Asians Must Stop Comparing Our Issues to Black Lives Matter
Doing so only hurts both the Black and Asian communities
Last week, Laura Huang, an author and associate professor at Harvard Business School, addressed in a tweet the exponential rise in anti-Asian hate crimes over the past year. “I want to see how passionately people (incl other POC) will stand up for Asians,” she wrote. “Those of you who were so vocal w BLM, where are you on the 1900% increase in Asian-directed hate crimes?”
These hate crimes, such as the assault of a 64-year-old grandmother in San Jose, California, earlier this month and the murder of 84-year-old Vicha Ratanapakdee shortly before, are part of a wave of violence toward older Asian Americans that has made the past year ever more frightening and cast a dark shadow over the Lunar New Year at the end of last week. Huang’s remarks are just the latest from a growing number of prominent Asian voices to express frustration on social media over the crisis level of anti-Asian violence and how seldom it breaks through into mainstream discourse. But in Huang’s case, the tweet sparked more issues than it addressed.
Her tweet, according to her critics, exemplifies a tendency to contrast public responses to anti-Asian racism with public responses to anti-Blackness, as if to suggest people care only…
