According to Stop AAIP Hate, insult and violence incidents towards Asian communities since the last March has reached 3,795 cases by February 2021, yet the government just started taking action recently through passing a bill called “The Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act” on April 14th (Edmondson, 2021). While it seems like this bill brings us closer to the solution of Anti-Asian attacks, by categorizing these violent cases as hate crimes raises quite some problems.
This bill aims to accelerate the investigation of hate crime cases related to Covid-19 by creating a new position at the Justice Department and expanding more channels for the public to report such crimes. However, defining hate crimes appears to be a real challenge. One of the main reasons is that it requires the authority, whom the crime is reported to, to not be a racist.
Take the recent mass shooting in Atlantic, Georgia as an example. Eight victims, including six Asian women, were shot to death in a massage parlor. The Georgia sheriff spokesman claimed that the gunman “has sex-addiction issues and wanted to eliminate the temptation”, then he said, “Yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did”.
Aside from the fact that six out of eight victims were Asian people, the gunman’s motivation indicates extreme racist fetish over Asian women, yet this case was not classified as hate crime. Later, the Internet disclosed that the Georgia sheriff spokesman has promoted shirts with words “COVID 19, IMPORTED VIRUS FROM CHY-NA on Facebook; in other words, the person who had the power to decide whether the case was a hate crime is veritably a racist.
Another problem is that stricter enforcement targeted to hate crime may worsen the problem they try to solve because socially marginalized people are aggressively and often arbitrarily policed. According to a racial justice attorney at Legal Aid, socially less privileged people are more likely to be accused of hate crimes. “I’ve rarely seen people who are more socially privileged be the ones accused of hate crimes, often what you end up seeing is people of color being accused of hate crimes” (Annieli, 2021).
More than ten assault cases of Asian victims were reported to the police in the month of February 2021, yet only one case had been prosecuted as a hate crime against Asian community this year: a Taiwanese person being charged with painting graffiti with anti-Chinese content. When race-related hate crimes cause more racial minorities to be punished, in the long-term it leads to more racial problems and likely to create more social unbalance.
The difficulty of prosecution is one other problem of hate crime. When it comes to anti-Asian assault, many cases were reported to be hate crimes based on the perpetrator’s verbal attack with racist words. However, the worst kind of attack is physical violence, which can be difficult to trace the motivation if the perpetrator doesn’t curse while attacking the victim. In order to categorize such a case as hate crime, the authority needs to greatly depend on an honest confession from the perpetrator.
Claudia Card, the philosopher, claims that hate crime laws are being used as a scapegoat for the society’s responsibility, “hate crime laws are popular because they allow the country to shirk responsibility for dismantling systems of oppression by more severely punishing only their most blatant and violent manifestations” (Annieli, 2021). Racism has been one of the country’s biggest, most severe social sickness, and by establishing hate crime, it appears that although the problem still exists, the government is taking action to solve it. However, harsher punishment leads to vengeance instead of justice.
Current criminal laws include crimes against every victim, hate crime laws turn existing crimes into harsher crimes based on the identity of the victim. Hate crime makes crimes against certain races, sexual orientation and gender more wicked and indicates that they should be punished more severely. It is unrealistic to depend on longer prison time and more severe enforcement to solve social problems like racism, homophobia and sexism as, according to what Briana Alongi wrote in Pace Review article, there is no reliable and substantial proof to support that hate crime refrain a perpetrator to hurt another person because of more severe punishment.
Anti-Asian violence is an epitome of the long-lasting racism problem of this country. Undoubtedly, it is extremely complicated to solve. A good start would be admitting that hate crime laws have very limited power in ending the recent attacks against Asian people and stop putting hope on a bill to solve the problem. Another good start might be ensuring that our authority is reliable and is at least able to distinguish and admit racism when it occurs.
Works Cited
Bokat-lindell, S. (2021, March 23). Are hate crime laws really the answer to anti-asian violence? Retrieved April 18, 2021, from https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/23/opinion/asian-hate-crimes.html?searchResultPosition=1
The fairness of hate crime laws. (n.d.). Retrieved April 18, 2021, from https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/03/07/are-hate-crime-laws-necessary/justice-not-vengeance-for-hate-crimes
Home. (2021, March 26). Retrieved April 18, 2021, from https://stopaapihate.org/
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