YG’s “Meet the Flockers” is blowing up on Chinese social media for its offensive lyrics, but the controversy also illustrates a cultural misunderstanding of hip-hop.

In 2014, the Compton-born rapper YG released his major-label debut My Krazy Life to widespread acclaim, with one critic calling it a “classicist read on Southern California gang life” coupled with “a refined flair for storytelling.” Buried in the middle of the album was a scant two-minute long track called “Meet the Flockers,” a nod to YG’s own past as a convicted felon that kicks off with him rapping the lines “First, you find a house and scope it out / Find a Chinese neighborhood, cause they don't believe in bank accounts.” Never released as a single, it at most merited a passing mention in reviews of the album.

Two years later, “Meet the Flockers” has resurfaced on an unexpected corner of the internet, after a YouTube video featuring the song began circulating feverishly at the tailend of last month on Weibo and WeChat, two of China’s most popular social media networks, with Chinese Americans as well as users in China condemning YG’s song as racist in its singling out of Chinese families as easy crime victims.

What sparked this outcry, more than two years after the song was originally released? All signs point to its origins being a September 16 incident in which Fengzhu Chen, a Chinese American woman in Georgia, shot at three intruders who entered her home, killing one of them. A grainy black-and-white video of the encounter went viral, and soon after, the “Meet the Flockers” video (which was produced independently of YG by one Darren Ojeda, and has since been deleted from YouTube) began making the rounds.

The social media outrage has now morphed into a campaign against YG and the song, including a White House petition created on September 21 with the vague (and in all likelihood unconstitutional) demand to "ban the song from public media and investigate legal responsibilities of the writer” that’s already garnered more than 62,000 signatures, as well as a planned protest of YG’s upcoming concert in Philadelphia by a group of Chinese American organizations. Even San Francisco Supervisor Jane Kim has weighed in, calling on YouTube to take down the video and for Def Jam and YG to denounce the song.

Hip hop is perhaps the only art form whose fictions are confused for truth, and not only charged with inciting violence, but criminalized. Few would accuse Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita of being the prime driver of pedophilia (though it too has been the subject of misguided calls to ban it from distribution). It requires a considerable stretch of the imagination, as well as a certain amount of naivete, to believe that a song released in 2014 is what’s driving crimes against Chinese American immigrants in 2016.

Yet it does point to something very real—the commonly held perception among Chinese American immigrants that they have a target on their backs, a belief only reinforced by lyrics like those in “Meet the Flockers.” According to CCTVNews, Fengzhu Chen told Chinese media that Chinese businesswomen were often singled out in Georgia because of their reputation for stashing cash inside their homes. Similarly, as robbery victim Hai Cai Chen put it in an interview with the Sacramento Bee, “They think Asians have a lot of cash, so they want to target us.” It’s a sentiment that is at least partially rooted in reality. A 2008 San Francisco Police Department survey of 300 robberies found that in crimes involving physical assault, 85 percent of the cases involved Asian victims and Black perpetrators. Chinese-language news outlets regularly publish stories of Chinese small businesses or delivery workers who are the victims of crime, like this story from last week on the killing of Quan Zheng, a Chinese delivery man beaten and robbed in Richmond, Virginia, who eventually died from his injuries. And in Sacramento, California, muggings and robberies of Asian American immigrants have been on the rise, according to an analysis of data by the Bee, and have even led to the creation of armed patrols who cruise the city’s neighborhoods on the lookout for would-be criminals.

It’s no surprise, then, that Chinese American immigrants are up in arms over the song. The concerns are real, but the response doesn’t only miss the forest for the trees, it overshoots it altogether and lands somewhere in the realm of farce. Calls for censorship, after all, rarely address the issue their proponents seek to fix. And since this is America, in an ironic but predictable twist, the campaign against the song has also revealed the casual, unchecked anti-Black racism underpinning the outrage of many of those who have protested “Meet the Flockers.” While the originally circulated video has since been deleted from YouTube, scores of upset (and presumably) Chinese and Asian Americans have found other versions of the song on the platform and left angry comments, rife with the n-word. (One commenter wrote that he now agreed with the killing of innocent Black Americans by police officers.)

All of this brought to mind fellow south central LA-born rapper Ice Cube’s song “Black Korea” from his album Death Certificate, itself the subject of controversy and demands to ban it from the airwaves and store shelves more than two decades ago. His response to the March 16, 1991 shooting death of Black teenager Latasha Harlins by Korean immigrant store owner Soon Ja Du, and released just months before the Rodney King verdict, “Black Korea” also tells a story of Black and Asian communities, but from the perspective of someone who’s tired of his Black skin being seen as incontrovertible proof of criminality:

Thinkin' every brother in the world's out to take
So they watch every damn move that I make
They hope I don't pull out a gat and try to rob
They funky little store, but, bitch, I got a job
"Look, you little Chinese motherfucker
I ain't tryin' to steal none of yo' shit, leave me alone!"

Like “Meet the Flockers,” and the campaign against it, “Black Korea” also speaks to a messy, complicated truth born of experience. I can’t help but think too of what Jay Caspian Kang wrote in the wake of the Peter Liang protests earlier this year, when tens of thousands of mostly Chinese Americans took to the streets in support of the NYPD officer who fired the bullet that killed unarmed Black man Akai Gurley. As Kang wrote, looking ahead to a future moment of political mobilization, “the message will certainly still be clumsy and riddled with contradiction.” It appears that he was right.