Featured image from https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-advocates-and-lawmakers-are-doing-to-address-growing-anti-asian-hate-crimes. Demonstrators outside City Hall in Los Angeles, California, U.S. March 27, 2021. REUTERS/Ringo Chiu
Atlanta Attacks
Amongst other atrocities and acts against civil justice, Asian Americans have fallen victim to the blunder of hate crimes. A recent shooting in Atlanta left eight dead, six of the victims being women of Asian descent.
The suspect, Robert Aaron Long, 21, was described to have rampaged through three massage parlors in the Atlanta area. While a motive has not been found yet, a majority of his victims Asian. Atlanta Mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms noted that this theme amongst the tragedy related to the horrible “issue that is happening across the country”.
However, unlike Bottoms, and President Biden who acknowledged the atrocity as “very, very troubling” after discussing the brutality that has been occurring towards Asian-Americans, Capt. Jay Baker, sheriff deputy who had spoken about the case is now no longer a spokesman to the investigation because of his remarks. Saying that the attacker had “a really bad day” in his statement about the shooting was met with backlash. In addition to his poor word choice, Baker was also censured on social media for his promotion of anti-Asian T-shirts that read “imported virus from Chy-na”. This statement had been echoed by former President Trump and his supporters during much of last year.
In February, multiple attacks in the Bay Area targeted Asian American Seniors. In New York City, a 65-year-old Asian woman was assaulted and told, now common obloquy non-White Americans hear every day, “you don’t belong here!” Some contribute the rise in acts of violence towards Asians to the global pandemic that former President Donal Trump labeled the “Chinese virus.” Bawi Cung and his sons were attacked in Sam’s Club, their attacker reasoned his actions to the fact he assumed Cung and his six and three-year-old son were possibly Chinese and could be spreading the COVID-19 virus.
The “Chinese Virus”
These attacks towards members of the Asian American community can be related to the comments Trump made about the pandemic’s origins in China that some later used as justification for their charged actions. Bettina Makalintal, a writer at VICE, explains that “it is very important to have a president who is not actively fueling the fire on this Chinese virus.” Many people “who are racist against Asian Americans [will tend] to associate the ill effects of the pandemic with Asian people in the United States in general.”
Spewing xenophobic rhetoric against a community will result in prejudice towards that community, and Twitter trends from last year prove exactly that. On March 16, 2020, President Trump tweeted calling COVID-19 the “Chinese virus”. The week before the top hashtag on Twitter had been #covid-19, the next week #chinesevirus reined. A study conducted by the American Journal of Public Health found that along with more people using #chinesevirus, they paired this hashtag with additional anti-Asian phrases.
An epidemiology professor who co-authored the study, Yulin Hswen, told The Washington Post that Trump’s tweets “normalized these racist attitudes. That might have perpetuated these beliefs and behaviors offline.” Other experts like professor Russell Jeung, who teaches Asian American studies, say this situation demonstrates how words so easily racialized the disease. Now rather than contributing it to a biological virus, people are stigmatizing Chinese people as “disease carriers and the ones infecting others”.
History of Asian Prejudice
Hatred toward Asians in the US isn’t new. There is a long history stretching back as far as the 1850s when Chinese immigrants began coming to the West Coast in large numbers. This was due to the high demand for low-wage labor positions. However, it soon sparked the “Asians stealing White jobs” racist rhetoric because White Americans felt their opportunities were being snatched away by Asians.
This eventually led to the Chinese massacre of 1871, wherein a racist mob in LA attacked innocent Chinese individuals in Chinatown, finally culminating in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. This act placed a ban on Chinese laborers from migrating to the US largely due to racist sentiments. It barred Chinese individuals from entering the US for around 20 years. However, a version of this act was extended for around 60 years until it was repealed in 1943, Washington Post states.
A precursor to this act was the Page Exclusion Act of 1875, which prohibited Chinese women from being able to migrate to the US. It was essentially a nod to “the dehumanizing narratives and tropes that render Asian women as objects of sexual fetishization and unworthy of being part of the national consciousness” says a Harvard article on the long racist history against Asian Americans. This trope has roots stretching far back and is still seen today. Upon shooting 8 individuals, 6 of which were Asian women, shooter Robert Aaron Long tried to cite the reason for his actions as being due to his ‘sexual addiction’, clearly Asian women are unfairly fetishized and treated as eye candy in American society.
An event quite similar to the hate Asian Americans are receiving as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic happened with a bubonic plague outbreak in 1900 in San Francisco. Though still unsure about its origin, the first infection was in a Chinese immigrant. This resulted in the entire Chinese community getting blamed for the outbreak. With the police surrounding Chinatown, no one but White residents were allowed to venture in or out.
It wasn’t just hated toward the Chinese, in the wake of Japan bombing Pearl Harbor during World War II, the US government forced all Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans into internment camps. This was due to suspicions that they may aid Japan in invading the United States. The individuals who attended these camps endured horrible conditions almost equivalent to that of concentration camps. Around 62 percent of all immigrants were US citizens. This brings up the question of whether it was fair to send American citizens to internment camps when citizens of German and Italian heritage didn’t have to endure such harsh conditions even though the US was still fighting against them.
In a conversation with NPR, Dale Minami, lawyer and former Asian American studies professor at UC Berkeley, talked with Ailsa Chang about the history behind racism toward Asians in the US. Minami cited one reason for the mass hatred as being that the last three major wars the US fought were against Asian countries (Japan, Korea, and Vietnam). This led to the spread of dehumanizing and racist rhetoric in the United States against these individuals despite the job of the government to support all of its citizens.
Action Being Taken & Response
Though this remains a pressing issue for the US, there is no doubt that serious action is being taken, even at the government level. Vice President Kamala Harris commented, “Racism is real in America, and it has always been … Xenophobia is real in America and always has been. Sexism, too.” The White House announced that they had a plan encompassing federal, state, and local law enforcement to train them about handling hate crimes, and they aim to establish a committee in the COVID-19 Equity Task Force that works specifically on addressing xenophobia. They have allotted $49.5 million to help fund services designed to aid Asian or Pacific Islanders who have endured sexual or domestic violence.
The organization Stop AAPI (Asian American Pacific Islander) Hate, which is an initiative that supports these communities, found nearly 3800 anti-Asian hate crimes in the US from March 2020 to February 2021. Cynthia Choi, co-founder of this organization responded to what the Biden administration proposed, “These new actions are a good first step and show the Biden administration is taking the issue seriously”.
Many believe that our law enforcement in regards to addressing hate crimes needs to improve immensely. LaVita Tuff, the policy director for Asian Americans Advancing Justice in Atlanta said, “Increased police presence doesn’t work if there are community members who fear the police as much as they fear the next attack.” They believe that the place to start in terms of addressing hate crimes is by improving data collection and widening accessibility to hate crime information. The Biden Administration plans to create a hate crimes webpage in which “scenario-based training on anti-Asian bias crimes” is added to the data collection training manual for law enforcement officials (PBS).
Also, policy-makers seem to be taking a stand. Rep. Grace Meng (D-NY) and Sen. Mazie K Hirono (D-Hawaii) introduced the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act in March 2021, which attempts to broaden support for data collection and helps to report hate crimes in different languages. Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif) is also introducing the No Hate Act which is going to provide grants to improve the reporting of hate crimes.
It’s not just on the official level that this issue is being spoken out about, public figures are also condemning the racism towards Asians in the US. Figures like the Kardashians, BTS members, Olivia Munn, Gemma Chan, Sandra Oh, Megan Thee Stallion, Rihanna, Lin-Manuel Miranda (and the entire Hamilton cast), John Legend, Mindy Kaling, and an endless list of others have taken their frustration with the events public. In response to the police sheriff’s claim that Long had a ‘bad day’ when he shot the 8 individuals in the spa, Trevor Noah said, “No, yesterday was a ‘bad day for the people who lost their lives. It’s always interesting who police try and find the humanity in.”
It’s clear that from the responses of numerous individuals around the world that we need to make changes in terms of how we view individuals of different races and cultural backgrounds. Those changes start at the governmental level and go all the way back to each of our hearts. What the Asian American community has endured in the almost 2 centuries of their existence in America is unacceptable. Hopefully, we as a nation can work in tandem with individuals of other backgrounds to address and solve this issue, because the real virus seems to be racism itself.