232: DEAR WHITE WOMEN: The Common Enemy Is White Supremacy

Dear White Women

You know the viral videos - the ones showing Black people, usually men, attacking unsuspecting Asian folks, usually elderly Asians. These are atrocious, awful incidents of course. We don’t want anybody to be harmed. AND, since we can hold two thoughts in our heads at the same time, we also need to state that these viral videos are giving us an inaccurate impression of anti-Asian hate.

For example, it turns out, according to a University of Maryland, College Park study, that most anti-Asian hate crimes are committed by white people, NOT Black people. Significantly so – more than three-quarters of offenders of anti-Asian hate crimes and incidents, from both before and during the pandemic, have been white.

We want to have this conversation as part of our mixed race Asian arc, focusing on what we believe should be a point of solidarity but has instead been misunderstood to be a divisive issue with regard to Black and Asian Americans, with actual data as a reminder for all of us – that we need to train ourselves to pause when we see narratives that pit one historically marginalized group against another historically marginalized group, and ask ourselves if they’re true, because they’re often serving simply as a distraction to change the conversation, to move it away from the “real” enemy - white supremacy. Dismantling white supremacy is where all of us - Asians, Black folks, white folks, and more – need to keep our energy focused.

What to listen for:

• Hate crime statistics - which show that even through the rise of anti-Asian hate through to the Covid years, there were still more anti-Black hate crimes than anti-Asian hate crimes.

• Perpetrators of hate crimes are predominantly white, as confirmed by multiple studies – NOT people of color, contrary to misperception due to viral videos

• Why is there this erroneous narrative of Black on Asian crime?

• Taking apart the idea of white adjacency, and challenging more people of Asian descent to stand in solidarity against the common enemy -- white supremacy.

• Examples of Black and Asian solidarity throughout history.

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