The long Western legacy of violence against Asian Americans

[Dill]

(03-20-2021, 09:21 AM)hollodero Wrote: I think it has to do with hate, and I think that has not just as much to do with Christian culture, or white Christian culture. "Incel", I don't kow about them. I would not put every lonely man into this group, and I would not blame this group for a man killing 8 people.

Three points on this: 

1. "Hate" is an impossibly vague term. But we hear it all the time. Last night I was listening to commentators and interviews talk of "stopping the hate." It's like asking "What causes COVID-19? How do we stop the spread?" and answering "It's all caused by 'disease.' Stop the disease."  So sure, it has to do with hate, but we need to go further, and as with the fight against COVID, research the variants, their causes, vectors of dissemination. 

2. Hope I didn't give you the impression that "incel" is the catch-all label for any lonely man. No. Like Bengals fans, they are a group with a self-identified interest who share their views online in their own "code." E.g., you and I would be "Chads" to them.  So if some guy were to pop up in this forum saying he had trouble dating women, no responsible person would call him "incel." It's not a catchall term like "bachelor" or "homeowner."  If I hear someone say "I love football," I don't respond "Ok, that guy's a Bengals fan." 

3. I don't know that the Atlanta shooter has any ties to the incel movement at all, that he spends time on line, etc. In any case, I'm not sure I would even say incel was the cause when incels do kill people, like those cited in my earlier post. Those people had serious problems before they identified as "incel."  I only brought up the incel movement to explain why, as Dino says, there is a stereotype of frustrated white males who kill women, but so far as I know, none of frustrated black males who commit this kind of crime. (Not saying they can't; would that be "racist"? Or is it racist to note that Americans of African descent can commit every category of crime too?)

(03-20-2021, 09:21 AM)hollodero Wrote: But I am not intending on doing social analysis now. I'm not Asian, I don't run the numbers on that. I just always wondered how these things work without it anyway, when which assumption is ok and when it is not.
If there's a vehicle driving in a crowd, we shall never jump to the conclusion it was an islamic terror attack. Although it always is. The one time it was not, facebook was full of people calling anyone who dared to assume it was should be ashamed to the bone. How could you jump the gun like that. Bad bad people.
There's a famous turkish soccer player who campaigned for Erdogan, that autocrat. But quite some people claimed he is not to blame, the western failure in integrating people is. Bad western people, look what you made this broken dude do. Sure.
On the same hand, I can say about Germans whatever I want. Or Americans for that matter. They can't find themselves on the map, right, yeah ha, so uneducated, no one has a problem with that here. And they're fat and stupid and overly nationalistic and whatnot. You can't say these things about Turkish people. It would be "dangerous right wing talk".

As to the first, the pattern of "when which" is clearer when we look to the history of who has dominated whom.  
That's why we can all say about Germans whatever we want. Things might be different if you guys* had lost Kahlenberg and then spent 200 years winning independence from your Turkish oppressors.  As it is, Turks entered the Germanosphere in the 60s as needed labor, and have remained "on site" in significant numbers and in a socially dominated position ever since, and fueling traditional xenophobia there. Your neighbors get to decide whether they are good and responsible enough to join NATO. And you get a vote on whether they can join the EU, or stay in it.

I have many times listened to your Germanophone northern brothers complain about Amis and Turks, and I never detected racism against white Americans in the former; against the Turks it was complaints about an inferior and foreign culture, inflected with racism. I can imagine what some are saying now about the influx of Syrians.

I suppose some Americans get huffy if you criticize them. I don't, at least not when the criticism is justified. (Two years ago, I had a discussion with a local student who was about to graduate with a degree in political science.  He could not point out Mexico on a map of North and Central America.)

Don't know which soccer player you refer to, or his circumstances. Did he play for a European team and experience racism, as non-Europeans often do?  Or are you just trying to evade your shared responsibility for turning him, Hollo! 

I'm going to finish this in separate post, so it doesn't get too long.

*Not "you Germans" but "you Viennese."**
**With a little help from your Polish friends. A lot of help, really.