Jennifer Ho

Professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and former president of the Association for Asian American Studies. In widely circulated commentary she attributes all race-related violence—including assaults on Asian Americans committed by Black assailants—to “white supremacy,” treating White people as the hidden authors of harm even when no White person is involved. That framework is anti-White ideology: it pins moral and causal responsibility on Whiteness as such regardless of actual facts.

This page summarizes Ho’s public argument and dismantles it. The goal is not to deny that anti-Asian racism exists, or that some of it comes from White people, but to show why her particular thesis—white supremacy is the root of every race-related violent encounter, including Black-on-Asian attacks—is logically hollow, empirically reckless, and a textbook example of blaming Whites as a group for conduct they did not commit.

Family background

Ho is the daughter of a refugee father who fled China and an immigrant mother from Jamaica—whose parents had themselves immigrated from Hong Kong. That is a blended Chinese and Chinese–Caribbean diaspora story: multiple migrations, survival, and resettlement in the United States.

By any historical standard she has had extraordinary opportunity—a country that took in her father as a refugee, welcomed her mother’s side of the family across successive moves from Hong Kong to Jamaica to America, and then placed her on a path to higher education, professional security, and a tenured professorship at a major public university. That record of openness and upward mobility makes her public posture all the more jarring: she writes and lectures as if White Americans, operating through a phantom called “white supremacy,” were still the hidden hand behind virtually every racial injury, including violence committed by non-Whites against Asians. It is hard to square that worldview with gratitude for the society that made her career possible. In plain terms, it reads as ungrateful—and as a fixed conviction that White America is “out to get” her and people like her, no matter the facts on the ground or the chances she was given.

Platform and academics

Her bachelor’s, master’s, and Ph.D. are all in English—not in Asian literature, Asian languages, Asian American studies, or ethnic studies. According to her University of Colorado Boulder faculty biography, she earned a B.A. in English from UC Santa Barbara, an M.A. in English from Boston University, and a Ph.D. in English from Boston University. She has since made a public career in ethnic studies and critical race rhetoric, but the entire ladder of her higher education was climbed inside English departments. That does not by itself invalidate what she says about race, but it does undercut any aura of specialized training in Asian texts, societies, or languages: her credential stack is English literary studies, repackaged as definitive expertise on who is “really” responsible for interracial violence in America.

Ho presents as an expert on Asian American culture and on anti-Asian racism during COVID-19. In April 2020 she produced a slide deck on anti-Asian racism that the University of Colorado Boulder turned into a website; she has described dozens of subsequent interviews, workshops, and panels on the topic. When she published her essay in the spring of 2021, she identified herself as president of the Association for Asian American Studies and as a professor specializing in ethnic studies, critical race studies, and Asian American culture—credentials that lend institutional weight to what follows.

What the article actually claims

In White supremacy is the root of race-related violence in the United States (republished April 2021 in Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine from The Conversation), Ho acknowledges viral incidents in which Black assailants attacked Asian Americans—including an elderly Asian man in San Francisco who later died, and a woman beaten on a New York sidewalk while bystanders failed to help. She does not dispute that the immediate perpetrators were Black.

Her move is to insist that those attacks are still “fueled… very specifically by white supremacy,” and that “white supremacy does not require a white person to perpetuate it.” She defines white supremacy as an ideology embedded in “nearly every system and institution in the U.S.,” such that to be non-White is to be treated as less than human. From there she concludes that the “dehumanization of Asian people” is “driven by white supremacy and not by any Black person who may or may not hate Asians,” and ends with a flat moral: “It’s not Black people whom Asian Americans need to fear. It’s white supremacy.”

She extends the same brush to other cases: a Latino man in Texas who stabbed a Burmese family in 2020, blaming COVID on “Chinese” people, is said to act out “white supremacist ideas” despite not being White. The murder of George Floyd is folded in too: Derek Chauvin’s conduct is attributed to white supremacy making Floyd into a “Black male threat.” Every thread is tied to one causal spool named after White people.

Why the thesis collapses

1. It is unfalsifiable. If every violent act—committed by anyone of any race—counts as evidence of “white supremacy,” then the term no longer distinguishes one cause from another. It becomes a closed loop: whatever happened proves the theory. That is ideology, not explanation. A serious account of street violence would ask about motives, patterns, policing, mental health, and intergroup tension where they actually occur. Ho preempts that work by relabeling the phenomenon so Whites remain the arch-villain even when the fist on the video is not White.

2. It erases the agency—and accountability—of non-White perpetrators. To say Black attackers are mere vessels of “white supremacy” is to treat them as incapable of moral choice and to redirect blame toward an abstract Whiteness. That is patronizing to everyone involved. It also lets actual assailants off the hook rhetorically: the crime becomes an epiphenomenon of White ideology rather than a choice by a person who could be prosecuted, condemned, and studied as themselves.

3. It conflicts with government victimization data. Commentators who still care about evidence have pointed out that Bureau of Justice Statistics figures on interracial violence do not show Whites as the disproportionate source of violence against Asian Americans. For example, in 2018 Black Americans—roughly an eighth of the population—accounted for about 28% of reported violent incidents against Asian Americans in the data summarized by Kenny Xu in City Journal, while non-Hispanic Whites—roughly three-fifths of the population—accounted for about 25%. However one interprets those numbers, they do not support a story that anti-Asian street violence is chiefly a White phenomenon or that White supremacy is the obvious “root” of every Black-on-Asian assault.

4. It smuggles collective guilt onto White people. Naming an ideology “white supremacy” and then declaring it the hidden cause of all racial violence loads responsibility onto Whiteness as a category. Ordinary White people who oppose attacks on Asian Americans—and who had nothing to do with a given assault—are nonetheless folded into a system that is said to “really” produce the blow. That is structurally similar to other forms of collective racial blame that progressives claim to reject, except the target is Whites.

5. It poisons coalition politics. Telling Asian Americans they must not “fear” Black people but only “white supremacy” while Black-on-Asian videos are circulating is not serious safety advice; it is narrative management. Asian victims who name who attacked them risk being told they misunderstand their own experience. Meanwhile, honest cross-community conversation—about crime, schools, mental health, and media incentives—is replaced by a single metanarrative that spares favored groups from scrutiny.

The wider ecosystem: narrative over truth

Ho’s piece did not arrive in a vacuum. Organizations such as Stop AAPI Hate promoted dramatic claims about anti-Asian “hate” during the pandemic while relying heavily on self-reported, unaudited submissions—much of it verbal harassment or “shunning,” not the physical violence that dominated headlines. Xu’s reporting in City Journal (“Stop Stop AAPI Hate,” Summer 2023) documents how that industry of data and activism often downplayed or sidestepped Black-on-Asian violence while emphasizing White villains (Atlanta, Trump’s “China virus” rhetoric) that fit a prewritten story.

Ho’s essay performs the same narrative function at the level of theory: it ensures that even when the assailant is not White, the moral center of gravity stays on White supremacy. That is how you keep funders, university DEI offices, and national media comfortable with a single axis of blame.

A sharper Asian American dissent

Not every Asian American writer accepts this script. Xu—who is Asian American—argues that many Asians are doing well in the United States and that the most damaging racial policies toward them (for example, elite college admissions discrimination) have often been engineered by progressive institutions, not by random White strangers on the street. His critique does not deny prejudice; it denies that Stop AAPI Hate–style activism and Ho-style theory give an honest map of where harm comes from. That internal dissent matters: the charge of “white supremacy explains everything” is not the unanimous voice of Asian America; it is a factional, ideological line.

Bottom line

Ho’s article is useful as a specimen: it shows how academic authority can be used to recode reality so that White people remain the root of evil even when the immediate facts point elsewhere. That is not scholarship in the sense of testing hypotheses against evidence; it is moral propaganda dressed in vocabulary from ethnic studies. Recognizing it as anti-White racism—blaming Whites as a class for violence they did not commit—is the first step toward refusing it.

ANTIWHITENESS.ORG