Violence against black and Asian people is sadly not new in the United States and Canada. African Americans, Native Americans, Chinese, Korean, Filipino, and Indian people have all been victims of high-profile racism in the past.
In addition, both Canadian and American law enforcement officers routinely use excessive force against Asian people, especially people of color. In fact, the fatal police shooting of an unarmed Chinese Canadian in Toronto in 2010 is still shocking many people.
To focus on only the violence against people of colour is to set the record straight: hate crimes are committed against all people. And they are committed by more than just white people. For example, in 2014 over 800 men were arrested in Malaysia for marching around wearing Ku Klux Klan hoods.
What links anti-Asian hate crime to other kinds of hate crime is that, as happens with skin color and racial profiling, perpetrators are most likely to attack people of color. This often seems to imply that anti-Asian hate crimes are distinct from anti-black hate crimes, but that is certainly not the case.
