Thursday, August 26, 2021

Black on Asian Crimes Due to White Supremacy?

I am obviously late on this topic, but here's another of my series on anti-Asian crimes (here and here are the other posts). For this post, I'm not actually looking at any data on anti-Asian hate crimes, but instead focusing on a March 30th Twitter post made by a Dr Eugene Gu and my critique of it. I'm sure many will disagree with my critique.


To me, my criticism of this tweet is that it is by default racist. It takes away agency from Blacks and states that any crimes they might commit are due to white supremacy. Dr. Eugene Gu is Asian. One must ask: if Asians really do blame white supremacy for these crimes, would this also be the reason why there are tensions between Asians and Blacks? The fact is that this doctor doesn't view Blacks as having their own agency. If this were a common attitude among Asians, wouldn't Blacks pick up on it and feel insulted that Asians think so little of their ability to think for themselves and are instead pawns? 

Also, I totally don't get this argument that white supremacy takes away respect and dignity away from Asians.

Now I can totally understand the argument that the Los Angeles 1992 riots where Korean Americans businesses were targeted was in part due to economic issues. Yet, to argue this is driven by white supremacy and ignoring agency totally excuses such actions. Sure, I can see how one could argue that the black and Korean communities needed to come together after those riots and find common ground. Yet, that doesn't seem to be an issue of blaming white supremacy, but instead taking personal actions to come to peace with what happened and how to prevent it from happening in the future. 

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