https://www.city-journal.org/anti-asian-violence-separating-truth-from-narrative
Viral videos of senseless violence have captured public attention since crime began rising in 2020. Some of the most extreme examples are attacks against Asian-Americans. Earlier this year, for instance, three teens and an 11-year-old, all black, beat and kicked in the head a 70-year-old woman in San Francisco. Yet many academics, advocates, and reporters argue that these cases leave a false impression. “While news reports and social media have perpetuated the idea that anti-Asian violence is committed mostly by people of color,” reported NBC News last year, “a new analysis shows the majority of attackers are white.” Unfortunately, the crime against 70-year-old Mrs. Ren is representative in many ways.
The refrain that most anti-Asian crimes are committed by white people is misleading, if not meaningless. While the Department of Justice estimates that Asians are the victims of over 180,000 violent crimes every year, an average year sees fewer than 24 violent anti-Asian hate crimes. In a discussion about violence directed toward Asians, focusing on hate crimes is a transparent attempt to obscure. The data show that whites, despite being the largest racial group in the country, are not responsible for the largest share of violent crimes against Asians.
Where do these misleading talking points come from? One common source, quoted by both NBC and the San Francisco Chronicle, is a literature review by Janelle Wong of the University of Maryland titled Beyond the Headlines. But Wong’s review does not focus on violent crime: it covers hate incidents against Asian-Americans, the majority of which consist of “verbal harassment” and “shunning”—not crimes. Advocacy group Stop AAPI Hate reported similar findings: 82 percent of recorded anti-Asian incidents were not physically violent. Wong suggests that conservatives are conflating anti-Asian attacks with affirmative action admissions policies that benefit blacks at the expense of Asians—it’s “an old tactic in white supremacy’s playbook,” she says. Wong also claims “there’s not really an empirical basis” for the observation “that it’s predominantly Black people attacking Asian Americans who are elderly.”