A few blog posts back, I mentioned that the problem with race-consciousness is eventually, when one adopts this worldview, you see racism everywhere. And here we are.
A few days back, a very troubled young man killed eight people in a shooting spree around Atlanta, Georgia. Of course you heard all about it; the only person who didn’t was my wife, who happened to be under dental anesthesia that day, but later had no recollection of the original event or our discussion (“What are you talking about?” was her initial response).
The news script went like this: the suspect was a twenty-one year old white man who was a “religious fanatic” and belonged to an “evangelic group.” He claimed to be a “sex addict” who attacked “massage parlors” to eliminate the “temptation” they presented to him, and he told authorities he was on his way to Florida to attack the “porn industry” when he was apprehended. Six of the eight people killed were women of Asian descent (ages thirty-three to seventy-four years old!) who worked at or owned the massage parlors. A police spokesman, when asked to explain the motivation for the killing spree the day after the attack, related that the suspect “denied having a racial motive,” and when further questioned, the spokesman ad-libbed that maybe the suspect had “a really bad day” which led to the spokesman’s reassignment from his duties. (The quotes above all come from news articles)
Those are the facts of the case as we know it. The media spin was to place this story as the crescendo of a series of anti-Asian hate crimes that began with the killing of eighty-four year-old Vicha Ratanapakdee in San Francisco in January. Media news and commentary opined that the suspect (I am intentionally avoiding using his name in accord with the idea that ignominy deserves no recognition) clearly committed a hate crime, equal parts misogynistic and racial. According to a running count by Andrew Sullivan, the New York Times ran (as of March 19th) nine stories along this line, while the Washington Post went for the gold with sixteen! Network news parroted the same line. A few went so far as to claim white male fetish-sizing of Asian women was the underlying cause, with a dollop of white supremacist violence on top. Those who mentioned the police spokesman did so with incredulity that anyone would be so stupid as to (1) believe what the suspect said his motive was and (2) could ever say anything as stupid as he had “a really bad day.” I saw at least two reports that the removed police spokesman had once tagged a racist meme on social media, calling Covid19 “the virus imported from CHY-na.”
Now what is the rest of the story? It’s still early, but so far not one intrepid reporter has uncovered a single text, tweet, or social media post expressing anti-Asian or anti-woman views by the suspect. In private discussions with his friends (which a few reporters have interviewed), the suspect told them he went to Asian massage parlors not because of race, but because those parlors “were the safest place” to acquire casual sex for money. And he was a repeat customer at two (of the three) places he later attacked. The suspect had long complained of a sex addiction, and had gone to rehab more than once, yet he remained plagued by his inability to control his sexual impulses. His Baptist congregation and his parents were well aware of his continuing struggle. In fact, the night before the attack, the suspect’s parents threw him out of the house, perhaps prompting the police spokesman’s “very bad day” comment.
According to a Times’ story and video, the suspect spent an hour inside his car outside the first parlor, then spent another hour inside the facility before he started shooting. We’ll know eventually what happened before the killing began.
The media coverage of the victims has been of two minds. Some commentators decried the suggestion any of the victims were involved in the sex trade, as if that was attacking the victims. Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms denied any evidence this was the case, but she was sadly mistaken, as the attacked massage parlors were previously targeted by law enforcement and were on the sex rating app RubMaps as locations for prostitution.
Some media noted the ages of the victims and stated this somehow suggested sex was not involved; a simple Google search would reveal a story from SupChina, an all-things-Chinese web service, entitled “Chinese moms in America’s illicit massage parlors” explaining the more than nine-thousand illicit massage parlors in the United States staffed and run by 35-55 year-old Chinese women. It’s an empathetic and personal story about women trying to make ends meet for their children, but it belies the notion that “Asian massage parlors as brothels” are somehow a fantasy imposed by others. The Times even ran an earlier March story (before the attack) confirming the size and illicit activities of these parlors, although that story highlighted the Asian organized crime ties of the industry.
The President and Vice President used a previously-scheduled Atlanta visit to mourn the deaths and decry anti-Asian racist violence, but where in the preceding facts is that racism? The claim seems to go all the way back to the first national case, in San Francisco in January.
Back then Vicha Ratanapakdee, an eighty-four year-old retiree of Thai descent, was taking his daily walk in the Anza Vista neighborhood of San Francisco. Perhaps you saw his story? The unprovoked attack was caught on video and is frankly, shocking. He was violently knocked off his feet and hit his head on a garage door. He died in the hospital days later. His assailant was a nineteen year-old black man named Antoine Watson. The media coverage inevitably cited a rising tide of anti-Asian violence and linked it to former President Trump’s “China virus” tweets, despite any evidence Mr. Watson is a MAGA man or how he was influenced by the President. The local police indicated repeatedly they had no evidence of a racist motive, which was criticized by local activists and ridiculed by the national media.
The apparent ridiculousness of the Trump-Watson connection got me interested, so I waded through tens of cut-and-paste national reports looking for better coverage in the local media. There I found this gem, hidden away by the barrage of the national media narrative:
Watson was “apparently vandalizing a car” when Ratanapakdee looked toward him and changed directions on his walk, (Assistant District Attorney) Connolly said in his detention motion, citing surveillance footage from the scene. The teenager then sprinted “full speed” at Ratanapakdee an instant after the elderly man looked back at him, according to the motion. Ratanapakdee was sent flying backward and landed onto the pavement. A witness told police they heard a voice yell “Why you lookin’ at me?” twice before hearing the apparent impact, prosecutors said. Sliman Nawabi, a deputy public defender representing Watson, disputed the perception that the attack was racially motivated.“There is absolutely zero evidence that Mr. Ratanapakdee’s ethnicity and age was a motivating factor in being assaulted,” Nawabi said. “This unfortunate assault has to do with a break in the mental health of a teenager. Any other narrative is false, misleading, and divisive.” Nawabi said Watson comes from a biracial family that includes Asians and had “no knowledge of Mr. Ratanapakdee’s race or vulnerabilities” since the elderly man was wearing a mask, hat, sweater and jeans.
Michael Barber in the San Francisco Examiner, February 8th, 2021
Oh, and Watson was with a woman named Malaysia Goo, who was at the scene of the attack, was arrested as an accomplice-after-the-fact, but was later released and not charged.
So we have a man of Black-Asian descent with an (possibly) Asian woman, vandalizing a car, seeing a man covered from head-to-toe looking at him. Then the suspect knocks the potential witness off his feet. These are points upon which both the District Attorney and the Public Defender agree. These are points not mentioned by national media piece. It would be easier to find Waldo in a sea of red hats than to find the racism in this story. Yet it remains exhibit #1 of anti-Asian hate.
Some may wonder about the data cited repeatedly showing an increase in anti-Asian hate crimes in recent years. I’ve gone on long enough here, so I’ll save that part of the story for a future post. Suffice it to say there is the media narrative, there are numbers, and there is data, but all three don’t get along well together.
What’s the harm in jumping to conclusions about racism and hate crimes? First and foremost, every debunked or manufactured claim of racism undermines the many real cases of racist violence. Second, hate crimes involve proving a mindset, and any attempt to do so requires examining all the various relationships involved in the crime. It’s a major reason prosecutors don’t like to take hate crimes charges to court. If you want to prove the Georgia man hated Asian American women, you’re going to have to let the defense demonstrate all the ways he “spent time” with them, so to speak. Whose end does that serve? Third and finally, lost in all this nonsense about who-hates-whom-and-why is this simple fact: people were murdered. Which is a serious crime. Innocent people became victims and died at the hands of violent criminals. These are real crimes which call out for real justice, not hate crimes demanding social justice.