I've seen a few of these Asian-guilt think-pieces circling the toilet of medium recently. Individual Asian people are probably surprised to find that they've somehow been implicated for this terrible murder.
They're probably not surprised to find out that another Asian person is capable of the kind of casual cruelty you'd have to muster to watch someone slowly die on the pavement without taking any action. Asians are not un-initiated with the potential brutality of Asian people, many of them having fled brutal regimes like Communist China, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc.
You might come to the same conclusion about any ethnicity or cultural group whether you're a 23andme certified member of it or not: human beings are capable of terrible acts, and no specific group has a monopoly on brutality, historically or otherwise.
This piece is filled with the same kind of lazy generalities as all of these formulaic dogmatic screeds. You can play bingo.
Check a box if the piece ignores the fact that most people who are killed by police are white. Check another one if the piece casually implies that white people are the original slave owning group. Check one if minding your own business a thousand miles away from a terrible act of brutality initiated by someone who shares some of your genetic features makes you share responsibility for it. The free square is always the logical fallacy of synecdoche which confuses the whole for the individual or the individual for the whole.
Asian people, like white people is an abstraction of speech. It makes it easier to talk about a group if you can just lump them into an easy verbal shortcut. But when you confuse a verbal shortcut for how the world works, you have played yourself. There is not such thing as Asian people. There are individual Asians and they're all individually responsible for their own actions, inactions, cruelty and biases. We know who killed George Floyd and we know who watched on impassively. It wasn't white people and it wasn't Asian people. It was those two awful cops. Blame them. Blame individuals for bad behavior. Anything else is the same kind of wrong, lazy thinking that leads to racism in the first place. We don't blame (or we shouldn't) blame all Muslims for terrorists attacks. A tiny minority of people out of a billion Muslims engage in terrorist attacks. Blame them. Not all Muslims.
Asian individuals are only responsible for their own immediate behavior. These cops didn't murder George Floyd because they were white and Asian. They murdered him because they're terrible cops. We need to dismantle the police, surveillance and prison state we live in and start anew. When we do, our efforts should be unencumbered with racist ideology or we'll repeat the same mistakes or our current awful system.
