Thread by @MsMelChen

Okay, I need to get this off my chest because it's been bothering me for a few months now.

American media has never backed up this claim that the words and actions by the previous admin directly cause the "rising tide of hate crimes" against Asian Americans.

https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1359315233379123203

In his first week in office, Biden signed a memorandum that reinforces the same claim - rebuking the previous admin for "advancing xenophobic sentiments" by using words like "China virus" and de facto banning its use by the federal government - and implying that the spate of

verbal and physical harassment of Asian Americans can be attributed to these hateful words.

These are serious claims, and it requires serious evidence. But what do we instead?

Bear in mind that the FBI hasn't released its 2020 hate crime statistics broken down

by ethnic group yet. But in its place, every article that remotely mentions the rise of anti-Asian hate crimes in the wake of covid19 has cited statistics from a group called "Stop AAPI Hate." Who are they and how did they collect this data is super relevant to this discussion.

The Stop AAPI Hate group appears to be founded by several progressive groups such as Chinese for Affirmative Action (!) & the Asian American Studies Department of San Francisco State University.

I can't find any funding information yet on GuideStar because it's a newly

established organization and they have yet to file any 990s.

The no. of incidents of anti-Asian discrimination documented across the U.S. by "Stop AAPI Hate" is indeed staggering - 1,843 as of May 2020.

But this number is actually based on self-reporting on the Stop AAPI Hate

web portal itself. According to a self-published report, the highest proportion of these cases are actually verbal harassment (69.3%) and shunning (22.4%).

So there is EVERY reason to be skeptical about this number. I do not doubt that there is an increase in both violent and

non-violent discriminatory incidents against Asians which is terrible and must be opposed, but I marvel at the lack of skepticism journalists have when throwing around this statistic and directly implicating rhetoric as the reason why this is happening.

These cases are also

mostly happening in the same major progressive cities like San Francisco and New York where there has been a major uptick in crime rates in general, so how much of it is ambient crime hasn't been delineated.

More troubling to me is how this conjecture has evolved from a

figure published by a brand new organization whose data collection methods and standard for what constitutes a hate incident are dubious, to an actual UN report.

In reporting on the latest spate of hate crimes targeting elderly Asians in Oakland's

cbsnews.com/news/daniel-wu…

Chinatown, CBS News now cites this same statistic & links the attacks to rhetoric with the full-on authority of a "United Nations report."

It's the same statistic, from the same group. But the UN wrote up a report condemning "contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination

xenophobia and related intolerance" and basically parroted the figure and conclusion from the original Stop AAPI Hate report, in this UN Report.

It cited nothing new and added nothing new. But it gave this statistic the imprimatur of the "United Nations" and media outlets then

began citing it as a "UN Report." Insidious, right?

You can read the UN report here:
spcommreports.ohchr.org/TMResultsBase/…

Of course anti-Asian prejudice due to covid is wrong. But if the rates of bullying, harassment and hate crimes against Asians are misattributed to phrases and

xenophobic sentiments (which could be construed to be hawkish approaches to China policy on the national security front), then we will not actually do anything to solve the problem.

And besides, Trump has been out of office and no longer has any platform to broadcast his views,

so why are so many eager to pin the current string of attacks on his rhetoric?

And how curious is it that using race as a shield (btw China is NOT a race) only serves the CCP's interest to obfuscate the association between the virus and its origins in Wuhan?