Climate of fear: Anti-Asian hate crimes and harassment have risen to historic levels during the Covid-19 pandemic. — AFP
“IT’S wrong, it’s un-American and it must stop”, President Joe Biden called out the rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans during the pandemic on Thursday.
“Too often, we’ve turned against one another, ” the president said, denouncing the “vicious hate crimes against Asian Americans, who have been attacked, harassed, blamed and scapegoated.”
Biden noted that the attacks are happening despite the fact that “so many of them, our fellow Americans, ” are health care workers working on the front lines of the pandemic.
“And still, still, they are forced to live in fear for their lives, just walking down streets in America, ” he said.
Many on social media were quick to thank Biden for addressing the issue, saying that “words matter, ” and compared his rhetoric to that of former President Trump, who referred to Covid-19 as “China virus, ” among other derogatory terms.
Although this was not the first time Biden had highlighted it – in his first week in office Biden had issued a memo condemning racism against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders – this wave of violence had remained relatively low profile because it didn’t fit neatly into the standard narrative of race in America.
As Korean American writer Jay Caspian Kang put it in his article in The New York Times, many people don’t realise that Asian Americans comprise people of different ethnic backgrounds “who do not speak the same language and, in many cases, dislike one another.”
Then there is the perception of racial violence in the US as "simply black and white", he added: “What doesn’t exist now is a language to discuss what happens when the attackers caught on video happen to be black.”
There is also a problem of tracking these crimes, which are believed to be under-reported by victims wary of dealing with the police or contributing to the criminalisation of African Americans.
A new report published this week found that while hate crimes fell overall by 7% in 2020, Asian Americans experienced a 150% surge in attacks.
In July 2020, there were more than 2,100 anti-Asian American hate incidents that were directly related to the pandemic. According to Stop AAPI Hate, a tracker supported by Asian American advocacy groups, many of the incidents they tracked included a perpetrator using language similar to Trump’s.
Question of identity
Kiwi Wongpeng was stopping at a traffic light in suburban Cleveland when a man pulled up beside her and motioned for her to roll down the window.
“Get out of my country – that’s an order!” he shouted from his pickup. After a pause, he added: “I’ll kill you.”
It wasn’t her first brush with racism. But she had never heard something so direct and violent until last April, as cities around the country were shutting down amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
The man, she believed, must have mistaken her for Chinese and blamed her for the virus that was first detected in Wuhan, China.
“I’ve felt scared for not just myself, but my community and Asians all over this country, ” said Wongpeng, 34, whose family immigrated to the US from Thailand 20 years ago and runs a Thai restaurant.
Anti-Asian hate crimes climbed in 15 of the 16 cities in the past year, with New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Seattle and San Jose experiencing the most significant increases and their highest tallies in at least five years.
Chinese and Korean restaurants vandalised with anti-Asian epithets and stereotypes – “stop eating dogs, ” said the graffiti on a New York noodle shop. Elderly Asian Americans were shoved on the street in broad daylight. And a Burmese refugee and his children were attacked by a man with a knife.
Brian Levin, director of the Cal State center, described the growth in hatred as one of “historic significance for the nation.”
“Opinion polls, derisive online activity, harassment and crime data have converged to show a vast spread and increase in aggressive behavior toward Asian Americans, ” he said.
In New York, where the number of anti-Asian hate crimes jumped from three to 28, all but four were related to the coronavirus. Many of the 2020 incidents in New York – and across the country – occurred in the early days of the pandemic, when fears ran highest.
That February, an Asian American woman wearing a face mask in a Manhattan subway station was kicked and punched by a man who called her “diseased.”
In March, an Asian American man walking with his 10-year-old son was followed and hit over the head by a stranger who assailed him for not wearing a mask.
In April, an Asian American woman in the Bronx was attacked on a bus by a woman and three teenage girls who hit her with an umbrella and accused her of starting the pandemic.
“There’s no question about it: All Asians feel extra vulnerable because the attacks have definitely increased, ” said Don Lee, a community activist in Brooklyn. “The harassment, the pushing, the shoving.”
The most comprehensive national data on hate crimes comes from the FBI, which defines them as offenses “against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender or gender identity.”
The FBI, which relies on voluntary submissions from law enforcement agencies, is not expected to publish figures for 2020 until November. But all indications suggest it will prove to be a record year for hate crimes targeting Asians.
While most of what is known so far comes from major police departments that have released their own data, Levin said that some of the worst anti-Asian hate crimes occurred in smaller cities – including the attack on the Burmese refugee and his two sons.
Last March, 34-year-old Bawi Cung was grocery shopping at a Sam’s Club in Midland, Texas, when a man grabbed a knife from a nearby rack. Cung was slashed on his face, his 3-year-old was stabbed in the back, and his 6-year-old was stabbed in the face. A Sam’s Club employee intervened, tackling the suspect, 19-year-old Jose Gomez, who was indicted on hate crime and attempted murder charges and is awaiting trial.
“Gomez admitted, he confessed to trying to kill the family, ” said Midland Dist. Atty. Laura Nodolf.
“He thought that they brought the virus here and were trying to spread it” and that “all Asians must be from China.”
“Most people think hate crime, white sheets, white hats, going after someone who is of African descent, ” she said. “This is a whole new dynamic.”
The police department data do not include harassment, which has been vastly more common but is not considered criminal.
Stop AAPI Hate logged 1,990 anti-Asian harassment incidents and 246 assault cases in the 10 months after its launch in March 2020. The victims who Stop AAPI Hate tracked were largely Chinese Americans – 40% – and Korean Americans – 15%.
“That and victim statements tell us that people are likely targeting people who they believe are from China. Covid-19 did not start in Korea, but racists aren’t always accurate, ” stated Stop AAPI Hate.
Historical hatred
Anne Anlin Cheng, a professor of English and American studies at Princeton, believes there is a historical root to the anti-Asian violence spike in the past year.
“This recent onslaught of anti-Asian violence can partly be attributed to former president Trump, who spoke non-stop of the ‘Chinese virus’, but he could not have rallied the kind of hatred that he did without this country’s long history of systemic and cultural racism against people of Asian descent, ” she wrote in The New York Times.
She pointed out that Asian-Americans exist in “a weird but convenient lacuna in American politics and culture.”
If they register at all on the national consciousness, it is either as a foreign threat (the Yellow Peril, the Asian Tiger, the Spy, the Disease Vector) or as the domestic but ultimately disposable prism for deflecting or excusing racism against other minorities, she noted.
What many are not aware of is that our histories are more entangled than how we tell them, she said.
Few people know that many of the same families that amassed wealth through slavery also profited from the opium trade in China, she explained.
“Or that at least 17 Chinese residents were the targeted victims of one of the worst mass lynchings in American history in Los Angeles’ ‘Negro Alley’ in 1871; or that America’s immigration policy and ideas of citizenship were built on top of laws like the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred Chinese labourers from immigrating to the US for 10 years.”
Mari Cobb, a 26-year-old immunology and genomics research lab technician at the University of Chicago, said she has watched in dismay as hatred even hit her. Her mother is Japanese American, and her father is white, which she said is how people usually see her.
This January at a Taco Bell, she was refilling her cup at the soda dispenser when a man approached her.
“The Oriental touched the dispenser!” he yelled. “Stop her! She started this whole thing!”
The reference to Covid-19 was clear.
Cobb later shared her story on Instagram, and eventually it was featured on standagainsthatred.org, a testimonials site launched recently by the advocacy group Asian Americans Advancing Justice.
“Growing up, my mom told me this could happen, ” Cobb said. “But I think my white privilege has prevented me from experiencing a lot.”
In an era of growing activism against racism, she said that concern shouldn’t be limited to Black and Latino communities.
“There’s been an increase in more people trying to actively become anti-racist, and I think that’s great, but I also think you need to include Asian people in that conversation.” — Los Angeles Times/TNS/Agencies
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