We went pretty quickly from "it started somewhere in China" to beating elderly asian people to death in the streets. I think the backlash was more against the justifications people use to be awful.
Who is “we”? The line of thinking that starts with COVID19 and ends with violence against grandmothers seems so preposterous that it should be tested objectively to see if it exists. There are reports of huge increases in hate crimes during a year full of brazen violence and media-fueled racial tensions. This is most easily explained by a trend in classification rather than victimization. That is, law enforcement is now documenting something that has been going on for a long time. This is certainly true of the national crime victimization survey, which listed Asians for the first time in the 2018 report, released at the end of 2019. I do expect to see increases in Asian victimization in the 2020 report, but the motivations are most likely under the banner of social justice. Nobody was looting and burning down cities in protest of the coronavirus.
>The line of thinking that starts with COVID19 and ends with violence against grandmothers seems so preposterous that it should be tested objectively to see if it exists.
Okay
>There are reports of huge increases in hate crimes during a year full of brazen violence and media-fueled racial tensions.
You don't think #ChineseVirus had anything to do with those racial tensions?
>This is most easily explained by a trend in classification rather than victimization. That is, law enforcement is now documenting something that has been going on for a long time. This is certainly true of the national crime victimization survey, which listed Asians for the first time in the 2018 report, released at the end of 2019.