No. No.no.no. You misunderstand me here.

You shouldn’t be making up your mind. That’s my point. You shouldn’t be arguing from one side of the fence if you want to be truly unbiased.

Again, it’s absolutely valid and okay to point out that there is no evidence publicly presented that this was a racial hate crime. That’s not incorrect. Your article made a lot of really good, reasoned points.

But….

You should also acknowledge that there is no evidence or insufficient evidence given to the public that race was not an element of the crime. You should acknowledge that there are questions along those lines that still need to be answered. You should call for patience and thoroughness while the process plays out. We should all want and call for a full accounting of the crime and not make judgements one way or the other.

Otherwise, you are arguing from one side of the fence. You’re choosing a position, a tribe based on incomplete evidence, investigation, and jurisprudence. No evidence = no racism. Even if you equivocate it with “I’ll reform my opinion once I have appropriate evidence".

The problem here is that it assumes tangible evidence of legal weight is available to be found and that the people involved with investigating and prosecuting the crime are actually looking for it.

You don’t actually know that and concrete evidence may not exist because racism exists mostly in the mind.

That’s why your article fails as an unbiased piece. You chose sides, one over the other.

My question for you and Steve is what evidence is going to be enough to draw a race correlation in your minds? How is that evidence to be collected? How is it to be evaluated? How can we know if we, the public, don’t push for answers in regards to race issues in this shooting, that it won’t just be dropped for expedience or convenience? Maybe even to conserve resources or keep a narrower focus for conviction?

Given the increasing hostilities the Asian community has faced with Trump’s “kung flu” and “China is the enemy, they gave us Covid" remarks, don’t they deserve to know definitively one way or the other? Don’t we all?