<p>I think this has to do more with localized fears and such, since fears sell movies. During the cold war we had all kinds of anti Russian movies, where they were the heavies (the Russians Are Coming, the Russians are coming satirizes the notion of Russians as heavies). The original Red Dawn (that I walked out of, I can appreciate propoganda movies, but this was a piece of dreck) had Russians as the bad guys with Cuban invaders <em>shrug</em> when the cold war was in its final gasps. </p>
<p>Right now, tensions are high with Asia, you have North Korea, that generates its own bad publicity daily, they are almost comic book, and with China there is a lot of resentment towards them and fear, given you have an oppressive, authoritarian regime that often seems to be on the wrong side of things (like North Korea),that is behind massive cyber hacking and DNS attacks and has done things like route 25% of internet traffic through its networks which could hold very dark connotations…not to mention resentment at currency manipulations and the lack of intellectual property protection, and obviously the loss of jobs to a dirty cheap labor pool. I suspect any anti Asian bias you see is being driven by these resentments and fears.</p>
<p>I also would be very careful about projecting too much onto comments and racist tweets. Asians hold up a kind of unique burden IMO, because of the often spectacular success of Asian kids in schools and such (put it this way, my S is in a music program that in his particular area is heavily Asian, and a large percentage of these kids end up in HYP schools, along with being talented musically), Asians are held up as a model minority which has its down sides as well, when you mythologize anyone, it creates burdens…what about the person who is Asian who is just average? What about the Asian like Jeremy Lin who is good at sports and is treated as a freak (when he went to Harvard, and was walking towards the gym, he would often get people saying 'hey, orchestra practice is the other way")…Frankly, it ignores that Asians are human. I remember back in my college days at NYU there was a shooting on campus, couple of people were killed, in a shootout between rival Chinese gangs who were at an Asian student union party, and people were shocked that you could have Chinese gangs or crime…</p>
<p>I kind of found the subway line comments humorous, when someone talked about the LIRR. A lot of the ‘well off’ communities the poster mentioned are towns that these days have significant upper income Asian populations, towns like Great Neck, Douglaston and other high income enclaves have pretty large Asian populations and the same is true all over the NYC region.</p>