who stabbed Christina Lee more than 40 times, or the man who chased down an Asian woman and pushing her to the ground late last month, or the man who struck a woman more than 40 times in a Yonkers vestibule while calling her an “Asian b---h,” or the man who attacked a man with a hammer on a Manhattan subway platform. Nor does it describe the man arrested for a two-hour spree of attacks on seven Asian women in late February.

Those first five incidents happened to be allegedly committed by mentally unstable men or otherwise hardened criminals who are Black, the last by a mentally unstable white man. None had known histories of political advocacy.

That’s an admittedly partial picture of the facts in America’s largest city, where anti-Asian hate and other forms of street violence rearing their heads appear to be deeply intertwined, and where untreated psychosis is a big part of the problem.

It does no one any good to pretend that some politically convenient disembodied force of hate is hurting people. Accurately describe the problem or it can never be set right.