On January 14, Michell Go, an Asian American woman, was pushed by a man in front of an incoming subway train in Times Square. She died immediately.
While the man, Simon Martial, has now been charged with murder, the police said that there was "no indication that Go had been targeted because of her ethnicity".
I don't know if this is the reason why the New York Times article covering the story (which ran 1300 words long) did not mention once that Martial is black.
On the same day, BuzzFeed ran a story with a headline: "An Asian Woman Died After A Man Pushed Her In Front Of A Subway Train In Times Square". What I want to know is that If BuzzFeed, another left leaning media outlet, deemed it important enough to highlight the racial identify of the victim, why do they leave out the racial identity of the killer?
As an Asian American who lived in New York City for 15 years, this is what I find most disturbing about Michelle Go's tragic death: the progressive media, which has tirelessly defended Critical Race Theory (CRT) as an important lens through which we should examine every wrong, falls silent on race whenever it does not fit the theory.
I can understand this hesitancy even if it does not make it right:
- Asian Americans represent the single greatest empirical problem facing CRT and those progressive social theorists with any intellectual integrity.
- Asian Americans are NOT white but yet they have the highest educational attainment of any racial group in America and the highest per capita income.
- Moreover, many Asian Americans arrived in America as refugees, with nothing in their pockets. Many Chinese Americans today are descendants of coolies who were brought to America (in many instances against their will) to build the Central Pacific Railroad. They were treated not much better than slaves and 10% of them died during the building of the Transcontinental Railroad.
Successful people are generally not well liked. In psychology, this is called hostile envy ("I think he manipulated his way up”).
I don't know if Michelle Go died because of hostile envy, but I suspect the disproportionate numbers of hate crimes against Jews and Asians in the United States are motivated directly or indirectly by it.
The chart above shows that there were 329 hate crimes committed against Jews and Asians in New York in 2021, compared to 38 against blacks, 11 against Muslims and 8 against Hispanics.
These numbers would suggest that America is not racist, at least not in the way that racism is generally defined. If anything, these numbers suggest that what America really suffers from is hostile envy.
Simon Martial may be deranged or not. The choice of his victim may be random or not. It does not matter in the grand scheme of things. Hate crime statistics paint such a damning picture of the nature of hate crimes in the US that whether Martial is a racist does not add or subtract from it.
What is lost in the data, however, is the actual person of Michelle Go: a successful executive at a leading accounting firm who spent her free time helping homeless people like Martial prepare for job interviews and improve their resumés.
With her untimely death, the world has lost a productive member of society and an opportunity to find out what was more important in making her who she was: her race or her cultural upbringing. As much as this is convenient for the proponents of CRT who play down the role of culture, it is a loss for everyone, whether Asian or not.
I suspect that what happened to Michell Go will drive more Asians to leave New York. I relocated from New York (a city that I once loved) to Israel a year ago to safeguard my right to exercise free speech. Safety has been an unexpected bonus. Yes, if you want to know, as a successful Asian I feel much safer in Israel than in New York today.
