Rather unusually, Corky Lee was the New York–based documentarian of a movement typically associated with California. He does not seem to have photographed its most famous defeat: the expulsion of elderly Filipino men from San Francisco’s International Hotel. This eviction was a counterintuitive but maybe more illuminating precursor to our moment of anti-homeless violence. Lee’s work often showed Asian Americans coming together to defend themselves against sudden eruptions of violence, as we saw in Detroit. I think of these moments as ascription crises, flashpoints where one’s racialization becomes abruptly redefined by external violence. To paraphrase Eric Williams, these attacks did not necessarily happen because of race. Rather, they create race. It is in these moments that “Asian American identity” is invented.
This new sense of being “Asian American” enveloped both the largely impoverished victims and the often more middle-class Asians who watched the violence play out on social media. During the onset of Anti-Asian Hate, progressives blamed the attacks on white supremacy and traced the violence back to the burgeoning cold war against China, thanks to Trump’s references to Covid-19 as the “China virus” and “kung flu.” But what, as conservatives inevitably asked, did it mean that some attackers were people of color? Or that they didn’t always seem ostentatiously racially motivated? This was not quite true. Some attacks were terrifying performances of xenophobia. Jose Gomez III stabbed a man and his son at a Texas Sam’s Club while screaming “Get out of America!” In New York, Tammel Esco called a woman an “Asian bitch” and punched her 125 times. In Bloomington, Indiana, a woman named Billie Davis stabbed a teenager for “being Chinese,” saying “it would be one less person to blow up our country.” But these last two incidences happened long after the idea of “Anti-Asian Hate” was first articulated, and the men who threatened Vicha Ratanapakdee, Xiao Zhen Xie and many of the other victims we saw in viral videos did not announce their prejudices. What did it mean if, in the early days of the attacks, as Esther Wang writes, many Asian Americans “began referring to any attack on an Asian person as a hate crime”? While the origins and motivations of terrible acts can sometimes be unknowable, perhaps we can resolve these contradictions if we identify “Anti-Asian hate” as a highly situated uptick in violence among the poorest of the poor, a conflict that happened to overlap with Trump-inspired prejudice against all classes of Asian Americans. This latter phenomenon was different: only a tiny fraction of the incidences documented by Stop AAPI Hate involved physical conflict.
While we’ve understood these attacks through the binary of racist attacker against Asian victim, another useful prism might be that of property owner versus the unhoused. Much of the footage of Asians under assault, as Jane Hu has written, was not taken by humans. Instead, it came from CCTV and surveillance cameras, photographic sentries installed to protect real estate. In New York, during the George Floyd protests, Chinese conservatives organized rallies in Flushing to proclaim their support of the NYPD and demand the defense of their property and shops. “Unlike the white/fascist pro-police marches that we’ve seen throughout the country,” writes organizer Kate Zen of Red Canary Song, “Chinese immigrants genuinely feel like they are the victim of criminal activity.” But City councilmember Peter Koo put it more baldly when he said, “Business Lives Matter.” In California, Chinese Americans spearheaded a right-wing campaign that successfully recalled abolitionist district attorney Chesa Boudin. If you actually listen to what the recall supporters said, you will see that many complained less about any direct encounters with violent crime than about an unease related to the presence of the homeless.