Manuel Pastor, director of the University of Southern California’s Equity Research Institute in Los Angeles, said hate crimes are not the issue of one community. “People understand they are something that could happen to other groups, too,” he said. “If you let it run loose for one group, it’s going to come back and haunt you.” In New York, lawyer and civil rights activist Maya Wiley was among eight mayoral candidates who joined the Rev. Al Sharpton for a press conference Thursday to denounce the attacks. “It’s on all of us, not only on the Asian American community, to call attention to the fact that despicable hate has no home here,” she said in a later Twitter post.
