NBC News assures us that despite viral images, it's mostly white people who are assaulting Asian Americans

NBC News is alerting us to a new analysis by Janelle Wong, a professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, that urges people not to let viral images of people of color assaulting Asian Americans color their perceptions (no pun intended). Wong looked into data from Stop AAPI Hate, Pew Research, official law enforcement statistics, and other sources to assure us that most assaults on Asian Americans are perpetrated by white people.

The piece is headlined, “Viral images show people of color as anti-Asian perpetrators. That misses the big picture.”

"No matter how many times we tell you unwoke hayseeds what you're supposed to think, you continue to stubbornly draw obvious conclusions from observable evidence." #journalism pic.twitter.com/PndKc9XPuS

— ryuge (@0ryuge) June 15, 2021

NBC News: Don't believe your lying eyes pic.twitter.com/oJpwAlV1yE

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) June 15, 2021

Some watertight analysis right here pic.twitter.com/r3oCLieZ0Y

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) June 15, 2021

The underlying study is awful, which I could tell as soon as I saw them using the word “Latinx”. They get their data from the U of M study that basically listed politicians using “Wuhan virus” as examples of anti-Asian hate incidents. https://t.co/Bcige2Pctv

— AG (@AGHamilton29) June 15, 2021

Kimmy Yam reports:

“You have security camera videos that are more available and prevalent in certain types of urban settings. And so that’s what’s available to people in terms of sharing,” Ramakrishnan said. “The videos are more viral than if it’s something that doesn’t have any imagery or video connected to it, like something that’s happening in the suburbs, for example.”

When they are circulated, they play on a loop with no audio. Even though the videos alone don’t provide much detail about what’s happening, they dominate our perceptions, [AAPI Data founder Karthick] Ramakrishnan said.

“There’s just something so powerful about these visual images so that no matter what the social science might say, people believe their eyes and especially the images that get played on repeat now,” he said.