The conversation

White supremacy is at the root of all racial violence in the United States

As the fear of anti-Asian violence increases, the police are trying to be more visible in order to repel attacks. AP Photo / Kathy Willens Despite the worrying increase in attacks against Asian Americans since March 2020, one worrying category of these attacks is: Blacks are attacking Asian Americans too. White people are the main perpetrators of anti-Asian racism. But in February 2021, a black person knocked an elderly Asian man to the ground in San Francisco; The man later died of his injuries. In another video from New York City on March 29, 2021, a black person knocks and beats an Asian American woman on the sidewalk in front of a door while viewers watch the attack, then closes the woman’s door without intervention or assistance . As the current President of the Association for Asian American Studies and a Professor of Ethnic and Critical Racial Studies specializing in Asian-American culture, I wanted to delve into the climate of anti-Asian racism I saw at the start of the pandemic. So in April 2020 I created a PowerPoint slide deck on anti-Asian racism that my employer, the University of Colorado Boulder, turned into a website. This led to around 50 interviews, workshops, lectures and panel presentations that I conducted about anti-Asian racism specifically during the time of COVID-19. The point I’ve made through all of these experiences is that anti-Asian racism has the same source as anti-black racism: white supremacy. So when a black person attacks an Asian person, the encounter may be fueled by racism, but more specifically, by the predominance of whites. White supremacy does not require a white person to maintain it. It’s Not All White People White supremacy is an ideology, a pattern of values ​​and beliefs that is anchored in almost every system and institution in the United States. It is a belief that being white is human and has inalienable universal rights. Not being white means that you are less than human – a throwaway item that others can abuse and abuse. US society’s dehumanization of the Asian population is driven by white supremacy, not a black person who may or may not hate Asians. During the pandemic, the “yellow threat” rhetoric blaming China for COVID-19 resulted in a 150% increase in police-reported incidents of Asian harassment in 2020. Specifically, East Asian Americans, or those who appear to be of East Asian descent or ancestry became targets for the misguided anger of people who accused Chinese or who they thought looked Chinese even if they were of a different ethnic background, such as Japanese, Taiwanese, Koreans , Burmese, Thais or Filipinos. Fear of Disease The predominance of whites as the root of racism can be seen in the Latino man in Texas who stabbed a Burmese family to death in March 2020, claiming to have done so because they were Chinese and the coronavirus hit the US problems, his belief that this family posed a threat is driven by white supremacist ideas that the Chinese are responsible for COVID-19. The same rhetoric of accusing and attacking someone perceived as Chinese of COVID-19 has been found in countless reports of harassment, including one from a Vietnamese-American woman spat at by a white man while trying to run a grocery store to enter March 2021. Four days later, video footage showed a 76-year-old Chinese woman who was slapped in the face by a 39-year-old white man on the same day that a white man killed eight people, including six Asian women, in Atlanta. [Get the best of The Conversation, every weekend. Sign up for our weekly newsletter.] Stories of individual harassment and violence against Asian Americans by white assailants don’t always get the same attention as the viral videos of black aggression against Asians. But white supremacy underlies all of these incidents, just as white supremacy caused Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin to kneel on George Floyd’s neck for over eight minutes: White supremacy made Floyd more of a black one male threat than to a human. Understanding the depth and scope of this ideology of racism can be challenging, but it brings each person and the nation as a whole closer to eliminating systemic inequality. It is not blacks that Asian Americans should fear. It’s white supremacy. This article was republished by The Conversation, a non-profit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Jennifer Ho, University of Colorado Boulder. Read more: Asian Americans are the top target for threats and harassment during the pandemic. Racism is behind anti-Asian American violence, even if it is not a hate crime. Jennifer Ho is a member of the Association for Asian American Studies.