I’m sure most of us have played Cluedo (or “Clue” if you speak ‘Murican) before; there’s been a murder, Dr. Black shuffled off this mortal coil and your job is to determine the murderer, weapon and scene of the crime using a series of observations, eliminations and a final deduction.
It’s a process of elimination as you rank order sort the suspects, weapons and location then remove them from your investigation.
Well, another clue just dropped in the Intersectionality version of Waddington’s classic. We may be about to learn which racial group has more Wokémon points than another if this continues much longer:
Jamie Chung accessorises with a “Stop Asian Hate” handbag.
No, I’d never heard of her previously either, but she made it in the news with the massive activist work she has undertaken with, erm, some words on a purse. Our generation’s Rosa Parkes, indeed.
“Asian Hate” then, what is it and, assuming we can agree on the definition of “Asian”, who is guilty of it?
The answer to that second question is where those who have leaned a little too far over their logical skis are going to find discomfort. If one has a fixed world view where racism and race-based violence flows exclusively from one group, the Stop Asian Hate campaign might introduce you to a feeling of cognitive dissonance.
Why? Well, this 2019 reprint of a 2010 San Francisco Chronicle report might give us a clue. Turns out the victim is often Mrs Kim, the weapon was an unregistered pistol, the crime scene was a Korean convenience store and the murderer was Dr. Black.
Bill’s Opinion
There’s probably only three ways this campaign is going to go.
The first is an honest data-driven discussion in the media about the actual perpetrators of the majority of this particular crime category. Unlikely, based on everything we’ve learned over the last few years.
The second is a misdirection by pretending the reason Robert Long killed 8 and injured one Asian massage parlour employees and other bystanders was a deeply-felt racial hatred despite his obvious previous strenuous efforts to overcome this by paying to have sex with them on a regular basis.
The third and most likely outcome is the hashtag will quietly atrophy as newsrooms quickly spike the results of their investigations into the ethnicity of the main perpetrators.
In the meantime, given there have been millions of global sales of the game of Cluedo, let’s assume each game is played once every couple of years, why is nobody outraged about the genocide of hundreds of millions of Dr. Blacks? Could they have made it any more obvious, perhaps the weapon was a noose and the murderer was a lynch mob?