Of hate, crimes and hate crimes: Anti-Asian violence is not quite what city pols want it to be

Flipping through the paper on Friday, you could read about:

A young Asian man who was at the Home Depot in East New York when a man brandished a two-by-four and asked his girlfriend, “Why you with that little d—k Asian n----r?” while telling him, “I’ll cut you, you f-----g Asian…Don’t call anyone. I’m a Blood. I’ll shoot you.”

A young Asian woman in Manhattan’s Chinatown eating ice cream outside while speaking Mandarin with a friend when she was slapped by a woman screaming, “Go back to your country!”

A middle-aged Asian man waiting for a train on the Upper West Side when a man yelled, “If you’re not Bruce Lee, then f—k off,” and hit him.

And in Brooklyn, an elderly Asian man shopping for groceries when he was shoved to the ground without warning by a man who had previously shoved one Asian woman to the ground and pinned another to a storefront and grabbed her hair as he tried to punch her in the face.

The subway attacker, who remained in the station and was promptly arrested, had been released last month after being charged with sexual abuse for allegedly touching a 68-year-old Asian woman’s leg. The Brooklyn attacker is “not racist” but off his meds and “on Pluto,” according to his siblings. The other two are still at large as I write this but it’s a safe bet that they’re also mentally ill, violently anti-social or both.

If you listen to Mayor de Blasio or most of the politicians competing to replace him, you’d get the idea that the only thing we need to stop these attacks is to reject Donald Trump. And that the police are, if anything, part of the problem.

After spa workers were massacred in Atlanta last month, I wrote about the double consciousness W.E.B. DuBois described more than a century ago and that East Asians are feeling now, “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others (looking) on in amused contempt and pity.”

Amid a wave of attacks targeting Orthodox Jews last year, I wrote about the doublethink from the city’s supposedly progressive pols who like to march against hate and Trump while pretending the Brooklyn Bridge in 2021 is the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965.

If they’re not offering answers to profound and difficult questions about treating people with mental illness and violent criminal records with human decency while also keeping everyone else here reasonably safe, then railing against white supremacy isn’t about dismantling systems of oppression so much as it is about dodging tough questions.

Centuries of de jure and de facto racism help account for animosities between groups fighting for a piece of the pie, but the idea that we can’t do anything about, say, people who happen to be Black attacking Jews or Asians in New York City until we eliminate hate in America is just a fancy way of saying u00af\_(u30c4)_/u00af. Shrug!

Refusing to acknowledge that, even out of real fears about ushering in more decades of destructive dragnet policing of Black neighborhoods, means ceding an obvious truth to the people who want to do exactly that.

As it happens, I got to ask Controller Scott Stringer on my FAQ.NYC podcast last week about anti-Asian violence here and what the police, in particular, should be doing about it. He replied (at about the 22 minute mark) that “Donald Trump and the white supremacists and their hateful rhetoric have contributed to these attacks” and then pivoted to how many people at Rikers have mental health issues while saying nothing about the NYPD except that “rather than a top-down police approach, let’s actually engage with Asian-American stakeholders.”

It’s not a coincidence that the two top candidates in the polls so far, Andrew Yang and Eric Adams, are the only leading ones talking about policing as anything more than a threat in its own right to public safety.

The rise in anti-Asian hate crimes — to 33 through March this year from 11 through March last year, according to the NYPD’s undoubtedly low official count — has coincided with a vast increase in gun violence over the pandemic year that the mayor and the wannabe mayors haven’t said much about. Gov. Cuomo talks about it a lot lately, but mostly just to trash de Blasio’s New York.

And the police have talked about it for so long that they’ve become Chicken Littles, sort of like the rich people who are always just one expense away from leaving the city and are still here, they’ve lost much of their credibility.

But finally, the progressives insisting anti-Asian violence here comes from people responding months later to Trump’s “China virus” rhetoric are doing white supremacists’ work for them by making those weaklings appear as ubiquitous and dangerous as they dream of being.

The more doubletalk we hear from pols, the more New Yorkers are going to be forced into double consciousnesses.

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