By: Aastha Uprety

On March 16, 2021, a white male shooter went to three spa and massage businesses in Atlanta, Georgia and shot and killed eight people. Six of the eight killed were East Asian women. The shooter, blaming his “sex addiction” and need to “eliminate temptation” for the violence, targeted women who were already marginalized by society for their gender, race, class, and occupation as massage workers.

For many, this massacre was the peak of a yearlong stretch of violence and harassment against Asians and Asian Americans. In response, many advocates have urged the police department to charge the shooter with a hate crime.

In a March 23 lecture organized by the Asian American Writer’s Workshop, sociologist Tamara Nopper addressed the messaging surrounding this past year’s rise in anti-Asian violence and cautioned against relying on prosecuting hate crimes as political action in response to grief.

Tamara Nopper is an activist and sociologist who has studied Asian American communities, Black-Korean conflict, criminalization, and financialization. Her two-hour presentation took an abolitionist, anti-carceral approach and covered a contemporary history of Asian American organizing, the development and limitations of hate crime legislation, and potential pitfalls in Black-Asian solidarity discourse. 

Her critique of the hate crime framework, explored here, provides important insight to activists and policymakers.

The Logic of Contemporary Hate Crimes

Nopper began with an overview of Asian American community organizing in the 1980s and 90s, much of which was rooted in response to the murder of Vincent Chin, the first instance of anti-Asian violence that was investigated by the Department of Justice. Some community organizations at the time advocated against both state violence—such as police brutality and immigration enforcement—as well as interpersonal assault and harassment. Current-day organizing around anti-Asian violence emerged from this period, and Nopper pointed out that this is when questions begin to arise about carceral responses to community grief.

Citing writer and activist Kay Whitlock, Nopper discussed how hate crime laws were originally used during the Reconstruction era to hold government officials accountable for violating the rights of Black people. However, the understanding of hate crimes has devolved into one of individual conflict, as hate crime laws are now used to prosecute one-on-one violence instead of state violence. 

The DOJ defines hate crimes as crimes that are motivated by bias. But hate crimes don’t always accurately reflect power structures, Nopper noted. A white person can be the official victim of a hate crime on the basis of “anti-white” bias, and a man or a straight person can be the victim of a hate crime based on their gender or sexual orientation, respectively. In addition, Black people are disproportionately charged as the perpetrators of hate crimes—in 2019, Black people made up 23 percent of those charged with a hate crime. A hate crime charge has the potential to add more time to a prison sentence or increase the offense level of a crime.

Police departments often support hate crime legislation, Nopper said. Prosecuting a hate crime can quell dissatisfaction in the community, and failing to prosecute hate crimes can increase the scrutiny of the police. Therefore, Nopper explained, police departments often use hate crime laws as an opportunity to build trust with the community. Hate crime legislation often supports police, too, by providing funding for law enforcement activities. 

Nopper brought the audience’s attention to what she sees as a particularly concerning recent bill—the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, sponsored by Representative Grace Meng (D-NY-6). This bill would address hate crimes motivated by bias against a protected class, as well as “the actual or perceived relationship to the spread of COVID-19 of any person because of that characteristic.”

Data Literacy and a “Crime Wave”

Monitoring data is a huge aspect of the push to document and prosecute hate crimes. So what about all this data we have seen over the past year about a rise of violence against Asian Americans? Nopper wants us to approach it carefully and responsibly. 

Many hate trackers, Nopper explained, such as the commonly cited Stop AAPI Hate, collect and report data on various types of hate incidents, not just hate crimes. From March 2020 to February 2021, 68 percent of the 3,795 reported incidents were of verbal harassment, 20 percent were shunning, and 11 percent were physical assault. While these instances do reveal something about rising tensions and bias against Asians, not all are crimes. 

Nopper also sees a basic data literacy problem with how numbers are presented. Many journalists have cited the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, which has stated that anti-Asian hate crimes surged 145 percent in 2020. When taking a look at the raw data, the number of crimes numerically increased from 49 to 120. While the increase is concerning and not insignificant, the high percentage value primarily serves to sensationalize the problem.

In addition to hate trackers are hashtags like #StopAAPIHate. On social media, this hashtag encompasses a wide variety of experiences, from microaggressions, to discussions of the Atlanta shooting, to the history of U.S. imperialism. 

What ultimately results from highly-active hashtags and misleading numbers is the perception of a crime wave against Asian Americans, Nopper explained. 

“Police forces benefit from the idea of a crime wave,” she said. “It helps give legitimacy to the idea that they’re needed.” It can even lead to more funding. 

So what do we do about our grievances? It’s a real, valid question, but difficult to answer. Nopper hopes for Asian American communities to move away from the “hate” framework, as it encourages people to only see racism through the language of crime. It also mobilizes communities around fear, Nopper said, instead of a shared vision for the future.

After a Q&A session with the audience, Nopper wrapped up with a discussion about the limits of mobilizing around feelings and emotional responses. 

“What do we do with our pain?” Nopper asked. “What do we do with our very real hurt, our very real pain, our very real anger, our very real rage?”

While grief, revenge, and similar feelings in the aftermath of a tragedy are valid, not everyone will feel the same way, Nopper said. 

“Our feelings and reactions don’t always have to be what we end up doing politically,” she noted. “What we do politically as a racial group isn’t just about us. If we’re demanding hate crime legislation, that affects everybody.”

--

Tamara Nopper’s full lecture can be viewed here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7MNPXHT0wM&ab_channel=AsianAmericanWriters%27Workshop