Young: Playing politics with tragedy

The tragedy in Atlanta, where a 21-year-old man shot nine people and killed eight — six of them women of Asian descent — at three massage parlors, has sparked a surge of concern over violence against Asian-Americans. But this good cause should not get lost in the fog of political spin.

Even the confessed killer’s motive has become a point of contention: Many progressive activists argue that it’s offensive to question whether this was a hate crime. The police say Robert Aaron Long denies racial motives and claims he was struggling with sex addiction and striking at sources of temptation; he had patronized some of the targeted businesses, though it’s unknown whether any of the victims were sex workers. Activists argue that anti-Asian racism often manifests in sexually fetishizing Asian women and that if the motive was sexual, it was self-evidently racial as well.

That may be true. But if Long, who belonged to a strict conservative church and was reportedly guilt-ridden over his lapses, was sexually obsessed with Asian women, that’s an entirely different kind of racial motive than the COVID-19-related backlash driving the recent spike in anti-Asian bias crimes. Lumping these problems together doesn’t help combat them.

In fact, anti-Asian bias is an extremely complicated phenomenon. The visceral response to the Atlanta shootings has often focused on the perpetrator being white. Yet many recent bias-motivated crimes against Asian-Americans, reports of which more than doubled in America’s largest cities in 2020 — with a particularly steep jump in New York City — involved Black and Hispanic attackers.

Asian-Americans also do not fit easily into the progressive discourse of "white privilege." While anti-Asian racism certainly exists, and segments of the community struggle with poverty, as a group Asian-Americans today are "privileged" on key metrics: On average, they outperform white Americans in earnings, education, and a variety of life outcomes. While they lean Democratic, nearly a third voted for Donald Trump in 2020. And they tend to oppose some progressive policies, such as high school and college programs that seek to increase racial diversity by moving away from merit-based admissions.

This has caused tensions and even accusations that Asian-Americans are trying to assimilate into "whiteness." Last week, a progressive Black school board member in San Francisco came under fire for 2016 tweets making such charges in especially crude form.

For many on the left, the Atlanta shootings are an occasion to reframe the conversation about anti-Asian prejudice in familiar progressive terms, with white supremacy as the only evil. Perhaps most disturbing, some are suggesting that harsh rhetoric about the Chinese regime should be curbed because it could fuel bigotry. Many Chinese-Americans who escaped that regime would beg to differ.

Progressives aren’t the only ones playing politics with the tragedy. On Fox News, a conservative Chinese-American author, Ying Ma, suggested that Vice President Kamala Harris should specifically denounce "Black-on-Asian violence" and that "all Chinese-Americans" should be encouraged to "denounce China" for its role in the COVID-19 pandemic. Left-wing identity politics is no better than the right-wing kind; singling out groups for either condemnation or loyalty tests is repugnant.

So far, President Biden has taken the right approach: expressing sympathy with the Asian-American community and denouncing anti-Asian violence without making any specific claims about the Atlanta shooter’s motives. We need compassion and facts, not more polarization.

Cathy Young is a contributing editor to Reason magazine.

By Cathy Young

Cathy Young is a writer for The Bulwark.