I will admit it: The Harvard Crimson is not one of my first reads of the day, and I would not have spotted the article referenced below were it not for this tweet from my good friend Hube of The College Fix. It seems that the Editorial Board of the Crimson are just terribly, terribly upset at discrimination against Asians:
By The Crimson Editorial Board | April 5, 2021
Racism directed against Asian people in America is old and urgent. The recent murder spree carried out in Asian spas and massage parlors in Atlanta — in which eight people, including six Asian women, were shot and killed — is the latest horrific entry in the history of violence Asian American and Pacific Islanders have been subject to in the United States.
This violence sickens and shocks us, but perhaps our shock is a failure in and of itself. Asian Americans have been sounding the alarm on their lack of protection for over a year as attacks against Asian Americans have sharply risen. Covid-19, despicably dubbed “Kung Flu” and “the Chinese Virus” by former President Donald Trump, has triggered a wave of irrational violence against people of Asian descent. Between this piece’s publication and when our board first gathered to grapple with the Atlanta shooting, a woman of Filipino descent was brutally attacked in Times Square by a man spitting that she did not “belong here.” Yet even as the threat became more evident and pressing — even as New York reported a more than nine-fold increase in anti-Asian hate crimes, and an 84-year-old Thai man lost his life in San Francisco to a brutal attack his family describes as racially motivated — most of American society remained unfazed until Atlanta. It took a massacre for us to pay attention.
Would it be wrong of me to point out that the cities in which the incidents pointed out by the Editorial Board occurred, Atlanta, New York, and San Francisco, are heavily Democratic?
The suspect in the Atlanta shootings claims that he was not racially motivated; that his decision to shoot up three separate Asian-affiliated establishments was a reflection of his ‘“sex addiction” and desire to remove the “temptation” Asian spas presented. The sheriff in the county the crime took place seemingly sympathized, saying on the alleged perpetrator: “He was pretty much fed up and kind of at the end of his rope. Yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did.”
This coddling and utterly absurd response underscore how racism and white supremacy shaped the course and fallout of the Atlanta shooting.
I do love how the Editorial Board, made up of matriculants at one of the most highly selective universities in the country, have managed to conclude that the accused killer’s motive was different from what he said it was. Ought we not to expect that such brilliant students would do something really radical like, oh, examine the evidence?
Have they interviewed the suspect? Have they talked to him? The Editorial board noted searches for Asian women are among the top hits on a pornographic site, and assumed that because millions and millions of (mostly) men search for such, that this one individual male must have an Asian fetish. If the left object to my pointing out that the anti-Asian attacks listed above occurred in heavily Democratic cities, that just because the cities are liberal in the aggregate does not mean that the perpetrators of individual acts couldn’t be evil reich-wing Trump supporters, then the logical fallacy of the Editorial Board’s statement becomes obvious.
We are a country with a rich history of coddling white, male mass murderers. Authorities and the media extend undue sympathy even when their crimes demonstrate an extreme disregard for human life. It’s a privilege we rarely afford other demographics; one we only seem eager to extend when victims, unlike the perpetrator, belong to a minority group: Cops buying mass murderer Dylan Roof Burger King comes to mind. The dynamic is symptomatic of how racist biases and misconceptions can shape our response to crime, and of how failing to understand their pervasive influence can mean completely misinterpreting the root of tragedies born from racial hatred.
Dylann Roof was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole on South Carolina state charges, and received a capital sentence on federal charges. I’m not certain just what more can be done to him.
Of course, the Editorial Board seem to think that Mr Roof was coddled because the police brought him food after his arrest, when he said he was hungry. Not feeding Mr Roof, who told the police he hadn’t eaten for a couple of days, would have been a civil rights violation which could have tainted his arrest. It took me, with my baccalaureate degree from the not-so-selective University of Kentucky, about three seconds to find that information.
Solidarity means focusing on our common societal goal of defeating white supremacy, whatever shape it takes. In doing so, we must avoid pitting urgently needed movements against each other; forcing them to prove their comparative validity. Oppression Olympics are counterproductive, particularly when the common, violent enemy looms as large as white supremacy. Stop Asian Hate must function as a rightful ally of its counterparts like Black Lives Matter; minority ethnic groups standing in solidarity against the lashes of white hatred and rage. As for white Americans: Start fighting white supremacy in your own communities.
Solidarity among marginalized groups counters white supremacy in and of itself by chipping at the model minority myth, used to pit Asian people against other minority groups and to promote the falsehood that anyone can succeed their way out of racism. The financial success of some Asian Americans has been weaponized to perpetuate the notion that other people of color could achieve the same success if only they worked hard enough. The model minority myth not only glosses over the huge income disparity that exists within the Asian American community but also ignores the historical injustices and systemic barriers that have been constructed to keep African Americans specifically in poverty. Expressions of unity are one way to dispel this insidious myth, alongside rejecting any stereotype that caricatures the incredibly diverse Asian American and Pacific Islander community as a monolith.
I have omitted much of the editorial, because I do not wish to plagiarize, and try to adhere to fair use standards. You can follow the link to the original, but at least when I read it, at 8:20 AM, there wasn’t a single word in it notiong that their own university, Hahvahd, has an admissions department which regularly discriminates against Asian applicants!
Not that it’s just Harvard. The Justice Department, under President Trump, brought a lawsuit against Yale University for the same thing, but the Biden Administration dropped it two weeks after coming into office.
Finally, to our Asian American peers: We see you, and understand that Atlanta is just the latest straw after a year-long onslaught of unjustified vilification and hatred. You deserve better than the response Harvard has given you, and more than what this editorial could ever offer. In the aftermath of Atlanta, we can offer no silver lining; only a reaffirmed commitment from this board to listen, learn, and use our voice to discuss and dismantle anti-Asian hate as best we know how.
If the Editorial Board see them, just how do the Board not mention, in their long editorial, that their own University discriminates against Asians. But, the Board, being beneficiaries of Harvard’s admissions processes, might not want to take that step. It is, after all, a reasonable question: if Harvard admitted strictly on academic achievement, how many of the Board would have been quoting Tom Cruise in Risky Business, “Looks like the University of Illinois!“
