Justin Phillips, the Sunday columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle, continues his “Black people can do no wrong” theme in his most recent op-ed, headlined (in the paper edition) “Forces stoking division target Asian Americans.”
Justin’s thesis is that reports of Black men increasingly attacking Asian Americans are fake news. Forget about all the videos you see on the nightly news: it’s all a set-up. The truth, he asserts, is that some nefarious “force” is foisting this lie upon America, in order to stoke “a destructive narrative pitting Asian and Black communities against each other.” Phillips never gets around to explaining just who these forces are, or why they want to pit Asians against Blacks. Instead, he tries to distract readers by suggesting that Black-on-Asian crime is a myth, and that, in fact, “White people are largely behind local hate crimes.”
White rightwing neo-nazis may largely be behind attacks on LGBTQ people and Jews, but the violence perpetrated by young Black males on Asians, particularly elderly women, is real and horrifying. Justin’s problem is that, as a Black apologist, he can never bring himself to admit that any Black people ever do anything objectionable, or that some proportion of Black people harbor a reverse racism against Asians.
This is happening, by the way, against the backdrop of the latest murder of an Asian woman, 60-year old Dr. Lili Xu, in Oakland’s Little Saigon district. We don’t know who killed her, yet, but I’m pretty sure OPD will find the perp soon.
Let’s look at some numbers. This is a report, by the City of Oakland, of a year’s worth of crime, categorized by victim and suspect. Let’s focus first on Asians. In the reporting year, only 5 Asians were homicide victims, thank God. But 1,538 Asians were victims of robbery. (I added up all the various Asian categories on the list.) Then look at the two lists PC245(A2), which is aggravated assault with a firearm, and PC245 (A1), aggravated assault with a deadly weapon other than a firearm. In the former, Asians comprised 103 victims. In the latter, Asians accounted for 85 victims.
Now, look at the suspects by race. In homicides, Black people accounted for 27 of a total 32 homicide suspects, or 84 %. In robberies, Black suspects numbered 8,228, of a total of 9,491, or nearly 87%. In assaults with a firearm, there were 844 Black suspects, of a total of 1,091, or 77%. In assaults with a deadly weapon other than a firearm, there were 1,034 Black suspects, of a total of 1,439, or nearly 72%. Justin, these are real numbers. They don’t lie. No “stoking forces” cooked them up.
Now, with percentages like these, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to conclude that most murders, robberies and assaults on Asians, as well as on everyone else including Black people themselves (who are the biggest victims of crime), are committed by Black men. In addition to the numbers, it’s clear to those of us who work in the field that fear of Black people, especially of young Black men, is widespread and generalized throughout Chinatown. People fear for their lives, property and safety, and it’s not because—as Phillips alleges—of evil, unnamed social media trolls. It’s because the residents of Chinatown see, first-hand, evidence of predatory Black behavior and, if they don’t see it with their own eyes, they hear about it in their close-knit communities, not just in Oakland but in San Francisco and beyond.
We can have a discussion about why Black men attack Asians; that’s for another day. But please, let’s not indulge in Trumpian disinformation the way Phillips does. There is some degree of angry dysfunctionality among some young Black men (for whatever reasons), of which anti-AAPI violence is but one symptom, and it does nobody any good for Justin Phillips to spin, distort, distract, ignore, obfuscate, or otherwise deny this sad, important fact, which may make him uncomfortable but is nonetheless true. It’s also highly insulting to our AAPI neighbors to suggest that they’re somehow being manipulated by sinister “forces” when they know damned well, in fact, that they are under attack, and by whom.
Steve Heimoff