Because it's a very nice narrative to try and stoke racial divides to go "See see the white people just want to kill anyone different to them" which leads idiots to go "Well we better get in first" or worse "I felt scared so reacted" which then gets used to stoke divides further.
To be fair, I don't think the more controversial takes on this event are a product of people trying to stoke racial tensions. I think this is very much still just downstream of irrational Trump hatred, and actual racism to an extent. There's a year of context leading up to this moment that you have to understand to make sense of certain reactions.
Let's start with this:
As feared, hate crimes against Asian Americans rose sharply during the pandemic. To be clear up front, I don't think that in itself is an irrational thing to worry about. A pandemic emerges from China, irrational people might avoid or attack Chinese Americans as a consequence, that's a reasonable thing to worry about. That's not the framing though. "They have heard the messages around China as the cause of the virus, and then they target somebody because they perceive that person to be from that place... The recent trend of anti-Asian American hate crimes has been fueled by political rhetoric during the pandemic, including labeling of COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus” or “Kung-flu.”
This is where Trump comes in: they skip straight past the "virus from China fuels resentment of people from China" to "people talking about it coming from China are the root cause". But like, it came from China, everyone knows it, why is talking about that the real issue? Because Trump. It was the Chinese virus for months. The news called it that, the politicians called it that, the original subreddit to talk about it was r/chinavirus. None of that was to be racist or xenophobic, racists and xenophobes aren't typically worried about epidemics in foreign countries, and it was an epidemic in China. It's not an appropriate term now that it's a global epidemic, but that's a change in circumstances. The other thing that changed is Trump said it. And the moment Trump said it, it became the blame-Trump game. On March 18th,
Trump was defending his use of the phrase "Chinese virus". On March 19th, Asian-American advocacy groups
opened a call line for reporting anti-Asian harassment during the pandemic. That's not coincidence. I'm not saying it's a conspiracy, just that one day the news was predicting Trump would cause a rise in hate crimes, and the next day people started trying to collect evidence of it.
Flipping back to the first link, the retrospective on the rise in hate crimes, that piece did the rounds very recently. Those people initially studying and reporting the increase in anti-Asian crimes were good and responsible. Even if they blamed political rhetoric, even if they likely believed in their hearts that Trump was to blame, they didn't say that. But unfortunately, discussions on the internet are rarely based off of the source material, news sites weren't inclined to be as responsible, and there is no shortage of people willing to say things like
"I think the political leadership under Trump really put a target on the backs of people perceived to be Chinese. It's Sinophobia." So now we have first two voices in the conversation: the objective reporting and the Trump-blamers.
Then enters the third voice: the backlashers. This group includes loyal Trumpers defending his name, media skeptics who want to doubt whatever is being said, and a handful of people who actually look through the source materials. The thing they all have in common is they're not blaming Trump or white supremacy. If you dig into the sources, they don't blame Trump. Even the ones blaming politics, even the ones I believe set out initially to blame Trump, they don't blame Trump like the media did. Why? Because it's runs counter to the facts. The only mention of Trump reported from that call line is someone saying "Well, go die in Wuhan, China, the origin of the
coronavirus and take Trump with you! B*TCH!” One of their examples of hatred was a college professor from the DC suburbs saying "China Virus" online. And like, they also had people spit at in Texas and other events from Trump country, but the rational response to reading that report is that hatred knows no political boundaries. If you dig into the crime statistics showing the increase in hate crimes, you find most of that increase is from New York, California, or other Democratic strongholds. Perfectly reasonable people look at that and say "how can you blame Trump's rhetoric for crimes committed by people who hate him?" More problematically though, if you dig into the list of hate crimes, you find a lot of the perpetrators are black.
Enter voice number 4: the actual racists. There are, in fact, horrible horrible racists on the internet who reveled in the idea that black people were the problem, and brought it up at every opportunity. The extra problem is that people without a dog in the fight often leave a debate behind once they feel they have a good understanding of the issue, so the more time that passed, the more the arguments were just group 2 using hate crimes to push their attack politics and group 4 using statistics to push their racism. There was a two week space between these articles about anti-Asian crime and the shooting, and by the days immediately preceding the shooting, places like twitter and reddit were full of conversations that basically went as such:
"Activist": "F Trump and White Supremacists for attacking Asian Americans like this!"
Racist: "The crimes are all committed by black people though."
"Activist": "You're a racist"
Racist: "no u"
Etc.
And then this tragedy happens. I don't have any reason to believe the internet arguments have any bearing on the shooting, I'm only trying to explain people's reactions to the event. Because the way people have reacted to a mass shooting doesn't make sense in a vacuum. It doesn't make sense that people would declare him a white supremacists within hours and seemingly celebrate the event. It doesn't make sense that people would be so ready to embrace a killer's claim that sex addiction made them do it. Those aren't how people act in a vacuum. That is how people act when they had already been having the same argument for 2 weeks. When you start posting headlines like
"Shooting result of Trump's rhetoric, you pull back in all the people who left the argument earlier. The people who couldn't blame Trump with the information they had, and the Trump defenders who know the data counters that narrative, all the reasonable people are pulled back into the fight, but it's already reached a point where only extreme positions remain, and suddenly reasonable people find themselves defending the indefensible.
So like, you look at some people's takes on this and wonder "how the hell did that person reach that conclusion", and I think the explanation is that they were just pulled into battle lines dominated by bad actors that have been forming for weeks or months prior to the shooting.
www.bbc.com
