It hasn’t been easy being an Asian American over the past decade, knowing that you’re expected to be an obsequious supporter of social justice as a marginalized minority while simultaneously being treated like dirt for working hard, doing well and ending the target of discrimination by the very passionate folks who demand your obedience.
As anti-Asian violence increased, it was hard to address since the perpetrators were mostly the same marginalized people who you were required to adore as they beat you, but you weren’t allowed to mention that it was black and brown guys beating old Asian people* because oppressed people can do no wrong and beating is reparations anyway. Let’s face it, Asians made them look bad, so how could they not be forgiven for beating Asians?
So the mass murder of Korean sex workers in Atlanta presented an opportunity to finally make some public headway, since the killer was a white man. Finally, someone to blame, even if it was just one guy against the hundreds of incidents. This was a big one, by far the most serious one, and it was a white guy. And all the woke folks suddenly stood behind anti-Asian discrimination.
Not enough to let them into Harvard or Yale, or mention that it was black people beating them on the street, but still, violence against Asians, even if it was only because they were sex workers, was finally getting its moment. And a couple of AAPI (you’re nobody without an acronym) politicians were not going to let the moment pass without leaping into the spotlight.
Introduced by Representative Grace Meng of New York and Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act is a short bill with two main provisions:
It requires the attorney general to put a Justice Department official in charge of reviewing reports of Covid-19-related hate crimes for at least a year.
It requires the Justice Department to issue guidance to state and local law enforcement agencies on how to establish an online hate crime reporting system in multiple languages, expand public education campaigns to encourage reporting of cases and provide guidance on how to mitigate racially discriminatory language in descriptions of the pandemic.
What does any of this have to do with Covid? It doesn’t matter, as every new law needs a hook into whatever it can find to link it to the public’s fears. What does it accomplish? For those who believe that the real problem with “hate crimes” is inadequate statistics, whose purpose is to provide an empirical basis for more crimes and punishment enhancements (“ooh, look more hate crimes so let’s double the sentence because that worked so well with drugs”), it lays an important foundation to prove how right they are to hate haters who hate. Even if, as happened in Atlanta, it was immediately labeled an Anti-Asian hate crime despite it being an anti-sex worker hate crime if any hate crime at all.
The problem with Hate Crimes in general are well known and have been discussed at length here and elsewhere. Surprisingly, Spencer Bokat-Lindell at the New York Times provides a somewhat useful survey of the arguments for and against hate crimes. While his sources are suspect and his descriptions shallow at best, it’s about as good as one could expect from a non-lawyer who has no meaningful grasp of the issues at hand.
If there’s a takeaway to be found, it’s the absurdity of the same people bemoaning mass imprisonment while demanding more imprisonment. If criminalizing speech or thought worked to eradicate racism, it hasn’t done much to help AAPI or much of anyone else. This irony doesn’t make it past the empty rhetoric that lets people believe they’re being sensitive to the plight of Asian Americans while making sure that their efforts to achieve admission to the most elite schools are crushed to make room for others. Those darn Asian Americans and their curve-busting ways.
It’s hard to blame Senator Mazie Hirona from seizing the moment to push a law for her racial cohort, since she’s finally got some backing due to Atlanta and has a white man to blame. But to what end does enacting more “hate crime” laws serve? Will it finally end racism to have people convicted of being double hate criminals, on top of murderers, so that after they’re executed, the woke can spit on them and kick them in the head a few times while screaming racist at their lifeless body?
What it will do is give the woke yet another opportunity to create performative laws that leave them feeling all warm, fuzzy and accomplished by having done something, something, to fight whatever hate is the bad hate of the moment. It might not be much. Heck, it might not be anything, actually. But it was also something, and as the syllogism goes, that’s close enough.
In his address about last week’s spa shootings in Georgia that left eight people dead, including six women of Asian descent, President Biden had only one novel policy prescription for stemming the rising tide of anti-Asian violence in the United States: Whatever the shooter’s motivation, he said, it was time for Congress to pass a new piece of hate crime legislation, the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act, which had been introduced this month.
No, it doesn’t accomplish anything useful, unless you’re desperately seeking empirical evidence to support your priors. But what it does accomplish is letting you know how much your government cares about your feelings, because if single hate crimes didn’t do the trick, maybe double hate crimes will fill those prison cells. But really, what difference does it make as long as there are laws criminalizing hate to make those good people who hate hate feel good about their government. Isn’t that what it’s really all about?
*It’s not me saying this. It’s the statistics. The NYPD kept stats on the race of defendants who committed the 20 anti-Asian hate crimes for which someone was arrested. Two were white. Five were white Hispanic. Two were black Hispanic. The rest, eleven, were black.
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