The Hate-Crime Distraction: Activists’ insistence that whites commit most anti-Asian hate crimes is a transparent attempt to obscure.

Even the claim that whites commit most anti-Asian hate crimes is based on questionable statistics. The main source that covers actual hate crimes is a 2021 study published in the American Journal of Criminal Justice by Yan Zhang, Lening Zhang, and Francis Benton entitled “Hate Crimes against Asian Americans.” This study covers incidents from 1992–2014 and includes the figure that white people commit 74.5 percent of violent anti-Asian hate crimes. However, Zhang et al. excluded Asian-on-Asian incidents, left out incidents where the perpetrator’s race was unknown, and lumped together all non-white perpetrators. Meantime, the authors note that “hate crimes against Asian Americans are more likely than hate crimes against either African Americans or Hispanics to be committed by non-White offenders.” (Proximity doesn’t seem to explain the disparity: my own analysis—using newer hate-crime data and comparing the perpetrators with the “likely neighbors” of a given Asian-American—finds that whites were about 28 percent more likely, and blacks about 255 percent more likely, to attack Asians than neighborhood demographics might predict.)

Yet a difficulty remains in these analyses. The Zhang study yielded 329 anti-Asian hate crimes over a span of 23 years. My analysis returned 713 incidents over 30 years (fewer than 24 per year). If these numbers seem low, it is because almost no violent crimes get designated as hate crimes. Again, no meaningful conclusions can be drawn from so few reported incidents. A linguistic trick—interpreting “anti-Asian” in the narrowest legal sense of the term—enabled the pivot from violent crimes to hate crimes.

The above studies ignore almost all violent crimes, often in favor of nonviolent behaviors like tweets or shunning. Because the hate-crime designation is rare, and fewer than 14 percent of local jurisdictions reported even a single hate crime for inclusion in the FBI database, datasets are too small and incomplete to draw meaningful conclusions.

A more pertinent question would be: “Who is responsible for the greatest proportion of violent crimes against Asians?” The Criminal Victimization report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics provides a robust dataset, with over 180,000 violent attacks on Asians in 2018.

The data indicate just how misleading the narrative of white-on-Asian violence really is. While black perpetrators account for 27.5 percent of violent attacks against Asians, Asians commit less than 0.1 percent of violent attacks against blacks, indicating little role for proximity. Most violent attacks against individuals of a particular racial group are committed by other members of that group—except for Asians, where a plurality is committed by blacks. In fact, blacks are responsible for 305 percent more violent crime against Asians than neighborhood demographics would predict, while whites and Hispanics commit significantly fewer attacks against Asians than would be expected.