None dare say its name
/There’s an unspoken reason that blacks attack Asians
Woom Sing Tse arrived in America from communist China almost 50 years ago with $100 to his name and worked his way up to owning a successful restaurant. On Wednesday, a 23-year-old Black career criminal executed him on Chicago’s streets. Maybe a rival paid for this hit or maybe this was yet another example of the Black community’s incredible hostility to Asians.
The core story is awful:
A Chicago man who loved ones said was the “epitome” of the American dream was shot dead while walking to buy a newspaper a block from his home Tuesday.
Woom Sing Tse, 71, had just finished eating lunch with his wife at their Chinatown home, when he was executed by a man who pulled up in a silver car as he walked to his local store, according to WGN.
Surveillance video obtained by the station showed the gunman opening fire from inside the car. The driver then got out of the car to fire another shot at Tse as he laid on the ground, the footage showed.
The suspect, identified as Alphonso Joyner, 23, was later arrested, and charged with first-degree murder, CBS Chicago reported.
Joyner had previously been arrested four times, including two gun charges, one of which he had pleaded guilty to, the station said. No motive for the ghastly attack was reported.
This is not the first Black-on-Asian attack to show up in the news. We read regularly about Blacks attacking Asians, whether it’s stories about beating them up, stabbing them, or shooting them. Back in August, the FBI reported that hate crimes against Asians had risen by 70% over the past year. The report does not mention that it’s mostly Blacks who are committing these crimes.
At the most primitive level, the anti-Asian crimes increased because ill-educated people, when hearing that the Wuhan flu originated in communist China, decided to make their displeasure known by attacking people who had escaped from communist China. This simplistic thinking is common in marginalized communities—and marginalized often means Black.
At a secondary level, Blacks have for decades competed with Asians for resources in poor neighborhoods. In San Francisco, as Asians poured in from the 1960s through the 1980s, they moved into the Tenderloin and Bayview Districts, both of which had long been Black redoubts. Just as happened when Puerto Ricans started moving into historically Black districts, there was an uptick in Black violence against the interlopers, who were squeezing them out of rental property and entry-level jobs.
Both of those are acknowledged reasons for Black on Asian violence. But there’s another reason that few people like to talk about: Asians go from ghetto to suburbs in one generation and, often, from suburbs to chi-chi upper-class communities in just one or two generations. If you think about the fact that Asians came to America broke, speaking no English, and often facing substantial prejudice, their success puts the lie to Black claims that there’s no way Blacks can achieve success in a country as racist as America.
California, for example, a state with a huge Asian population, long had the Asian equivalent of Jim Crow laws. This article lists law after law, riot after riot, and court decision after court decision, all aimed at ridding California of what was then called the “Yellow Peril.” Democrats imprisoned thousands of them during WWII. Even in 1967, Hollywood produced a comic movie, Thoroughly Modern Millie, that showed Asians engaged in sex trafficking. In many ways, Asians experienced every bit as much discrimination as Blacks.
Additionally, Asians, unlike Blacks with deep roots in America, but like Mr. Tse, arrived here relatively recently, broke, and unable to speak English. In that regard, one might say that Blacks have been better positioned for success.
The real difference between the two groups is simple: Education. Asians revere it. When I attended San Francisco's Lowell High School that requires an exam to enter, Asian students whom we called “FOBs,” or “fresh off the boats,” within a year or two were pulling higher grades than any native-born California kids. Just look at this chart at the left-wing Brookings website showing the homework difference between the races.
Meanwhile, as John McWhorter detailed in his superb Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America, educational attainments are too often denigrated in Black America as something that is “White.” Although McWhorter first wrote the book some years ago, nothing has changed.
Sadly, rather than seeing Asian behavior as something to emulate to achieve Asian success rates, too many Blacks see Asians as a group that needs to be destroyed, perhaps because they put the lie to Black narratives about generational failure in America.