That it was caught on video is fortuitous, a reflection of the reality that much of our world is preserved on video. This provides us with the ability to see what before we could only hear about, have described for us. When we watch it, the brutality is very different, very real.
NYPD says 65-year-old Asian American woman was walking to church this morning when suspect assaulted her and said “f*** you, you don’t belong here.” Happened in front of 360 W. 43rd St. 11:40am. Sources say building security guard not only failed to render her aid… 1/2 pic.twitter.com/ZLtQEHHJci
— CeFaan Kim (@CeFaanKim) March 30, 2021
In the scheme of brutality, this one was particularly horrifying for three separate reasons. The first was its gratuitous nature, that the conduct was so randomly vicious. The 65-year-old woman was doing absolutely nothing to draw her attacker’s attention, no less his outrage and violence.
The second is the depth of violence against her. It wasn’t “just” a random punch, as landed on the face of Rick Moranus, but stomping on an old Asian woman on the ground. Few people, indulging their worst feelings, would engage in such a wantonly violent act.
The third is the “Kitty Genovese” aspect, that a security guard stood there, feet away, and watched it happen without moving a muscle, whether to stop it, to call the police, even to yell at the attacker. And then the coup de grace, a second security guard closing the door as if to shut the attack out of his world. Two men who denied their own humanity by being present for this viciousness and choosing to do nothing, choosing to close their eyes and the door. All the while, this was the man who allegedly stomped on this poor Asian woman.
Despite the video, the New York Times describes the attack.
A man kicked a 65-year-old woman to the ground in broad daylight on a Midtown Manhattan sidewalk on Monday, stomped on her several times and made anti-Asian remarks in what the police called another targeted hate crime.
“A man”?
The police said the attack happened around 11:40 a.m. outside an apartment building at 360 W. 43rd St., where a surveillance video showed an unidentified man kick the woman in the torso after the two approached each one another on the sidewalk.
An “unidentified man”?
The attacker, who the police department’s hate crimes task force asked for the public’s help in identifying, stomped on the woman’s upper body and head at least three times after she fell to the ground.
“The attacker”?
The video, which was released by the police and drew widespread attention online, showed a man who appeared to be a building worker standing in the lobby, unwilling to intervene. He then closed the building’s front door while the woman was lying on the ground after the attacker walked off.
“A man”?
The victim is described as a 65-year-old woman, but nowhere in the body of the New York Times story is it stated that the victim was an Asian woman. It’s noted that the attacker made anti-Asian comment, “Fuck you. You don’t belong here,” but never that she was Asian. At the end of the story, violent attacks on Asians are noted, including the subway beating caught on Tik Tok, but still no mention that the victim in this crime was Asian.
The headline to the story, however, notes that she was an Asian woman, although the reporter who wrote the story doesn’t write the headline. And the headline doesn’t even mention “a man.”
As the image of the attacker makes apparent, the “man” who stomped on this seemingly random old woman’s head, who told her “you don’t belong here,” who casually walks away after brutally, and pointlessly, engaging in wanton inexplicable violence, was a black man. This isn’t because all black men are violent criminals, or all black people hate Asian people. but because this “man,” this one individual, this one human being, committed this horrific attack.
The New York Times was correct not to note his race, as his race had nothing to do with it. While he is a black man, he is also a human being with agency, with the ability to walk past this random 65-year-old Asian woman and go on his way or, as happened, to kick this woman and then stomp on her head. And stomp again. And again. This man did it.
And those other two men, perhaps security guards, perhaps just doormen, maybe even just a guy standing there for no particular reason, similarly has a choice to make. He could have done something, anything, to help the woman, to prevent the attack, to act in furtherance of a human being who was being viciously attacked before his eyes a mere few feet away. He, too, made his choice, and his choice was to do nothing. The other man’s choice was more affirmative, to close the door, to shut the violence happening before him on the street out of his world.
The attack represented another jarring reminder of the rise in violent crimes targeting people of Asian descent across the United States, which advocates say has been exacerbated by pandemic-related racism. On March 16, a gunman killed six women of Asian descent in attacks on massage businesses in the Atlanta area that left eight people dead.
There are people who commit violence against other people. Some do so because of hatred toward race, ethnicity, ancestry, and others do so for differing motives, whether financial or hatred for more irrational, more bizarre reasons. Trying, as has become the desperate need of too many people who passionately believe they are doing “good” by deceiving themselves and others into believing that this is all part of some simplistic ideological narrative, has created a false and twisted grasp of what happens on the street in the real world.
The attack here was astoundingly brutal and horrifying. That the perpetrator was black is no more relevant than making every insipid excuse to deny that black people are not human beings with free will and the same responsibility not to engage in violence against others as anyone else.
The New York Times was right not to mention that this attacker was black. They would similarly be right not to mention when an attack is another race when it is not relevant to the story. Every crime isn’t about race. Ironically, this one appears to have been, though the race at issue was the victims, and the reporter choose not to mention that either. Thankfully, the headline writer saw fit to add in that detail.
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