Andrew Yang versus the unrepresentative activists

Even in an NYC primary, nobody really cares what left-wing activists think

(Photo by Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images)

There was a funny Intelligencer article earlier this month titled “Andrew Yang’s Plan to Fight Hate Crimes Makes Asian Activists Cringe.”

It detailed negative opinions of Yang from the writer Sarah Jeong, the Asian American Feminist Collective, CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities, and Desis Rising Up and Moving.

The author of the piece, James Walsh, writes that “for many in New York’s Asian communities, his prescription — more police funding — reads like a glib response to a deep-seated societal ill,” and that the NYPD’s Asian Hate Crime Task Force is “contradictory to the nascent defund-the-police movement, which has been gaining momentum since the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests.”

If read as a literal piece of reporting, Walsh’s article is spot-on. Asian activist groups in New York see anti-Asian hate crimes through a lens of intersectional anti-racist politics that commits them to be good allies to defund-police activist groups. Therefore th…