[CW: hate crimes, racism, anti-Blackness, police violence, assault, mass shootings]
As violence against Asian Americans continued to convulse our cities and reverberate worldwide in early 2021, our mainstream media stopped briefly to note one newsworthy moment that then quickly fell off our collective radar. Swept aside by the Atlanta spa shootings just over a month later, the incident was largely forgotten and rarely resurfaces today. But it has kept me up at night ever since.
On Jan. 31, 2021, a 91-year-old East Asian American man was brutally attacked in Oakland’s Chinatown. It was just one of a slew of headlines we Asian Americans had seen multiply across our screens, watering the venomous seedlings of fear taking root in our minds as our parents and elders begged us to stay safe, and we likewise begged them not to go out. But this time, there was one crucial difference.
Frustrated by the slow police response to the Oakland assault, Daniel Dae Kim and Daniel Wu, two prominent East Asian actors who embody modern Asian American representation on the big and small screen, announced a reward of $25,000 for information leading to the arrest of the perpetrator of the assault. Their social media posts featured a video of the incident: pixelated closed-circuit footage cut for maximum shock value. Within less than two weeks, Yahya Muslim, the 28-year-old Black man seen in the video, was arrested. A happy ending, it would seem.
But at what cost?
Drifting Further From Our Allies of Color
While many Asian Americans rejoiced at this seeming success of justice — and many others notably did not — Kim’s and Wu’s posts didn’t just attract tens of thousands of likes; they also opened the floodgates to thousands of comments criticizing the Black Lives Matter movement and spewing racist hate. This social media frenzy was egged on by mainstream media outlets eager to cover new angles on anti-Asian violence, an issue they still understand so poorly.
The result was…
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