#anti asian hate crimes

Western media downplays anti-Asian racism and manipulates narratives about it in order to reinforce the Model Minority Myth, the Asian gender divide, and geopolitical tensions in Asia.

Even in so-called progressive outlets, U.S. media invokes Orientalism and even gendered depictions of Asian countries to create a contrast: Evil Misogynist Asia vs. Benevolent White Male West. The goal is to dehumanize Asians, deify whiteness, and justify warmongering against Asia.

Whenever diasporic Asians are harmed by racist violence, U.S. media takes one of three approaches: 1) ignoring the incident, 2) reporting on the incident but erasing the Asianness of victims, or 3) reporting on the incident but questioning whether it’s really racism to blame. 

To ensure AsAms don’t work together to push back against this, U.S. policies and propaganda create a gender divide. The 1942-1943 Mixed Marriage Policy ranks Asians, with monoracial Asian men the least valuable and most threatening. This ranking still exists.

Four years ago, I made a sincere effort to help heal this gender divide by pointing out how all AsAms were hurting and at risk of falling into a cycle of retribution. Instead of taking accountability, AsAms in power targeted, harassed and blacklisted me.

I—along with anyone else who dared to speak up—was repeatedly scolded with the refrain that the harm Asian men experience is not meaningful. Yet looking at the recent data and media narratives about anti-Asian hate crimes, we now have damning evidence of how untrue that is.

In my previous post, I did an in-depth analysis of anti-Asian hate crimes and the role of Stop AAPI Hate as a primary source of data collection. Now I want to talk about how journalists—especially AsAms—have skewed this data into a violently racist narrative.

After the Atlanta shootings, the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) shaped the media narrative about Atlanta and anti-Asian hate crimes in general. The problem is that they relied on Stop AAPI Hate data—which over-prioritizes East Asian women over other AAPI victims.

There’s more than sufficient evidence from trustworthy sources like AAPI Data to show Asian men are as likely to be victims of hate crimes as Asian women and also more likely to experience physical assault. So why isn’t AAJA promoting this narrative?

One look at the governing boards of AAJA says a lot. For an organization that is supposed to promote inclusivity of Asian voices in media, there aren’t many Asian men represented. Not only that, but there are more white men than actual Asian men seated in the Asia division.

This erasure of Asian men in anti-Asian hate crime narratives is eerily similar to what happened with my comic Reconciliasian and how Asians in power erased Asian men back then too. Seeing AAJA’s guidance on the Atlanta shootings provides new insight.

What I thought was a fringe mindset among a handful of AsAm journalists was actually a product of top-down marching orders sent out to all AsAm journalists, which then gets disseminated as the mainstream narrative. This intentional erasure of Asian men is racist and violent.

It’s ironic that AsAm leaders push for restorative justice for anti-Asian hate crimes—which emphasizes communication between the perpetrator and victim—yet none of them has owned up to how much harm they’ve caused with their bias. Whenever they’re caught, they just go quiet.

That’s the part of the betrayal that hurts the most. Violent perpetrators of anti-Asian hate crimes get more sensitivity than actual Asian male victims of hate crimes. I can’t even put into words how heartbroken and angry I am to see this racist abuse play out again and again.

For example, I never forgot the contrast in Juju Chang’s interview of two Atlanta shooting victim’s children. To a daughter she says “your mom would be very proud of you” and to a son she says “what do you think your mother sacrificed for your benefit?”

The lack of empathy towards Asian men is so normalized in media narratives that it’s not even questioned. Here’s a person who lost his mom to a violent hate crime, yet an AsAm journalist felt the need to imply he should feel shame—which is so inappropriate to ask of anyone.

The point of these posts isn’t to say East Asian women or AAPI women in general shouldn’t get attention and resources. It’s to correct the harm of AsAm leaders erasing Asian men, and to make sure all AAPI can get meaningful victim support, resources, and media attention.

But I’m not holding my breath. This requires big changes—including giving Asian men like me a voice—and so far, Asian American leaders have demonstrated strong resistance to holding themselves and their friends accountable. They profit off the harm, and want to continue doing so.

So I anticipate they’ll do what they’ll usually do. Quietly lurk on my posts, steal the content, & then speak over me and other people they’ve harmed in order to portray themselves as the heroes who came in to save the day. With fellow AsAms like these, who needs enemies?

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The mainstream media narrative about anti-Asian hate crimes consistently erases Asian men as victims. So when AAPI Data—a well-known source of reputable stats—acknowledged this issue in March, I felt validated for the first time, and decided to find out what went wrong.

Is the erasure of Asian men in anti-Asian hate crime narratives occurring during data collection, analysis, or interpretation by mainstream media? The answer is that deep-seated bias against Asian men is present at all three levels of the process, causing harm along the way.

The reports I read came from a variety of sources: AAPI Data (national surveys), Stop AAPI Hate (community reporting), hate crime statistics (national law enforcement data), and articles and reports from Asian academics and journalists. I focused on these four reports in particular.

Here’s what I found. National survey data (AAPI Data) is considered more reliable than community reporting (Stop AAPI Hate), yet mainstream Asian-led media has relied heavily on Stop AAPI Hate data. Which might not be so bad—if Stop AAPI Hate didn’t show several signs of bias.

Stop AAPI Hate has pushed a media narrative that East Asian women are at the highest risk of physical assault. Yet their most recent national report and survey of AAPI women show that Asian men, enbies, and South Asian women are the most likely to experience physical assault.

Stop AAPI Hate has also pushed the narrative that Asian women are uniquely targeted because of their gender. Yet in both their national report and survey of AAPI women, victims of all genders overwhelmingly attribute these hate incidents to race & ethnicity, not gender.

The omission of Asian men from the narrative of anti-Asian hate crimes is more glaring when Dr. Janelle Wong’s report shows that there’s evidence—even before 2021—that Asian men report violent incidents more often, self-report to community organizations less, and get less media coverage.

It seems Stop AAPI Hate suffers from two major problems: 1) it ignores important patterns in its own data if it doesn’t validate a narrative centering East Asian women, which 2) suggests a biased over-prioritization of EA women in outreach efforts—which impacts self-reporting.

Additionally, Stop AAPI Hate doesn’t collect race data on perpetrators of anti-Asian hate crimes. Its vague language and ambiguous framework of restorative justice & education seems to favor the perpetrators’ needs more than the needs of actual AAPI victims—which is concerning.

Restorative justice is well-intentioned but has major flaws, including the assumption that the victim has enough English proficiency to understand procedures and communicate their needs. Given what we know about many AAPI victims, this assumption is dangerous and can cause harm.

Anti-Asian hate crimes are vastly under-reported in national law enforcement stats because AAPI feel the least comfortable in reporting them and, like in Atlanta, law enforcement routinely downplays anti-Asian racism due to white supremacist apathy and the Model Minority Myth.

AAPI victims worry about drawing attention to themselves in reporting hate incidents, so they may feel pressured to rush through restorative justice procedures or acquiesce to whatever is proposed, regardless of whether they agree. This defeats the purpose of empowering them.

Also, national hate crime stats show 75% of perpetrators of anti-Asian hate crimes are white, 25% non-white. So why is restorative justice, an approach meant to protect POC from disproportionate levels of judicial punishment, being applied in a one-size-fits-all approach?

To understand why this is harmful, let’s consider the Atlanta shooter. The AAPI community had to fight loudly to overcome the racist narrative that he had a sex addiction and “had a bad day.” According to Stop AAPI Hate, should we drop all charges and just get him in a classroom?

Overall, vague restorative justice procedures could end up reinforcing the status quo that already exists: perpetrators don’t face appropriate consequences and AAPI victims are disempowered. AAPI deserve full transparency on what restorative justice looks like—upfront.

This doesn’t mean Stop AAPI Hate’s work is useless. But the severe de-prioritization of Asian men raises red flags on what the organization’s purpose is and how much bias is corrupting its work. It means that Asian men are being double victimized—and by our own community no less.

So until Stop AAPI Hate publicly acknowledges the harm it’s caused in its erasure of Asian men, improves its methodology and analysis, and centers victims completely, it shouldn’t be relied on as a primary data source to shape the media narrative about anti-Asian hate crimes.

In this post, I focused mostly on the data and analysis of anti-Asian hate crimes, and Stop AAPI Hate’s role as a primary source. In my next post, I’ll focus on journalism and the mainstream media messaging about anti-Asian hate crimes that gets produced from this data.

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Knowledge is power, but power can corrupt. White institutions teach a select class of Asians to adopt elitism and gatekeeping in order to harm their community and deny lived experiences.

Asian Americans have the largest wealth gap of any U.S. racial group. Elitist Asians are a small percentage, yet they’re purposely given the largest AsAm platforms and resources in order to perpetuate the Model Minority myth and downplay anti-Asian racism. (for more info, see my Monomyth comic)

To be clear, higher education isn’t inherently bad. It’s like any other tool—it can enlighten and empower, or be misused. There are many Asian academics, educators and journalists who resist white supremacy and fight for their communities. But we’re talking about the ones who don’t.

These elitist tokens claim to fight for the most marginalized. In reality, they want to be the only Asian at the white table—the voice for the “voiceless.” White supremacist institutions are happy to seat them there, since tokens don’t dismantle the system but reinforce it.

Netflix’s show The Chair inadvertently captures this dynamic. It was widely touted as positive Asian rep, yet Sandra Oh’s character protected and prioritized a white male colleague/lover from accountability while treating marginalized students and her Black colleague as obstacles. When I saw prominent Asians and other POC gush about feeling seen by Sandra Oh’s The Chair character, I was disappointed—but not surprised. It speaks to their lack of self-awareness and how accustomed they are to trampling over their own people that they don’t think it’s wrong.

This is the major disconnect. We supposedly understand how structural racism works and that higher education—like every other industry in the U.S.—perpetuates white supremacy. Yet POC who get accepted to ivy leagues are not only celebrated, but viewed as automatic leaders.

The truth is, these institutions would never allow POC to matriculate if there was a real threat of them dismantling their bigoted systems. The token’s purpose is to insulate these institutions from accusations of bigotry, promote bootstrap narratives, and keep other POC out. Asian tokens know that to keep these prestigious positions of power, they must avoid being seen as a threat by white people. So, despite making outward claims of dismantling the Model Minority myth, they internalize it as fact—to the point of adopting white guilt as their own.

Tokens mask their gaslighting, bullying, and abuse by over-intellectualizing racism—the way white people taught them to. We’re seeing this with anti-Asian hate crimes, and how tokens police language and emotions while creating a hierarchy of which victims matter and which ones don’t.

This includes the thorny but necessary conversation of holding other POC accountable for anti-Asian violence—especially the Black community. Even though white people commit the majority of anti-Asian hate crimes, there’s also a significant pattern of Black people doing it too.

But according to elitist Asians tokens, that pattern isn’t relevant, and Asians shouldn’t be upset or talking about it. This is because, in internalizing the Model Minority myth, elitist Asians see themselves as above other POC and think accountability is anti-Black. It’s not.

Let’s be clear: assaulting Asians for being Asian is violent racism. The attacker’s race doesn’t change this. While we should be sensitive to the context of white supremacy when holding Black people and other POC accountable, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t discuss it at all.

Yet elitist Asian tokens sabotage efforts towards solidarity, healing, and progress because they project their class privilege onto a community that is larger and far more vulnerable than them. Meanwhile, white people are happy to let tensions between Asians and Black people remain.

The situation is frustrating and sad. How much violence could we have prevented if our communities did a better job of educating and tackling difficult conversations head-on instead of avoiding them? How much solidarity is lost because we’re at the whims of tokens who don’t care?

It’s ironic that the ones who supposedly understand the power of education the best are using it the worst. But that’s exactly what white supremacy wants: violence, division, and ignorance. That’s why it’s up to all of us to speak up and spark these conversations—so we can learn.

(Please don’t repost or edit my art. Reblogs are always appreciated.)

If you enjoy my comics, please pledge to my Patreon or donate to my Paypal. I lost my publisher for trying to publish these strips, so your support keeps me going until I can find a new publisher/lit agent

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Make America Mask Again (even though it barely did to begin with).

Unlike Asia, the West associates wearing masks with weakness and fascism, rather than a civic duty to protect themselves and others. As if forcing sick individuals to work or be in situations that can literally kill—just to keep the capitalist machine running—isn’t tyrannical.

Asians are triply targeted in this pandemic. We are potential COVID victims like anyone else, yet also get blamed for the pandemic, and then get treated as “dirty” carriers of the disease even more when we wear a mask. This leads to violent anti-Asian hate crimes against us.

It isn’t Asian to care about others and mask up. It’s basic empathy and hygiene—which many Americans lack. To my fellow Asians out there who’ve been masking from the start and never stopped even though it added another target to your back, I see you. Hang in there.

(Please don’t repost or edit my art. Reblogs are always appreciated.)

If you enjoy my comics, please pledge to my Patreon or donate to my Paypal. I lost my publisher, so your support keeps me going until I can find a new publisher/lit agent.
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#StopAsianHate is meaningless until we acknowledge white men as the architects of anti-Asian racism, and the blueprints they use to divide the Asian community and sabotage progress.

Understanding anti-Asian racism means connecting its history in the U.S. with its history in Asia, instead of treating them separately. U.S. imperialism, war, and colonization abroad directly informs the racism Asian Americans experience because the goal is the same: divide, conquer, and kill.

White men used war to split Korea and Vietnam in two, and divide AsAms the same way. One blueprint of the U.S.’s domestic anti-Asian strategy is the Mixed Marriage Policy of 1942-1943. Implemented during Japanese Internment, it gave certain Asians special exemptions to leave camp.

Internment was meant to harm Japanese Americans, not white men with Japanese families (whiteness is why few German and Italian Americans were interned). So, the Mixed Marriage Policy let Japanese leave camps if they:

1) married a non-Japanese

2) proved a “Caucasian environment.”

The Mixed Marriage Policy had two versions. In 1942, few Asians were eligible—especially monoracial Japanese men. The 1943 version greatly expanded eligibility for monoracial Japanese women and mixed-Japanese adults, but eliminated nearly all eligibility for monoracial Japanese men.

Each eligible case required proving a “Caucasian environment.” So while on paper the MMP offered exemptions to non-white mixed-Japanese couples and their kids, they were rarely granted. The MMP’s real goal was to benefit white men with Japanese wives and mixed-white Japanese children.

Overall, the Mixed Marriage Policy reveals white men’s hierarchy of Asians:

1) mixed-white Asian adults

2) monoracial Asian women married to white men and with white-mixed children

3) monoracial Asian men—preferably deported, divorced, detained in an internment camp, or dead.

By explicitly laying out white men’s hierarchy of Asians, the MMP is an incredibly revealing anti-Asian document. Which is perhaps why it’s so difficult to find—the original documents are at the National Archives and aren’t digitized (must pay to see them).

There’s good reason for white men wanting to hide the MMP. It’s a Rosetta Stone for understanding the motivations of many modern anti-Asian hate crimes like the NYC Hammer killings, Atlanta spa shootings, and Isla Vista massacre. Each can be directly tied to the roadmap MMP provides.

The 2019 NYC hammer killings occurred when a white man saw films vilifying Asian men and wanted to “defend” Asian women. He entered a buffet to hammer random Asian men in the head. They all died slowly: Fufai Pun later that day, Kheong Ng-Thang 3 days later, Tsz Pun a week later.

The 2021 Atlanta spa shootings occurred because a white man blamed Asian women for his “sex addiction.” He shot at multiple Asian massage workers and planned on targeting more. Victims include Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Hyun Jung Grant, Soon Chung Park, Suncha Kim, and Yong Ae Yue.

The 2014 Isla Vista massacre occurred because a functionally-white, white-mixed Asian hated white women who rejected him & men of color. He assaulted monoracial Asian men several times and murdered three—Cheng Yuan Hong, Weihan Wang, and George Chen—by stabbing them 15, 25, and 94 times.

Many people believe anti-Asian racism started with COVID, but as these examples show, Asians have always suffered violence. The problem is our stories are purposely erased and twisted to double-victimize us and reinforce the lies of the Model Minority Myth. This happens two ways.

The first erasure comes from white people in government, news, education, and more. White men know coverage can humanize—or destroy. That’s why the racial component of Isla Vista was removed, the hammer killings were downplayed, and “sex addiction” was used to justify Atlanta.

The second erasure sadly comes from complicit Asians. The MMP’s core concept is clear: to be spared fatal anti-Asian racism, you must actively show loyalty to whiteness by proving a “Caucasian environment"—in other words, dodge the bullet by redirecting it to another Asian’s head.

Complicit Asians say criticizing their complicity condemns interracial relationships. It doesn’t. There were Japanese whose white spouses stood by them—like Arthur Ishigo, whose wife Estelle voluntarily joined his camp. He later died of cancer and she lost her legs to gangrene.

These days complicit Asians aren’t restricted by gender or marriage. Anyone can be one (although partnering with white men remains the easiest way to do this). To prove their "Caucasian environment,” they must punch down on Asians with equal or greater hate than white men do.

For ex, complicit Asians write articles telling Asian Americans to not label anti-Asian violence as hate crimes until white officials say so, disrespect Asian male Isla Vista victims by blaming their deaths on Asianness, and so on. They’re not bringing awareness—they’re sabotaging it.

That’s by design. White men know in-fighting wastes AsAm energy. So, they recruit complicit Asians, give them a monopoly on AsAm resources, microphones, and platforms—despite being a minority in AsAm spaces—and watch as they perpetuate the status quo rather than dismantle it.

This all comes back to the same violent, imperialist strategies white men have used against Asian countries for centuries: rape and pillage, divide and conquer, install puppet leaders. Drive Asians out of Asia through violence, dangle the “American dream,” then murder us more.

This means the MMP’s relevance is twofold: 1) white men’s hierarchy of Asians endures to this day, and 2) rising hate crimes show how easy it is to bring internment back. Between 2020 and 2021, overall hate crimes dropped by 7%, but anti-Asian hate crimes spiked 149%.

So to #StopAsianHate, it’s not enough to talk about the "easy” topics. We must also address the “taboos.” This includes the violent ways whiteness recruits Asians so it can Trojan Horse its way into our communities, shut down progress, and endanger us all—exactly as intended.

Thank you to Ashlynn Deu Pree, Paul Spickard, and Adrienne Edgar for their help with points of contact and data.

(Please don’t repost or edit my art. Reblogs are always appreciated.)

If you enjoy my comics, please pledge to my Patreon or donate to my Paypal. I lost my publisher for trying to publish these strips, so your support keeps me going until I can find a new publisher/lit agenthttps://twitter.com/Joshua_Luna/status/1134522555744866304
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