If you assume that people answered honestly, it's very possible that remaining proportion of people who viewed Asian Americans negatively were more likely to express anti-Asian American racism and hate over the past year, instead of keeping quiet about their views.
Furthermore, a lot of people are biased to skew their responses or lie due to social-desirability bias [1]. The responses are self-reported. It's highly plausible that many people said their opinion "stayed the same" while actually worsening.
Most importantly, anti-Asian hate crimes have "increased by 339 percent" from 2020 to 2021 [2]. Even if you doubt the data, comparatively, crime reports are more reliable and objective than self-reports when you ask a population about their views of people of a particular ethnicity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social-desirability_bias
[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/anti-asian-hate-c...
This statement crosses the line into absurdity.
The poll (that they designed!) didn’t give the “correct” results so time to do some hand waving and move the goalposts.
I’ll never understand this obsession with imagined grievances and jumping through hoops to paint one’s self as a victim. What is the point? Attention? Pity?
You're asserting that the crime reports are wrong, and we can conclude that racial incidents did not increase because people in a survey said they weren't racist.
Many Asian Americans aren't asking for your "attention" or "pity." If there is more awareness among the Asian American community of racist incidents (e.g. many Asians getting randomly punched or pushed onto the subway tracks), one can have more aware of their surroundings when going outside to avoid random violence.
2. You can't just ignore a poll because the results don't match your message and then just say: "Oh, well, we can't even trust the results of this poll guys. All the racists will just say they aren't racists... cuz, cmon, we like KNOW there are SOOO many racists!"
3. Hate crime reporting has increased because HOW these incidents are now reported has changed in the past ~18 months at the Federal and local levels. Are there fewer or more of these incidents? Is there some trend? I don't think less than 2 years of data can tell us much of anything.
I find it interesting that when this argument fails to find any actual evidence it reverts to vigorous hand waving and asking us to believe there is some growing contingent of illusive racist boogeymen.
Enough with the fear mongering.
You wrote that we can’t ignore evidence that does not support your worldview in point 2, and then you flipped and said we should ignore the evidence of crime data in point 3, because the results did not match your own message.
At least be consistent and say “we don’t have enough data to conclude either way,” instead of claiming that it’s a bold statement that polling data is less reliable than crime statistics.
Not just that, people are also just biased to believe their previous opinions are consistent with their current opinions.
I always make sure my responses to anonymous surveys are as politically correct as possible. Ya know, just in case ;)
...yet on the same page the responses to "How has your opinion of Asian Americans, in general changed over the past 12 months?" overwhelmingly skew to "stayed the same" or "positive".
Maybe I'm missing something, but it certainly seems like they are trying to push a narrative that even their own data doesn't support.