Hate-Crime Laws Are Not the Answer to Anti-Asian Violence, Abolition Is – Teen Vogue

Anti-Asian violence has taken hold of national attention this spring with six Asian women among the lives lost to a string of shootings in Atlanta and four members of the Sikh community among the lives lost to another shooting in Indianapolis. Additionally, brutal attacks against East Asian and Southeast Asian elders have been carried out across the country. It remains unclear when or if these attacks will cease.

In response to this surge in violence, the Asian American community and its allies have organized around the rallying cry and hashtag #StopAsianHate. While this slogan has done important work to draw attention to anti-Asian violence and to guard against alternative hashtags like #AsianLivesMatter, which would problematically appropriate the work of Black movements, the word hate misdiagnoses the problem Asian American communities are facing.

The hate frame locates racism in the extreme emotional responses of individuals, which obscures the fact that racism is a structural problem. This is why, in the immediate aftermath of the Atlanta shooting, the national conversation became about whether the shooters actions were racially motivated when it should have been about the white supremacist structures of racial inequality and the feeling that conspired to produce both the assault and the assailant.

The second risk of #StopAsianHate is that the hashtag prescribes a solution that isnt one: hate-crimes legislation. And, indeed, the Senate recently passed, by a vote of 941, the COVID-19 Hate-Crimes Act, introduced by Hawaii Senator Mazie K. Hirono and New York Representative Grace Meng. The legislation will enhance law enforcement responses to anti-Asian attacks in light of COVID-19 and create a position at the Department of Justice to facilitate the expedited review of such cases. This should give us pause.

Many believe that treating acts of violence as hate crimes can deter people from enacting bias-based harm, but there is no conclusive evidence that it does. Hate-crime laws merely attach additional penalties to already criminalized acts assault, harassment, vandalism, murder. By definition, they are reactionary in that they are dispensed only after harm has already been done.

By seeking justice through a hate-crimes framework, Asian Americans risk putting themselves and other marginalized communities, especially Black communities, at greater risk of violence not from street assailants or mass shooters, but from the carceral state. And, as the legal scholar, trans activist writer, and teacher Dean Spade argues, Hate-crime laws strengthen and legitimize the criminal-punishment system, a system that targets the very people these laws are supposedly passed to protect. Movements for abolition through the Black-led uprisings that swept the nation after the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor have forcefully forwarded the claim that safety, accountability, and justice cannot be attained with the help of police, prosecutors, and prisons. Asian Americans must not forget this lesson. More recently, the police killings of Christian Hall and Angelo Quinto are reminders that the violence of the criminal legal system is also anti-Asian violence.

Rather than pouring more resources into criminalization, Asian Americans should instead push for more investment in life-affirming, grassroots services, and organizations dedicated to serving the Asian Americans who are most vulnerable to interpersonal and structural violence. What good are the billions of dollars spent on policing and incarceration when there is no state support for the families of victims? The families of the Atlanta shooting victims, for example, received no governmental assistance and instead resorted to crowdfunding to pay for health care, funeral expenses, and lost income. In a different attack, 83-year-old Asian grandmother Nancy Toh was knocked unconscious and bleeding profusely when she regained consciousness. Toh reported that she was afraid to go to the hospital because she could not afford medical care. Hate-crimes laws cannot meet these needs because they dont even try.

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Hate-Crime Laws Are Not the Answer to Anti-Asian Violence, Abolition Is - Teen Vogue