The long Western legacy of violence against Asian Americans

[Dill]

(03-16-2021, 04:25 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Yes and no.  They were targeted but their willingness to fight back, e.g. sit on the roof of their business with rifles, led to a lower rate of victimization.  The revisionist historians are now trying to down play that, big time, but I was here for it.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/how-we-rise/2021/03/11/why-the-trope-of-black-asian-conflict-in-the-face-of-anti-asian-violence-dismisses-solidarity/

The Trope of Black-Asian Conflict

These senseless acts of anti-Asian violence have finally garnered the national attention they deserve, but they have also invoked anti-Black sentiment and reignited the trope of Black-Asian conflict. Because some of the video-taped perpetrators appear to have been Black, some observers immediately reduced anti-Asian violence to Black-Asian conflict. This is not the first time that the trope has been weaponized. Black-Asian conflict—and Black-Korean conflict more specifically—became the popular frame of the LA riots in 1992.

The trope failed to capture the reality of Black-Korean relations three decades ago, and it fails to capture the reality of anti-Asian bias today. A recent study finds that in fact, Christian nationalism is the strongest predictor of xenophobic views of COVID-19, and the effect of Christian nationalism is greater among white respondents, compared to Black respondents. Moreover, Black Americans have also experienced high levels of racial discrimination since the pandemic began. Hence, not only does the frame of two minoritized groups in conflict ignore the role of white national populism, but it also absolves the history and systems of inequality that positioned them there.

As underlined, and expected, it's really about white supremacy people!  There isn't an eyerolling emoji of sufficient power to respond to this.  

Jennifer Lee and Tiffany Huang are sociologists, not historians.

The point of the article, as far as I could tell, was to counter some unspecified news portrayals of violence against Asians framed to suggest a renewal of Black-Korean tensions often portrayed in popular culture, like Spike Lee's film Do the Right Thing.

No one is disputing that Koreans may have been targeted during the LA riots and "fought back."

Jennifer Lee has evidently done a lot of fieldwork with Korean business owners in minority communities in New York and Philadelphia. She seems to think that violence and mutual blame is not a serious problem between Koreans and Blacks in the U.S. She also does not want Asians to start reflexively targeting Blacks because some may be among the perpetrators. 

Finally, the term she uses is "white national populism," not "white supremacy," though the latter may be driving some or much of the former, she identifies the aforesaid populism as likely a greater danger to Asian-American safety.

Is there a reason to suppose she is wrong suggest that Koreans and Blacks generally get along and that the more general sources of xenophobia pose the greater danger?