The problem with “stop Asian hate” is that racial violence isn’t produced by “hate” in the abstract. It’s produced by political economy, and therefore can’t either be reduced to or represented by individual instances of interpersonal violence, which can have multiple causes
At the structural level, anti Asian racism manifests through institutional discrimination, policing, militarism, global supply chains and labor arbitrage, etc. All this disappears when we focus on individuals’ sentiments
I find the ongoing circulation of crime videos with Asian victims quite troubling for this reason. These stories tend to trade in a lot of sensationalism, and usually the narrative assumes “hate” as a primary cause — and not always with clear evidence that’s the case.
A lot of these videos depict people who are made vulnerable to violence by their jobs, age, and by patriarchy (in addition to race). A lot of these videos are taken in cities that are reeling from pandemic related crises on top of decades of neoliberalism.
Some of the videos depict violence without a clear purpose, others show things like robberies and muggings. These can be “racially motivated” too, but muggings don’t happen purely bc of individual prejudices (which is how stop Asian hate formulates racism—only as prejudice)
If there were a more consistent appeal to actually materially assisting the victims, I might feel differently. Sadly that’s not the case. Often the purpose of sharing these videos is to evoke emotional responses from the viewer and nothing more. It’s sloppy work.
There’s certainly been a real wave of violence against east and southeast asian people since at least covid. But what does sharing these videos without solutions for either the people depicted or the people watching really do? Where does it leave us?
In the absence of solutions from & implemented by the organized masses, the “fix” that often gets suggested is policing. This is how the idealist/individual framing of “hate” works against us. We’re trying to empower the very state that produced this violence in the first place!
We also can’t discount the role of the AsAm right in disseminating these videos—incl ones that later turned out to not even depict an Asian victim. Ofc this isn’t everyone sharing, but it’s imp to know how these vids get circulated, by who, and to what end theverge.com/22359080/anti-…
Tl;dr this shit leaves people feeling very isolated, embattled and open to reactionary persuasion and I think that’s by design. You’re not going to beat racism with agitation alone—you need organization! Agitation without organization can only lead to counterproductive outcomes
Moreover, “racism” doesn’t only become identifiable in the moment an Asian immigrant delivery worker or nurse is assaulted. The racism is always-already present in the fact that that worker is in the US to recoup the value stolen from their home country by imperialism
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