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Students weigh in on the recent controversy evoked by media coverage of a possible increase in crime by African-Americans against the Asian community.
Increase cultural understanding
By Nancy Wu
Stereotypically, Asians are soft-spoken and obedient, which often gives the impression that they are vulnerable victims. However, after recent random assaults in San Francisco on Asian-Americans, the Asian community came together to protest in front of City Hall on May 4th.
It seems that because of this perceived vulnerability, Asian-Americans have become victims of violent attacks by African-Americans. The lack of understanding between African-Americans and Asian-Americans is the result of a language barrier and cultural misunderstandings, which can make the immigrant population appear as easy targets.
The hesitation of some victims to report the crimes further reinforces the stereotype of soft-spoken Asian. Many Asian-American victims do not go to the police out of fear of an inability to bridge the language gap and fear of being misunderstood, resulting in an unpunished assailant. According to C.W. Nevius, a reporter of the San Francisco Chronicle, some Asian-Americans are ashamed to report the crimes inflicted upon them. Mrs. Cheng, a 52-year-old woman who was thrown off a Muni platform by a 15-year-old African-American teenage boy, said in Nevius’s article, “I feel ashamed that this horrible bad luck has happened to me.” Although she suffered injuries that left her with missing teeth and a limp, Mrs. Cheng does not want retribution against the perpetrator for fear of retaliation. Her decision reinforces the image of an un-rebellious Asian-American community. This self-perpetuating problem should be solved. The city should instigate a more effective program for translators for Asian-Americans to enable them to raise issues about safety and to give victims the opportunity to explain their situation clearly.
The San Francisco Police Department plans to place 32 police officers at transit stops around the Visitacion Valley and Bayview District, but this will not alleviate the tension or increase cultural understanding. The added police officers will only monitor crime scenes, and will not in any way bring the Asian-American and African-American communities together.
Another major factor in the misunderstanding between the two groups starts in the schools — the education of the younger generation now includes segregation in the San Francisco Unified School District. The lack of diversity at schools has obviously affected some students’ mindset on racial issues since the assailants of recent assaults on Asian-Americans were local African-American teens. The public schools are not purposely segregated, but because most students are allotted into each school based on their neighborhoods, some SFUSD schools are not diverse enough. A Bayview District School, KIPP Bayview Academy, has a total student population of 67.3% African-Americans compared to the 2.8% of Asian-Americans students. Through un-diversified schools, students are not able to learn the aspects of different cultures through interacting with students of different races. The district should host city-wide events to that help students expand their cross-cultural understanding.
The May protest served as encouragement for victimized Asian-Americans to report crimes, but the city should work with minority communities in the city and the school district to increase communication and harmony between ethnic groups.
Stop incidents from escalating
By Sean Lee
Some in the Asian community of the Bay Area argue that the recent assaults involving African-Americans attacking Asian-Americans were racially motivated. I believe that regardless of what caused the violence, controlling the interracial community’s urge to respond with hostility is of greater importance.
Whether this string of attacks was racially charged is questionable and it would be reckless to conclude that the general population of Asian-Americans is a specific target of African-American violence based on these few incidents. To attempt to prove that there is a racial correlation is futile, because these attacks were isolated incidents with no relation to each other. Rather, it behooves the Asian community to respond to these crimes with careful forethought.
Passionate feelings of fear, frustration or anger are extremely difficult to suppress, especially if a person feels that his or her people are targets of malicious victimization. However, both individuals and the Bay Area’s interracial community will benefit when they resist the impulse to react with heated words.
Since Oakland and the greater Bay Area have always been very ethnically diverse, occasional bouts of conflicts due to racial tension should not be surprising. However, the entire interracial community should not allow the fevered emotions and misguided speculation that result from these isolated incidents to escalate into a full-on race conflict between the different ethnic niches of the Bay Area.
We are all reminded of the 1992 Los Angeles race riots that resulted from mounting tensions between the Asian-American, African American and Hispanic communities who shared neighborhoods. Fortunately, the Bay Area has not experienced a similar catastrophic event fueled by racial tension. We do not want the ill will evoked by the recent string of crimes to be the first step towards such an outcome. Simply acknowledging the danger of setting our progress in race relations backwards may constitute a step forward, but it is not enough.
Deliberation over whether the attacks were racially motivated is ultimately futile. Instead, we must rise above this counter-intuitive thought process, and include all stakeholders in a dialogue to reach a new level of understanding. For the interracial community, the action of not retaliating will make this first step possible. Such a step will help prevent further racial conflict and spur the possibility of rebuilding a strong community identity.
Crimes originate in opportunity
By Joe Fiorello
Many people believe that two details make the killing of Tian Sheng Yu, a 59-year-old Chinese man, such a prominent issue: Yu was attacked in broad daylight in Oakland’s bustling business district. More importantly, his attackers were black. Many peoplehave reacted loudly to this event, compounded by the recent string of attacks on Muni’s T-Third Street train route, and label them black-on-Asian crime. Undoubtedly, these are all deplorable acts; all forms of violence are wrong and should be stopped. However, when people sum up all these recent events and label them as an alarming increase in black-on-Asian crime, they wrongfully blame the entire African-American community for the actions of a handful of dangerous youths.
The assailants behind Sheng Yu’s brutal death and those responsible for the three recent attacks on Muni’s T-line all share one common trait, and it is not the presumption that they are all black. Most of the attackers have yet to be racially identified, as reported by both The Examiner and KTVU, but every suspect has been a teenager. The two men charged for Sheng Yu’s beating and death are both 18-year-olds. To continue this trend, a 15-year-old suspect been charged for violently throwing a 57-year-old woman off a Muni platform. The Chronicle similarly informs us that in the case of Huan Chen, an 83-year-old Asian man, young people assaulted him from behind and left laughing.
It is easy for all of us to point fingers when we are angry, but blaming the entire African-American community is reprehensible. Many African-Americans wish no crime upon Asians. According to KTVU News, the people who quickly helped the Asian woman who was thrown off a Muni platform on March 22 included African-Americans. When viewed in a larger perspective, these attacks do not indicate a new black-on-Asian crime trend, but are recent incidents in youth crime greatly publicized by media.
Since black-on-Asian crime only accounts for a small portion of all violence in the Bay Area, maybe race is not as big a factor as simple opportunity. Contributor to New America Media, Amanze Emenike, who himself used to rob Asians and Latinos explained that he was taught to target these immigrant groups because they usually did not have extended family relations that would later seek him for revenge. As reported by The New York Times, Reverend Cecil Williams of Glide Memorial Church explains that “one [ethnic] group may emerge because they’ve got greater population and another group feels pushed out — feels like they don’t have any voice anymore.” Although tension may exist between some individual African-Americans and Asians, these crimes simply are not black-on-Asian crimes.
When we look at these seemingly racist attacks and contrast them with all Bay Area crime, we see the same problem. Youth in poverty-stricken neighborhoods, frustrated by their own stressful situations, seek easy targets as outlets for their anger. Asian citizens make easy targets, as first generation Asian-Americans often do not speak English well. Additionally, since Asians own stores in black neighborhoods and generally hold higher-paying jobs than African-Americans, they also make accessible targets that can be counted on to have cash. All of a sudden these incidents do not seem racially motivated, but motivated by simple opportunity.
African-Americans need voice
By Anthony Clay
The recent violence on Asian-Americans in San Francisco’s Bayview District is a travesty. And no one in his or her right mind would dare imply that the attack and death of Sheng Yu in Oakland was anything other than tragic. However, the current media spike covering the recent Asian-American victims in the Bayview District is another example of the juxtaposition between the value of a model minority to American society versus an African-American to American society.
African-Americans make up only seven percent of the population while Asian-Americans make up thirty, but according to sfgate.com, despite the smaller number of people, the African-American victim rate in San Francisco is still two percentage points higher than that of the Asian-American victim rate. Black-on-black crime and police-on-black crime are daily occurrences in the Bayview and yet, The Chronicle deems these events too common, or possibly unimportant, to cover in its paper.
This is not an abstract controversy to me. On April 25, a friend and I were driving through the Haight District where we saw three young black men attack a black youth behind the McDonalds located on Haight and Stanyan. The bloodied younger man was lying on the ground when people rushed over to the scene, including my friend and I. Someone called the police, who came forty minutes later, and the rest of us were left to wait and watch helplessly as this young man nearly bled to death. The next morning I woke up at 6 a.m. and quickly checked The Chronicle and The Examiner to see if there had been any coverage of the incident – neither had anything about it.
This incident was another example of a recurring theme. This lack of coverage compared to the recent coverage of Yu’s tragedy, ten articles in a week, says two things: one, the protection and safety of the stereotypically law-abiding Asian-American population is more important than that of the African-American population, stereotypically seen as unruly, uneducated and dissenting. And two, the mainstream media and city government considers it more important for San Francisco citizens to be made aware that Asian-Americans have been involved in a couple of recent isolated incidents of violence than the reality that African-Americans are also victims, not solely perpetrators, of similar incidents daily. Disregard the fact that one out of every five African-Americans in San Francisco will fall victim to some kind of violent crime, according to sfgate.com, and over-publicize the fear that the model minority is in danger. The response from many African-Americans, led by Bayview spokeswoman Kimberly Pittman during a May 11 press conference dealing with the Asian-American victim rate, says it all: “Where were you when we were the victims?”
But we cannot place all the blame on The Chronicle for the lack of concern for the Black community. African-Americans, including myself, have been too satisfied with pointing the finger at the people we hold responsible for our economic and social troubles instead of taking action to spread awareness of the crime and lack of resources that are in our neighborhoods. On May 4, politicians listened to voices from the Asian-American community about the recent violence in the Bayview. These same politicians have turned a deaf ear to the African-American concerns in the Bayview District – but we will not be unheard. The African-American population needs to organize rallies, hand out tabloids that cite recent crime-rate and victim-rate statistics, call town meetings — anything to spread awareness of the rising African-American victim rate to the people of San Francisco and our own community.
Awareness is the start; however, unity is the key. The discrepancy between the victim rates of African-Americans and Asian-Americans is simply a discrepancy. Tensions between the Black community and the Asian community are completely unnecessary. Energy should be harnessed to solve the real question facing both of our communities: what are we going to do to change these statistics in both our victimized populations?
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