Last Tuesday, eight people were murdered in three Atlanta-area spas, and six of the victims were Asian females. Although authorities say it is premature to determine a racial motive and the current evidence indicates the 21-year-old white male perpetrator was motivated by sexual addiction, legacy media immediately took to speculating about a racial motivation.
The New York Times acknowledged “it was not clear whether there was a racial motivation” then took to describing Asian-American hate incidents, citing the organization Stop AAPI Hate funded by the Asian Pacific Planning and Policy Council, Chinese for Affirmative Action, and the Asian American Studies Department of San Francisco State University.
CNN employed a comparable doublespeak. “Investigators said it was too early to say whether the crime was racially motivated, and instead pointed to the suspect’s claim of a potential sex addiction,” says a CNN report on the incident. But the same article described anti-Asian sentiments in U.S. history and referenced Stop AAPI Hate’s claims about hate crimes. The article also cites the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
A few days after the shooting, ABC backed the ill-supported narrative. It cited The Page Act of 1875 — a bill to restrict Chinese women from emigrating to the United States — and described anti-Asian discrimination in World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Philippine-American War. Where is the correlation?
Left-wing activists and politicians have also heralded the speculative rallying cry. On Monday, hundreds of #StopAsianHate supporters protested in Atlanta. Democratic Georgia Sens. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff spoke, as did others like state Rep. Bee Nguyen — the first Asian-American Democratic to hold office in the state.
“We stand resiliently in defiance of hatred and murder,” Ossoff said. “This is Georgia. This is love. This is compassion. This is the best of us and this is what defines the people of our state and our nation, not those who kill or scapegoat or engage in racism or hate speech or hate crimes.“
Notwithstanding that the corporate media and their leftist allies are willing to push any and all narratives without proper evidence, there is something important to remember here. While the left virtue-signals about Asian discrimination and seems to believe that being the loudest shows the most solidarity, it is also the left that has categorically discriminated against Asian Americans for decades through affirmative action policies.
Walk Down Memory Lane
Back in 1996, vice-chancellor Jerry Kang at the University of California-Los Angeles described affirmative action as having a “double-edge” that has justified “negative action” against Asians. Kang, who graduated from Harvard University, is certainly no conservative; he lectures on implicit bias throughout the country and is the founding vice chancellor for equity, diversity and inclusion at UCLA.
Nonetheless, Kang’s hypothesis was firmly rejected in the academic world. In the eyes of the woke ivory tower, the “internal instability” he described of institutions denying the “right to equality” was not the proper way to champion equitable outcomes.
Through the lens of equitability, institutions operated by the left have aimed to determine that some races deserve admittance, while primarily Asians and whites do not. In the process of seeking to “level the playing field,” much the opposite has been happening for years. The playing field is no longer a playing field at all. It is a laboratory for politically motivated administrators to play God.
“There is definitely racism against Asians, just as there is racism from every color against every other color. I don’t buy the media’s attempt to carry a white supremacy narrative into this fact, because Asians have to face racism from (and are racist against) whites and blacks. The solution has to be to reduce the role that color plays in our discourse on all sides because it literally ‘colors’ our ability to understand the true facts behind this crime and other crimes,” said Kenny Xu, the author of the upcoming book “An Inconvenient Minority: The Ivy League Admissions Cases and the Attack on Asian American Excellence.”
In 2018, a study from the Center for Equal Opportunity found that elite colleges and universities routinely discriminate against Asian American applicants due to affirmative action quotas. It found that Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were “capping” Asian acceptance rates in the same way that schools capped Jewish people rates in the 1920s. The study notes:
At both MIT and Harvard there seems to be a limit or ‘ceiling’ on how many Asian American applicants are to be admitted. If there were no such ceiling, both MIT and Harvard would probably enroll a significantly larger number of Asian American applicants,’ the study notes. ‘As it is, some of those applicants may conclude they were rejected on account of their race. That would be discrimination, certainly as a matter of fact, and most likely in a way that is not consistent with the constraints on such discrimination that the Supreme Court has established.
Linda Chavez, the founder and chairman of the Center for Equal Opportunity, said that “Too many Asian Americans applying to elite schools are discriminated against on account of their race.” Since 1995, her organization has published dozens of studies on racial and ethnic discrimination in admissions processes to schools. Many of the research evidently stems from the racial quotas that leftist administrators champion, which has slashed meritocracy.
In August, the U.S. Department of Justice concluded that Yale University discriminated against both Asians and whites in undergraduate admissions. The DOJ probe found that Yale violated Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act in its using of racial or national origin information to produce a multi-step, non-meritorious admissions process.
“For the great majority of applicants, Asian Americans and whites have only one-tenth to one-fourth of the likelihood of admission as African American applicants with comparable academic credentials. Yale rejects scores of Asian American and white applicants each year based on their race, whom it otherwise would admit,” the DOJ noted.
“There is no such thing as a nice form of race discrimination,” said Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband for the Civil Rights Division. “Unlawfully dividing Americans into racial and ethnic blocs fosters stereotypes, bitterness, and division.”
But while these studies and probes reveal affirmative action means systemic racism against Asian Americans and whites, the left continues to champion affirmative action. Biden’s Jan. 26 executive order to make “more concerted efforts to address hate crimes and harassment against Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders” is broad jargon that Asian-American activists deem hollow.
“I think the executive order was just a form of pandering to the Asian-American community,” Issac Yi of the Young Asian Pacific American Leaders told The Washington Free Beacon.
Hypocrisy Runs Deep In Washington, D.C. Inc.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department rolled back the Trump-era Yale lawsuit affirmation in February under Biden’s lead “in light of all available facts, circumstances, and legal developments.” The DOJ dismissed a thorough two-year investigation that showed black students with the same academic qualifications as Asians were as much as eight times more likely to be admitted.
Roger Severino, former director of the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services under President Trump, said this was highly unusual.
“The DOJ can’t rewrite history. What they were trying to do, which was highly unusual, was to withdraw their notice letter which had the factual findings that showed Yale was engaging in outright racial balancing to the detriment of Asian Americans,” Severino told The Federalist. “It’s highly unusual to reach back in time and to dispute the factual findings of your career professionals. This is what should be seen as a very ideologically motivated departure from standard practice.”
“I do acknowledge that there is a significant amount of discretion at DOJ as to what cases they’re going to pursue,” Severino added. “But that’s different than revoking findings of facts. The facts are the facts.”
Aside from the controversial legal theory that the Biden administration’s DOJ has championed, the corrupt media is gaslighting us all on this issue. While The Washington Post has a long history of publishing material claiming that Asian-discrimination no longer exists in education — and ignoring brutal affirmative action standards — it now claims solidarity over unsupported motives of the lone gunman in Atlanta.
The New York Times, which likewise backed discrimination against Asians in a 2017 report, is now publishing article after article claiming a moral high ground, in addition to identifying supposed discrimination.
Asians have been discriminated against for decades because of the left’s immoral affirmative action policies, spurred by diversity racial quotas. But seldom do the Democrats recognize their own catastrophic failures, instead of pinning them on white supremacy or white people as a whole.
“White supremacy and hate are haunting Asian Americans,” ran a headline in CNN on March 18. “Asian Americans are the latest victims of white supremacy,” an article in The Hill declared on March 20. “… Racism, misogyny, & white supremacy are a threat to all communities, and we must call out the targeted, violent attacks on our AAPI neighbors,” Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., tweeted on March 17.
“To our asian neighbors, family, and friends,” tweeted freshman Rep. Cori Bush D-Mo., “… We will dismantle white supremacy alongside you.”
The hypocritical left ought to spare us their sanctimony about Asian discrimination in the Atlanta shooting. If the evidence shows it is true, fine. Any good-hearted person will denounce any form of racial discrimination. But until a racial motivation is established by evidence, do us all a favor, Washington, D.C. Inc.: Perform a little introspection on your own actions.
This article has been updated since publication.
