CNN "Newsroom" - Transcript Interview with Mark Takano

Interview

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PAUL: Jasmine Wright, we appreciate it so much. Thank you.

So these shootings in Atlanta aren't isolated events. We are in the middle of the nationwide rise in anti-Asian violence, as we've been talking about here, partly spurred by the coronavirus pandemic. The Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism says reports of anti-Asian crime have more than doubled during the pandemic, and lawmakers at the local and federal level have been calling out these incidents for months now. Many are calling for Congress to back the No Hate Act. It would, among other things, improve reporting of hate crime data.

My next guest is a Congressman Mark Takano of California. He's vice chairman of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus which supports the No Hate Act. Congressman, thank you for being with us. How hopeful are you that this act will actually become a real piece of legislation?

REP. MARK TAKANO, (D-CA), VICE CHAIRMAN, CONGRESSIONAL ASIAN PACIFIC AMERICAN CAUCUS: I'm very hopeful, especially with last night's strong, strong endorsement from President Biden himself that he called upon Congress to pass the COVID-19 hate crime bill.

PAUL: Talk to us about what you felt, what you thought when you heard about what happened in Atlanta.

TAKANO: I was just heartsick when I found out about it, and regardless of what we will eventually find out about the motives of the assailant, these murders of Asian women occur in the context of rising anti-Asian harassment and assaults and murders. And so I was concerned, regardless of how -- what the actual motivations are of the assailant, it has served to really bring this issue to the surface in a very, very significant way.

PAUL: We know that words matter, verbiage matters here. A spokesman for Cherokee County, which is the first place where the first shooting took place in Atlanta, he was removed from the case due to some comments that he made. How persuasive, do you think, are the words from law enforcement in a situation like what we saw in Atlanta, to set the tone for what happens next?

[10:09:53]

TAKANO: Well, knowing more about that spokesman's background and the fact that he was displaying t-shirts that had China spelled C-h-y, hyphen, n-a, and reaffirm confirming the rhetoric that was being espoused by former President Trump, rhetoric like "China virus," "Wuhan virus," or the most offensive to me is "kung flu," that we had a leader, a captain in that police force feeling OK to publicly do things like that without realizing that he has a responsibility to make everyone in the community feel secure, and that law enforcement is going to be -- is going to move forward protecting everyone.

And so his statements came across to many in the Asian-American community as minimizing what the assailant had done. Look, I am open to the notion that this young man was primarily concerned with his own salvation and saw women, all women, as temptations, in this case temptations that needed to be eliminated, and that he was struggling with an attempt to gain control over himself.

But at the very least, women were dehumanized, and Asian women were also dehumanized. But, certainly, this police captain's authority, his own personal authority, his moral authority, was compromised by previous displays, I think, of bias.

PAUL: You just said -- so you said that -- you're showing some understanding. You say that you have an understanding that the suspect in this case, the shooter, had his own demons that he was dealing with. Does that mean to you that the hate being charged, or the hate crime, is absolutely still necessary, though, in this case? And what is the symbolism as Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms mentioned yesterday, the symbolism of at least charging him with a hate crime could be significant as well?

TAKANO: Look, hate crime statutes are very difficult to invoke. They rely on evidence that there was a racial animus on the part of the accused. And they're very difficult to write, and they're very difficult for prosecutors to use.

And to any casual observer, the notion that these were Asian businesses, that six out of the eight who were killed, six of the eight women who were killed, were Asian, would seem prima facia evidence that this was a crime directed, in part, against Asian-ness. But legally, technically, it's very difficult to actually make these things stand up in court, given how the statutes are written.

So I can understand the difficulty and the carefulness, the difficulty of the Justice Department and the local prosecution. At the same time, I think they're showing tremendous leadership, the president, the vice president, who is a former attorney general, they're showing tremendous leadership to show that they care about the Asian-American community, they care about Asian lives, and that -- I believe that they are showing that they understand how important leadership is.

I actually think the most important thing that comes out of this is leadership. The tone that's set by our top officials, the tone that's set by the kinds of stories that come out of Hollywood. I've seen tremendous progress, even during this pandemic, on that front in terms of how Asians are portrayed in movies and media, the narratives about them, the break with the kinds of stereotypical ways in which Asian women are fetishized, and how often they're seen as submissive.

[10:15:03]

All of these things, we don't know how they played upon the mindset of this young man. It's going to take a lot more time to sus these things out. But I go back to the importance of leadership and how the absence of leadership during the pandemic in terms of recognizing the duty of government to quell or to counteract what would naturally bubble up in a society as people are confined, as they're dealing with home isolation, the anger and resentment, and to do everything possible to prevent that from being focused on a particular ethnicity or a particular race, quite to the contrary. No concerted effort to actually stop that from happening. The opposite happened.

PAUL: Sure.

TAKANO: You had a president that stoked those feelings for political gain, and we're dealing with the aftermath of that. And -- go ahead.

PAUL: I'm sorry, Congressman Mark Takano, we've run out of time. But I wanted to make sure that you got all of your thoughts in and were able to convey them to us. Thank you so much for taking the time for us. Congressman Mark Takano there.

TAKANO: I appreciate it. Thank you.

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