Asian Americans

In the wake of Saturday’s horrific shooting at a Lunar New Year celebration in the heavily Asian neighborhood of Monterey Park, California, Democratic lawmakers sprang into action, speculating that the violence may have been racially motivated. Hours later it emerged that the shooter was himself also Asian. The frequency of mass killings in this country is harrowing. But Cockburn finds such tragedies are made all the more gruesome when politicians so often jump ahead of the facts, ascribing motivations or reasons to the violence that are politically beneficial to them or fit their ideological framework. Representative Adam Schiff, for example, pegged “bigotry towards AAPI individuals as a possible motive.

President Biden is meeting with the K-Pop band BTS on Tuesday, ostensibly to discuss anti-Asian hate crimes. To Cockburn, who tends to be a bit cynical, it looks more like part of a government trend to appeal to Generation Z in the most blatant way imaginable.  While there is nothing inherently wrong with bringing in celebrities to talk about serious issues (which both Obama and Trump did while in office), it seems suspiciously as if the Biden administration only invites the most popular stars in order to serve its own agenda. Normally presidential puppets would come in the form of fellow politicians, but when dealing with mass-market public figures like TikTokkers or other internet celebrities, the move comes off as shallow and deceitful.

Last spring, Yiatin Chu joined a series of protests against the spike in unprovoked assaults on Asian Americans in New York City. Prominent New York Democrats, including Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, were in attendance and spoke at the rallies. Senior party figures expressed their solidarity with the Asian community. They drew connections between the violence on New York’s streets and the xenophobic language of former president Donald Trump. And sometimes they blamed the violence on something less specific: white supremacy. After a while, Chu, a politically active Democrat, stopped going to the protests. “I was just really turned off by the messaging,” she tells me.

Poor Colin Kahl. The Stanford professor is qualified, experienced, and shares President Biden’s views on defense and foreign policy. Ordinarily, that would be enough to get confirmed to a job like undersecretary of defense for policy. But no more! Three and a half years after #MeToo, the casting couch has migrated from Hollywood to Capitol Hill, thanks to Sen. Tammy Duckworth. On Tuesday, Sen. Duckworth announced that, since President Biden’s political appointees were insufficiently diverse, she would be voting against any Biden nominees with white skin color, starting with Kahl. The only exception, Duckworth said, would be for LGBTQ nominees. Well, Kahl will have a hard time pulling off a racial rebranding this late.

Eighteen months ago, liberals attempted to link the spike in anti-Semitic hate crimes to white supremacist actions. New York City mayor Bill de Blasio and the ADL highlighted the activities of white supremacist groups in upstate New York, despite all of the assaults being in the New York City metropolitan area, overwhelmingly perpetrated by black men. This culminated with black men killing Jews in Jersey City and Monsey, New York. Attempts were then made to rationalize them away rather than focusing on the anti-Semitic beliefs of black-nationalist groups, including the Nation of Islam. The same dynamics seems to be unfolding with the current spike in anti-Asian hate crimes.

Want to know the worst kept secret in America? Every time President Trump and the White House Press Corps do their performative dance, while the country rolls its eyes and goes about its day — Trump insults everyone. Male, female, black, white, purple, Hispanic or, as in yesterday’s dust-up with CBS reporter Weijia Jiang, Asian. We can argue all day about if his behavior is fitting for the Oval Office (it isn’t) or if it helps the country (it doesn’t), but one thing that’s been clear in the three-plus years of the Trump presidency is that everyone is fair game. Rarely does sex or ethnicity factor into the president’s choice of target: he is an equal opportunities offender.

Tone-deaf. White people-pleasing. Bumbling pineapple bun. These are just some of the choice epithets that have been hurled at Andrew Yang after he shared his thoughts about the Asian American experience in the age of coronavirus. Calling the growing reports of racist and xenophobic attacks against Asian Americans across the country a ‘heartbreaking phenomenon', Yang opened his op-ed with a soliloquy about a recent experience at a grocery store where, for the first time since growing up as one of the few children of East-Asian descent in a New York suburb, he felt the searing tinge of race-consciousness and anxiety about his place in America.