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 Author:Jennifer Lee  published: Wednesday,May,18,2022

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 Author:Jennifer Lee  published: Wednesday,May,18,2022

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in the year 2020 during the pandemic a lot of hate against the asian community had raised."1 in 6 asians american adults reported experiencing a hate crime in 2021 ,up from 1 in 8 in 2020" . the pandemic had made a lot of people realise how much we don't know about historical experiences and police related things about the asian community . they have been a lot of attacks against the asian community during the year 2020 , a gunman in dallas texas opened fire in a korean owned nail salon and injured many people.

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Confronting the invisibility of anti-Asian racism | Brookings

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Dr. Jennifer Lee of Columbia University sheds light on the the invisibility of anti-Asian racism while advocating for comprehensive pre-college curricula teaching Asian American, Native American, African American and Latino American histories.

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By: human rights watch , Published:May 12th 2020

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By: human rights watch , Published:May 12th 2020

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this article talks about how in the year during the year 2020 was a rough time for the asian community and how it made a lot of people realise how much they were never educated or how much the history on the asian community was not taught.it talks about how much the asian american is invisible in the school curriculum and how many organisations have come together to try and change that.even as the fasted growing racial group even a vast majority of the asian community don't know much about their own history.the author wrote this article to educate people on the asian american history even thought they are going through hard times as a community

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Covid-19 Fueling Anti-Asian Racism and Xenophobia Worldwide

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Governments should take urgent steps to prevent racist and xenophobic violence and discrimination linked to the Covid-19 pandemic while prosecuting racial attacks against Asians and people of Asian descent.

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BY LUIS NOE-BUSTAMANTE, NEIL G. RUIZ, MARK HUGO LOPEZ AND KHADIJAH EDWARDS  published: May 9th 2022

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BY LUIS NOE-BUSTAMANTE, NEIL G. RUIZ, MARK HUGO LOPEZ AND KHADIJAH EDWARDS  published: May 9th 2022

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the Asian community has been getting a lot of hate according to new research shows that 63 percent of Asian adults say violence and racism have risen by 19 percent. this has made many of their lives more complicated and made them concerned about their safety when out in public or in general. most of the hate was because of America's last president Donald trump and just racism, in general, blaming the Asian community for the cause of the virus covid-19."A survey was conducted from April 11th to the 17th of 2022 about a year after a fatal shooting of eight people, including six women of Asian descent, in the Atlanta area". all these attacks and threats against the Asian community make them fear for their lives which made most change their daily routines to avoid them.

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About a third of Asian Americans say they have changed their daily routine due to concerns over threats, attacks

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Most Asian Americans say violence against them is increasing, and most also worry at least some of the time about being threatened or attacked.

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By:Li Zhou  ,  published:March 15th 2022

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By:Li Zhou  ,  published:March 15th 2022

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A 24 year old asian voting rights organizer based in brooklyn felt as though she had to do something to fix the Asian hate problems after learning of a shooting in atlanta. shootings occured in three areas of atlanta taking the lives of eight people including six asian woman.this incident made alot of people feel as though it was a racially motivated attack becuase the gunman was a white mail and most of the attacks were focused on asian buisnesses. this made people feel as though they dont really care much about the asian community and trying to find reaosns to make the attack not seem racially motivated.most of all these attacks are tied to xenophobic sentiments twoards covid ninteen.this is proven becuse since the year 2020 attacks against people of the asian community have risen up tp more than 10,900 attacks from march of 2020 to december of 2021.

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Brianna Cea, a 24-year-old voting rights organizer based in Brooklyn, felt a painful sense of recognition after the Atlanta shootings last March.

These shootings - which occurred at three Atlanta-area spas - took the lives of eight people, including six Asian women. The victims included Daoyou Feng, 44, Hyun Jung Grant, 51, Suncha Kim, 69, Paul Andre Michels, 54, Soon Chung Park, 74, Xiaojie "Emily" Tan, 49, Yong Ae Yue, 63, and Delaina Ashley Yaun, 33.

"Seeing people who look like me being targeted and people not recognizing that they were clearly targeted because of what they looked like was hard," Cea, who identifies as Thai, Korean, and Chinese American, told Vox.

Initially, both police and the media appeared to accept claims that the shootings, carried out by a white man, were not racially motivated, even though the attacks focused on Asian-run businesses, and the rationale he gave was that it was a way to reduce sexual "temptation," a statement that speaks to the longstanding objectification of Asian women. The fact that people wouldn't acknowledge the racial aspect of the attacks only added to the trauma of the shootings, Cea emphasizes.

"To me it was compounding that feeling of constantly feeling invisible, reckoning with that in the media and in the workplace," says Cea, who serves as the president of the Asian American advocacy group OCA-New York and the executive director of GenVote. "In the face of this tragedy, you still go back to this narrative of erasure."

For Cea and a number of other Asian Americans, Atlanta was a breaking point amid two years of growing anti-Asian violence that took the form of brutal attacks on older people, vandalization of businesses, and assaults on the street. Fueled by xenophobic sentiment tied to the coronavirus's origins in Wuhan, China, and former President Donald Trump's use of racist terms like "China Virus," anti-Asian harassment soared in 2020 and 2021. According to Stop AAPI Hate, an organization tracking instances of violence and verbal abuse, there were more than 10,900 incidents reported between March 2020 and December 2021.

The devastation of the Atlanta shootings compelled many Asian Americans to speak out in a new way. In the weeks that followed, rallies erupted across more than 50 cities, and hundreds of thousands of people participated in trainings, petitions, and crowdfunding efforts to support victims and condemn anti-Asian violence. Cea was among those to host a vigil in New York City, which sought to memorialize the victims. The use of hashtags like #StopAsianHate and #StopAAPIHate took off on Twitter and Instagram as well.

What began as a tagline on social media ultimately evolved into a national movement, spurring a reckoning across different industries, prompting new policies at the federal and state levels and transforming broader awareness of anti-Asian racism.

Approaching the one-year anniversary of the Atlanta attacks, the Stop Asian Hate movement is at a crossroads.

While it's had significant achievements - including shepherding the passage of a federal hate crimes law, emboldening a new generation of Asian American activists and sparking a dialogue about anti-Asian discrimination - it also faces major questions of where to go next.

Organizers view the policies that have passed as insufficient - and worry that the focus on policing, which some have taken in response to anti-Asian violence, could harm communities of color. As more horrific attacks make headlines, many are still searching for new ways to address the biases that are tied to such violence as well.

"It can't just be about raising awareness and visibility," says Turner Willman, the social media director for the progressive advocacy group 18MillionRising. "It needs to be coupled with structural change."

The origins of the Stop Asian Hate movement

In the spring of 2020, Manjusha Kulkarni, head of the AAPI Equity Alliance; Cynthia Choi, the co-director of Chinese for Affirmative Action; and professor Russell Jeung, head of the Asian American Studies Department at San Francisco State started noticing a concerning trend. Increasingly, they were hearing from friends, colleagues, and news reports about a spike in anti-Asian incidents.

After Kulkarni held a press conference about an Asian American middle schooler in Los Angeles County who was badly beaten by a classmate, the three came together to launch Stop AAPI Hate, a website where people could submit incidents they've experienced.

"We needed firsthand data to prove what was happening in the lived experiences of Asian Americans," Jeung says.

Since its launch, Stop AAPI Hate has seen a steady influx of reports. And other sources have seen a similar uptick: A study by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at CSU San Bernardino found a 339 percent increase in hate crimes toward Asian Americans across several major cities between 2021 and 2020.

This year, the attacks have continued. In recent weeks, Christina Yuna Lee was murdered in New York City's Chinatown, and multiple Asian women were assaulted by the same person in New York City.

"That's a reason we started Stop AAPI Hate. We did not want this to be minimized, we wanted to have the numbers. We didn't want there to be denialism," Choi previously told Vox.

The movement, meanwhile, built slowly. Across the country, people - including the Stop AAPI Hate team - had been raising the alarm about growing anti-Asian sentiment for months, though it didn't get more attention until a series of videos capturing brutal attacks against elderly people went viral in February 2021.

These videos, including one calling attention to the killing of 84-year-old Thai American Vicha Ratanapakdee in San Francisco, were amplified by activists like Amanda Nguyen, a longtime activist against sexual violence, and celebrities including actors Daniel Dae Kim and Daniel Wu, who questioned why there wasn't more coverage and focus on these attacks.

As frustration about these incidents grew, the Atlanta shootings marked an inflection point, unleashing a wave of protests, demonstrations, and public outcry.

The Stop Asian Hate movement changed awareness of anti-Asian racism

One of the biggest achievements of the Stop Asian Hate movement is that it raised awareness about the pervasiveness of anti-Asian racism.

"There has been this narrative over the last many, many years that so many parts of our community don't face marginalization that we know we're impacted by," says Mohan Seshadri, the executive director of the Asian Pacific Islander Political Alliance of Pennsylvania. "We are seeing folks outside of our community waking up to the fact that anti-Asian violence and anti-Asian racism has been baked into our system and our government."

For decades, the discrimination that Asian Americans have faced - including everything from exclusionary immigration policy to outright erasure - has been rendered invisible. In large part, that's been due to the "model minority" myth. First popularized in the 1960s, it implies that all Asian people are successful and well-off, obscuring both the diversity within the group as well as the disparities that people experience.

But public perception of the problem of anti-Asian racism has changed rapidly.

According to a UCLA-led survey, between 2017 and 2021, the percentage of people who believed Asian Americans experienced significant discrimination more than doubled. The survey, analyzed for Vox by Baylor University's Jerry Park and Seattle Pacific University's Joshua Tom, found that 23 percent of people across demographic groups said they believed Asian Americans faced a lot of discrimination in 2021, compared to the 10 percent of people who said the same in a similar poll done after the 2016 election.

In May 2021, following media coverage of anti-Asian attacks, as well as a surge of Stop Asian Hate rallies and protests, 60 percent of people surveyed in an AP-NORC poll also said they believed discrimination against Asian Americans had increased in the last year.

These polls were conducted shortly after interest in the Stop Asian Hate movement took off. And though they don't prove the movement alone was responsible for changing public opinion, other data points speak to the reach of Stop Asian Hate. As NBC News has reported, Google searches for the term "Asian American" were up 5,000 percent in 2021, and searches for the term "Stop Asian Hate" and "Stop AAPI Hate" also increased. Per tracking by the social media analytics firm Zignal Labs, the #StopAsianHate and #StopAAPIHate hashtags were used on Twitter more than 8.4 million and 2.5 million times, respectively, in 2021.

It's also forced a new dialogue across industries. Congress, for the first time in three decades, held a hearing focused explicitly on discrimination toward Asian Americans. Former late-night host Jay Leno apologized for jokes he'd made about Asian people eating dogs, which followed years of ignored complaints. And new attention has been placed on how underrepresented Asian Americans have been in film, television, elected office, and leadership roles relative to their presence in the US population.

There have been policy wins, too

The movement has fueled some policy wins, though activists are divided on whether certain bills actually address the source of anti-Asian discrimination.

At the federal level, Congress approved the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act last May, which designated an official at the Justice Department to focus on Covid-19-related hate crimes, provided more funding to law enforcement for hate crimes reporting, and bolstered training resources to help police address hate crimes.

At the time of the bill's passage, Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) said that the legislation offered "an important signal that Congress is taking anti-Asian racism and hatred seriously."

Some activists, like Stanley Mark, the senior staff attorney at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, have also celebrated the law as an important first step. "There is funding there to promote more reporting and strengthen community-based organizations. I do think it's a beginning," Mark says.

Others, however, have been more critical, concerned that the legislation doesn't confront the root causes of bias against Asian Americans, like xenophobic political rhetoric, gaps in education, and a lack of resources across communities. Many worry that it won't deter future hate crimes and that it could lead to unintended problems, such as the overpolicing of Asian American communities and other communities of color.

"The real question is what do we do with that data [the bill collects]? Is it to reinforce a certain narrative that we need more policing?" Jason Wu, co-chair of GAPIMNY-Empowering Queer & Trans Asian Pacific Islanders, one of over 85 Asian American and Pacific Islander advocacy groups that opposed the bill, previously told Vox.

At the state level, several bills have gained more momentum in the last year. In Illinois and New Jersey, lawmakers passed bills requiring schools to teach Asian American history after groups including Asian Americans Advancing Justice Chicago pushed lawmakers to take up the legislation.

"We're reaching out to school districts all across the state to make sure that this happens and that it's taught well," says Grace Pai, the executive director of AAAJ-Chicago. "That requires an army of people paying attention."

In California, the state legislature also passed an API Equity Budget, which allocates $166.5 million in funding to community-based organizations, including those working to help hate crime victims and to collect demographic data about the Asian American and Pacific Islander community in the state.

Moving forward, organizers - including a coalition called Make Us Visible - are continuing to focus on legislation that will require the teaching of ethnic studies and Asian American history in schools, with states including Florida, Ohio, and Connecticut also weighing such curriculums. Rep. Grace Meng (D-NY) has also introduced federal legislation aimed at requiring the teaching of Asian American history in schools, while the White House has reestablished its initiative on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders, which is dedicated to improving language access and data collection.

Asian American organizations have seen a surge in engagement

Another effect of the Stop Asian Hate movement has been a surge of engagement and participation in Asian American organizations in the past year.

Asian Americans Advancing Justice has seen more than 130,000 people participate in bystander trainings it's held via chapters across the country. And according to a rough estimate from Candid, an organization that tracks funding for nonprofits and foundations, $112.4 million was committed in grants to AAPI organizations in 2021, a 16 percent uptick from the $97.2 million committed in 2020.

"The world of philanthropy for many years had neglected Asian American communities," says University of California Davis Asian American studies professor Robyn Rodriguez, whose research focuses on Asian American activism. "There's been a new investment in Asian American communities that hasn't existed before."

A host of new organizations providing mutual aid and local resources have cropped up as well. In New York City, Soar Over Hate is among the new mutual aid organizations that have launched to help provide everything from public safety resources to health care screenings. In Los Angeles, a new group called Seniors Fight Back offers free self-defense classes to elders.

Nationally, a number of new coalitions have formed between Asian American groups, including the Asian American Leader's Table, which sought to help organizations around the country respond to anti-Asian violence in different regions.

"Where community exists now but didn't exist before, that's an immense accomplishment," says Tuấn ĐinhJanelle, the director of field at the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center.

The movement has also spawned a new generation of organizers. Grace Xia, 17, and Nathan Duong, 18, are among those who organized their first protests last year in, respectively, San Mateo, California, and Seattle, Washington. Xia says her protest centered the voices of AAPI women leaders and was attended by 300 people. Duong's rally focused on passing out safety supplies, including emergency whistles and face masks. Both have said they intend to keep up this activism moving forward.

The Stop AAPI Hate movement has strengthened Asian Americans' affinity with AAPI as a political identity as well. Polls have shown a growing number of AAPI adults are now identifying as members of the broader AAPI community.

There are a lot of paths forward for the movement

Sustaining the energy of the movement, and maintaining a cohesive coalition, are the next hurdles that organizers face.

"The challenge is that you have so many Asian and Pacific Islander organizations out there. To get them to collectively work together and share the same voice is very challenging," says Connie Chung Joe, the executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice Los Angeles.

Among the most common goals of what's still a decentralized movement: pushing more education about Asian American history, which activists see as key to changing perceptions and combating the erasure that AAPI people have faced.

But issues like policing are still a source of division. The Stop AAPI Hate organization found that 53 percent of Asian Americans and 58 percent of Pacific Islanders named education as an effective solution to address anti-AAPI sentiment, while 30 percent of Asian Americans and 21 percent of Pacific islanders favored more law enforcement.

"There are some who believe we need to double down on policing and there are some who are very skeptical and vehemently opposed to a solution that focuses on law enforcement because it undermines what we know about the role of policing in Black Lives Matter," says University of Maryland Asian American studies professor Janelle Wong.

There's also a push to broaden the focus of the movement beyond individual incidents of hate that have predominantly affected East Asian and Southeast Asian people to confront structural racism that different Asian American groups have faced. This includes the deportations of Southeast Asian people and the racial profiling of South Asian people as national security threats in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

"What kinds of incidents count is sometimes very narrow, and it ends up leaving people out," says Willman.

To step up the fight against systemic racism, some activists hope that the Stop AAPI Hate movement can develop its own detailed policy agenda, and point to the BREATHE Act - legislation drafted by the Movement for Black Lives and endorsed by progressive lawmakers such as Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) - as a source of inspiration. Among other things, that act would shutter the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency as well as the Drug Enforcement Agency, while divesting federal funds from local law enforcement.

"The Movement for Black Lives has the BREATHE Act, a North Star piece of legislation. I think we need one as an Asian American movement, a North Star," says Sarath Suong, the national director of the Southeast Asian Freedom Network.

Many organizers also believe that working in solidarity with other communities of color is vital to combat a broader system of white supremacy and collectively build political power.

Doing so will require acknowledging biases within Asian American communities - and countering them. Some experts, like UC Davis's Rodriguez, fear media reports that have focused on anti-Asian incidents by Black attackers could activate anti-Blackness among some members of Asian communities.

For now, different groups are approaching next steps in unique ways. The Stop AAPI Hate organization is backing California legislation that would track data about street harassment near public transit, and study it as a public health issue. 18MillionRising is supporting the VISION Act, a California bill that addresses how incarcerated immigrants and refugees are often sent to ICE detention after their release from prison. And organizers in Connecticut have ramped up advocacy for a bill requiring Asian American history in the state's schools.

Certain activists also aim to harness the energy of this movement to mobilize more Asian American voters during the 2022 elections after the group saw sharp increases in turnout in 2020.

"Despite common assumption that Asian Americans don't care about politics, or that they are apolitical, what 2021 has shown us is that's not true," says Indiana University Asian American studies professor Ellen Wu.

Cea, the voting rights activist, and others ultimately hope the energy from Stop Asian Hate can fuel affirmative expressions of Asian Americans' strength and political power.

"It did provide a unified rallying cry for folks, but a year later, it's important that we change the narrative," she says. "If we continue this idea of stopping Asian hate, that perpetuates this idea that we are constant victims of hate. We need to have a more empowering narrative that we are speaking out and fighting back."

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The Stop Asian Hate movement is at a crossroads

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Brianna Cea, a 24-year-old voting rights organizer based in Brooklyn, felt a painful sense of recognition after the Atlanta shootings last March. These shootings - which occurred at three Atlanta-area spas - took the lives of eight people, including six Asian women.

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By:Frances kai-Hwa Wang   ,  Published:april 11th 2022

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By:Frances kai-Hwa Wang   ,  Published:april 11th 2022

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during the early years of 2020 there was a major attack in atlanta that opened everyone's eyes on how bad the hate against the asian community was.it asnt a surprise to many people in the community because many attacks like that have been happening for frequently during the year 2020.this attack hit home for many asians because it made them think that could have been them in that situation.these attack seem to be or most definitely are because of racism against the community since the covid-19 outbreak. this made a lot of people see that discrimination against the asian community does not exist said Ayesha Ghazi Edwin a part of the Michigan Asian Pacific American Affairs Commision(MAPAAC).

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DETROIT - When Rebeka Islam watched news break about a series of shootings at Atlanta area spas last year, she felt as if someone had punched her in the gut. "I was simply devastated," Islam said. However, she was not surprised.

Prosecutors would go on to argue that the 22-year-old white man suspected of killing eight people that day, including six Asian American women, was motivated by race and gender. The suspect has claimed he was motivated by sex addiction. The victims included Daoyou Feng, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Soon Chung Park, Xiaojie Tan, Yong Ae Yue, Delaina Ashley Yaun Gonzalez, and Paul Andre Michels.
WATCH MORE: Remembering the lives lost in Atlanta shootings
But "prior to the Atlanta shootings, there was already a rise in racist, violent acts against Asian Americans all across the country. It was horrifying to watch this happen," said Islam, the executive director of APIAVote-Michigan, a grassroots nonpartisan organization working to increase Asian American and Pacific Islander civic engagement. "This is where it hit even closer to home for me. I'm sure many women like myself were thinking, 'that could have been me.'"

A year after the shootings, many additional attacks on Asian Americans have continued across the country, something activists view as part of the long tradition of violence and discrimination against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders woven through the nation's history.

"Part of American culture has been minimizing and pretending discrimination against Asian Americans can't and does not exist," said Ayesha Ghazi Edwin, chair of the Michigan Asian Pacific American Affairs Commission (MAPAAC).

There are 22.9 million Asian Americans and 1.6 million Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders across the U.S., according to 2019 Census data. American history is pockmarked with anti-Asian exclusion, discrimination and prejudice, particularly when economic times are tough or during other times of great unrest. Following 9/11, there was a 1,600 percent increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes reported to the FBI in 2001 as compared to 2000. The 1982 killing of Vincent Chin in Detroit came at the end of the 1980-1982 recession. The examples stretch further: the Page Act of 1875, America's first immigration law, which effectively banned almost all Chinese women after the Great Panic of 1873; the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned almost all Chinese people from the country during the Long Depression of 1873 to 1896; the 1907 Bellingham riots, in which a mob of 500 white working men attacked and forced out several hundred mostly Sikh men over fears of labor competition at lumber mills; and the 1942 incarceration of about 120,000 Japanese Americans after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, to name a few.
WATCH MORE: 'Courageous vulnerability': Sikhs reflect on targeted attacks after FedEx shooting
The most recent report from Stop AAPI Hate, a coalition that tracks hate incidents and hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the U.S., shows that from March 2020 to December 2021, almost 11,000 hate incidents against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders were self-reported to the organization. Nearly 62 percent of those incidents were reported by women. About 120 occurred in Michigan, where Islam's group works.

These numbers are likely undercounted. In a survey between AAPI Data, a demographic and policy research group focused on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, and Survey Monkey in late March of 2021, one in eight Asian Americans surveyed said they had experienced a hate crime or hate incident in 2020 and the first three months of 2021.
READ MORE: 'You don't teach prejudice by discussing its existence.' How to talk to children about race and discrimination.
AAPI Data's most recent 2022 American Experiences with Discrimination Survey in partnership with Momentive conducted in early March of this year showed that number had risen to 1 in 6 Asian American adults in the past year. In the first three months of 2022 the figure is already at 1 in 12, or 8 percent, with the number likely to increase as the year continues and COVID-19 restrictions lift.
READ MORE: Sikh Americans push for greater visibility, awareness against years of hate crimes, misunderstanding
The survey also found that Asian American men are as likely to experience hate crimes and hate incidents, but are less likely to report them, and that 83 percent of Asian American parents are concerned that their children may be bullied because of their race or ethnicity.

Asian Americans were not alone in experiencing hate incidents. From January 2021 through early March 2022, the latest survey showed, 19 percent of multiracial adults, 17 percent of Black adults, 16 percent of Asian American adults, 15 percent of Native American adults, 14 percent of Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander adults, and 13 percent of Latino American adults experienced hate incidents or hate crimes, in comparison to only 6 percent of white adults.

"The horrific violence we saw in Atlanta in March 2021 made some people pay attention to this problem in a new way," said Melissa Borja, an assistant professor of American culture focused on Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies at the University of Michigan. "I only wish they had paid attention to it earlier."

In the days and months after the Atlanta shootings, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Atlanta and met the families of victims and Asian American community advocates on March 19, 2021; Congress passed the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act in May 2021; Biden established the White House Initiative on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders (WHIAANHPI) and the President's Advisory Commission on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders (PACAANHPI). Many states, counties, cities, and organizations passed resolutions condemning anti-Asian American violence. A bipartisan group of 26 governors issued a joint statement in solidarity. Illinois and New Jersey passed laws requiring the teaching of Asian American studies in K-12 schools, and other states are considering similar mandates, including Michigan, Ohio, Florida, and Connecticut. Nationally, Rep. Grace Meng, D-N.Y., introduced H.R.2283 Teaching Asian Pacific American History Act, which has been referred to committee.
WATCH MORE: Asian business districts hope for recovery after shutdown, racist attacks
But there is more work to do, activists say. "We have a responsibility to keep this activism alive and to speak out against racism whenever it rears its head," Islam said.

When a gunman killed eight people, including six women of Asian descent, last year in the Atlanta spa shooting, Zora Bowens and Ceena Vang created the activist organization Whenever We're Needed and began holding rallies around southeast Michigan.

A history of violence and discrimination, in the U.S and beyond

Borja, at the University of Michigan, has been tracking and mapping the rise in anti-Asian American violence with a team of nearly 20 researchers through her Virulent Hate Project. She and other scholars and community activists had been warning for more than a year that something like the shootings in Atlanta could happen because of the COVID-19 pandemic, increased tensions between the U.S. and China, and rhetoric from prominent leaders that scapegoated China for the pandemic, "causing Asian Americans to become increasingly vulnerable to acts of violence, racism, discrimination, and harassment," Borja said.

Anti-Asian American attacks and boycotts of Asian American owned businesses began to rise in January 2020 alongside early reports of COVID-19 in China. In March 2020, Bawi Cung and his 6-year-old son were attacked by a man armed with a knife at a Sam's Club in Midland, Texas. The man, who later pleaded guilty to hate-crime charges, thought the Burmese American family was Chinese and blamed them for COVID-19. In January and February 2021, several attacks against elderly Asian Americans attracted media attention, including 84-year-old Thai American grandfather Vicha Ratanapakdee in San Francisco, who was shoved to the ground and died of his injuries; 65-year-old Filipina American Vilma Kari in New York, who was kicked and stomped as security guards looked on and failed to intervene, and 75-year-old grandmother Xiao Zhen Xie in San Francisco, who fought back against her attacker, beating the man with a board and putting him into the hospital.

Not all violent crimes and incidents against Asian Americans are hate crimes - only the first and third of those mentioned above were classified that way. Virulent Hate Project's work shows that anti-Asian American racism takes many forms, and not all rise to the level of prosecutable crimes.

"Hate crimes have been the focus of a lot of public discussion, advocacy, and research. However, to focus only on hate crimes is to miss the bigger story of racism," Borja said. "While some forms of racism involve violent hate crimes, the vast majority of expressions of anti-Asian racism do not. Racism is expressed in many forms, all of which harm Asian Americans."

"Our vision of understanding the problem of anti-Asian racism needs to be global in scope."

These forms of anti-Asian American racism include physical harassment, verbal harassment, avoidance, spitting and coughing, business downturn, vandalism and graffiti, online and social media harassment, and barring from business. Borja also found that anti-Asian racism is both global and local. She found stories of anti-Asian racism, violence, and discrimination in cities across the United States, but also in Australia, the U.K., Canada, and other countries.

"Our vision of understanding the problem of anti-Asian racism needs to be global in scope. The pandemic scapegoating affecting people of Asian descent has been experienced all around the world," Borja said. "For local organizers, I think it's important to see how anti-Asian racism has been experienced in our own communities by our own neighbors, classmates, and coworkers."
READ MORE: How the Sikh community's experiences with hate crimes shows why data collection is so important
In addition, scholars and activists point to the stereotyped perception of Asian Americans as smaller and less likely to fight back. And at the intersection of race and gender, the proliferation of hypersexualized stereotypes make Asian American and Pacific Islander women extra vulnerable to racism, sexism, and violence. Borja points to how the alleged Atlanta shooter claimed that his crimes were not racially or sexually motivated, which was initially accepted unquestioningly by law enforcement.

"It enraged me that ... the public accepted it, in part because hyper-sexualization of East Asian women stereotypes is so pervasive and normalized in our society that people can't see it when it's in front of their face," Borja said.
READ MORE: The only Arab American museum in the nation is 'much more than a building'

One year after the Atlanta spa shooting, One Detroit and WDET sit down with activists Ceena Vang and Zora Bowens as they reflect on the first rally they held and the impact they've had on the community.

Speaking out and taking action
WATCH MORE: After Atlanta shooting, protesters call for action, protection for Asian Americans
In Michigan, the continued anti-Asian American violence also coincides with the approaching 40th anniversary of the death of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American man killed in a Detroit suburb by two white autoworkers following years of recession and unemployment anxieties as more fuel efficient Japanese automobiles became more popular in the U.S. following the 1973 and 1979 oil crises, cutting into the profits of American automobile manufacturers. The men who killed him were fined $3,780 and did not serve any jail time. The killing galvanized the Asian American community across ethnic lines to form multiethnic and multiracial alliances, to organize for civil rights, and to advocate for change in the Mitten State and across the country.

"Not many people know the historic role Detroit has in Asian American activism," Islam said. "His death in the early 1980s shocked so many Asian Americans nationwide, and [Asian Americans] mobilized and called this tragedy what it was: a hate crime. His death represents a critical turning point in that it mobilized Asian Americans and it became a rallying cry for stronger federal hate crime laws."

For Ghazi Edwin, the rising violence against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders across ethnicities brought her back to the time after 9/11, when there was a sudden increase in hate crimes, hate incidents, surveillance, harassment, and violence against Muslim Americans, Arab Americans, Sikh Americans, South Asian Americans, and others mistakenly associated with stereotypes of terrorists.

"Being a brown person who went through 9/11, I know what it feels like to go outside and have people look at you a little longer, wondering if you're 'to blame' for some international conflict, or a pandemic, that has nothing to do with you. I mourned for our Asian American community that day," and after the shooting at an Indianapolis FedEx facility that killed eight people, including four Sikh Americans, one month later.

While activists had been watching the number of reported anti-Asian American hate incidents and hate crimes rise steadily during the pandemic, the shootings in Atlanta brought much wider attention to the problem, and many more people and organizations began to act.
WATCH MORE: 'Hate is learned': Tracing the history of anti-Asian violence in America
Rallies, vigils, and town hall meetings were held virtually and in dozens of cities across the country. In Michigan, after the shootings, Ceena Vang and her best friend, Zora Bowens, created a community group to support Asian American, Black, and marginalized communities whenever and wherever they are needed, plainly calling the group Whenever We're Needed (WWN). They organized a protest and march against anti-Asian American violence in downtown Detroit outside of the McNamara Federal Building and a second larger rally 25 miles north in Troy outside of Troy City Hall.

"I felt very called to host a protest in Troy because I was born and raised there," Vang said. "Growing up in the suburbs and Troy being predominately Asian and white populated, you still felt like an outsider and faced stereotypes and discrimination as a [person of color]. It was gratifying to see citizens of Troy of all races and ages come out to show love and support, especially the youth."

Through the commission, Ghazi Edwin has helped many cities, counties, and the state write resolutions to condemn anti-Asian American sentiment. She also helped organize a virtual town hall meeting with Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and state Attorney General Dana Nessel, which was attended by more than 4,000 people statewide. Ghazi Edwin is now running for Ann Arbor city council.

"It is so important to first discover and learn how to tell your story, over and over again," Ghazi Edwin said. "When I began to explore my Asian American identity, learn the story of Vincent Chin, and get involved in Asian American organizing, I found a whole world of Asian American history, civil rights, and important social issues that helped me understand and process my own story as an Asian American immigrant woman."
READ MORE: How the Sikh community's experiences with hate crimes shows why data collection is so important
"Stories help to share your experiences, and hearing the stories of others helps you to connect with them. ... We must share our stories as Asian Americans, as immigrants, as individuals and as a group, so people can understand the necessity of the Asian American civil rights movement," she added.

Changes over the past year

In the year since the shootings in Atlanta and Indianapolis, Vang has noticed more Asian Americans becoming more active and vocal speaking out against anti-Asian American violence. She hopes to see more unity and solidarity going forward.

"It is important for us to all band together and realize that we are more similar than we are different," Vang said. "The movement towards building a better future of unity happens when we acknowledge each other and the strength we have in numbers. The fight for equality and justice is lifelong and I encourage everyone to continue to be present."

Other activists have also noticed an awakening within the community. "Those of us who have known that white supremacy is the issue, are finally being heard," said Jungsoo Ahn, interim executive director of Rising Voices, a nonprofit organization that seeks to promote the civic participation of Asian American women and families in Michigan. "Those who have ascribed to, hidden under, and/or been forced into the model minority myth are beginning to resist. In Michigan, we are a group who has historically not been talked to and ignored in terms of the value of our voices and the resources attached to making our voices heard."

This awakening has also come with a greater investment of resources in Asian American communities. The National Science Foundation, for instance, is investing in research to help "understand, address, and end bias, discrimination and xenophobia, including against AA and NHPI communities." The Department of Justice announced $21 million in grants for state and local law enforcement to support them in investigating and prosecuting hate crimes, as well as assisting victims of those crimes.

As funders come to better understand the disparate challenges in Asian American communities and better understand that anti-Asian American hate has been an issue all along, advocates have been able to put forth more nuanced race and class narrative analyses, build power among Asian Americans, and develop multi-racial coalitions, Ahn said.

The federal COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, passed in May 2021, provides resources and training for state and local law enforcement to accurately identify and report hate crimes to the FBI, to create specialized hate crimes units, and to create hate crimes hotlines that are accessible to people with limited English proficiency.
WATCH MORE: What you can do to fight violence and racism against Asian Americans
Borja noticed that as more people pay attention to the issue of anti-Asian American and Pacific Islander racism, more individuals and organizations and other communities of color are speaking out in support of each other in solidarity. "I've seen allies speak up and show support for Asian Americans in new ways, and it's truly exciting," she said.

She was surprised, however, with how differently people responded to the 2021 shootings at an Indianapolis FedEx facility, which killed eight people, four of them Sikh American: Amarjeet Kaur Johal, Karli Smith, Matthew R. Alexander, Samaria Blackwell, Jasvinder Kaur, Jaswinder Singh, Amarjit Sekhon, John Weisert.

"It shocked me to see how Sikh Americans and other South Asian Americans have often not been part of how people imagine and understand who counts as Asian Americans," Borja said. "But Sikh Americans are Asian Americans, and they have also [been] victims of anti-Asian racism and violence. We need to do better about being more inclusive when we talk about Asian America."

The FBI has determined that these were not hate crimes, though the Sikh American community has urged investigators to recognize how bias played a role in the attack.

"The shooter chose a place known for hiring people of color, specifically a Punjabi Sikh-majority, for his attack," Amrith Kaur, Sikh Coalition legal director, said in a statement. "We are not dismissing that mental health issues nor the toxic masculinity discussed during the press conference played a role in this attack. But it is important to recognize that bias can be a factor in addition to these other issues."

Moving forward and solutions

For these Michigan activists, the legacy of Chin's murder is always in the back of their minds.

Borja emphasized the need to continue building relationships and working in coalition and solidarity with other communities that have experienced oppression and injustice at the local level and local contexts.

"We need to build on relationships at the local level, and we need to retain awareness of both the specificity of historical harm and the possibilities of working together with a shared vision of thriving and justice," she said. "So much of our national conversation about Asian America tends to focus on Asian Americans in California and New York, but the solutions that work there don't necessarily work elsewhere."

"The needs, populations, and political circumstances really differ when you look at the issue of anti-Asian racism in Indiana, Michigan, Texas, and Georgia. Each locale has its own history of racism and violence, and that sets up different opportunities for the future," Borja added.

In the Michigan legislature, Democratic State Sen. Stephanie Chang and Democratic State Rep. Ranjeev Puri successfully helped adopt resolutions condemning hate violence and rhetoric against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, and encouraging Michiganders to report hate crimes and discrimination. Chang has also proposed a bill to teach Asian American and Pacific Islander history to all K-12 students, and she has coordinated with other legislators of color to also propose bills to teach Arab and Chaldean American, Latino and Caribbean American, and Indigenous and Native American histories to all of Michigan's K-12 students in addition to African American history, which is already in the curriculum.

A more comprehensive education including the histories of communities of color will help people better understand others' intersectional identities, help disrupt the "model minority" myth stereotype, and pave the way for more complex solidarities.

"Acknowledging the diversity and complex intersectional identities among us, advocating for disaggregation of data so people understand the true nature of the inequities our community faces. Realizing how much more we have in common than different, continuing to advocate for representation in public school curriculum, not forgetting our history of achievements and of discrimination, and teaching it to others," Ghazi Edwin said.

On a national level, the National Korean American Service and Education Consortium (NAKASEC) is lobbying to pass legislation to create a pathway to citizenship for undocumented people, advocating in particular for Asian Americans, women, and adoptees. It is also trying to build solidarity among oppressed and marginalized communities.

"The root causes of violence and oppression must be addressed," said Rachel Koelzer, NAKASEC communications manager. "Half-baked solutions that punish, surveille, incarcerate, and target individuals or communities cannot be tolerated and will never offer our communities safety. We must continue building solidarity amongst oppressed and marginalized communities. Recognizing our shared struggles, we must move together toward collective liberation."

Events to mark the anniversaries of tragedies are usually held so communities can come together after having had a chance to recover and reflect. But for Asian American communities, the violence has not yet ended, delaying the healing process. The recent deaths of Michelle Alyssa Go who was pushed to death in front of a subway, Christina Yuna Lee, who was followed and killed in her home, GuiYing Ma, who died after being bludgeoned by a rock, and the brutal beating of the as yet unnamed 67-year-old Filipino grandmother are still fresh in people's minds.

"What's critical is that we do not let up," Islam said. "We've seen how often there is this immediate surge of interest in the aftermath of a tragedy, but then people begin to forget or they move on to the next news cycle. We simply can't do that. And for communities of color, we need to keep working as partners and continue to keep showing up for each other. There is strength in numbers and despite our differences ... and with a collective persistence, we can keep moving the needle on this issue. We cannot stop. We cannot lose momentum."

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How violence against Asian Americans has grown and how to stop it, according to activists

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One year after the Atlanta spa shootings which killed eight people, including six Asian American women, Asian American communities continue to be on edge.

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By: Jennifer Lee , Published: June 1st 2022

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By: Jennifer Lee , Published: June 1st 2022

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research in the article shows that hate crimes are broadly affect asian american,black and other communities of color.the same crisis mentioned in other articles the attack in atlanta by a white gunman on march 16th 2021 killing many people.data from the AAPI show based on many surveys more than 16,500 adults ,show that awareness of anti asian hate among the general public is relatively strong.more than 48 percent of these believe hate crimes against the asian community have risen since the year 2020.because of this people had started many movements like the #StopAAPIHate movement in hopes to try and stop racism and xenophobia.many of these researches show that many asians consider themselves " a person of color" and so do many other communities feel the same as well.

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The past 2 years have been a period of mourning, anger, fear, and exhaustion for Asian Americans: 16% of Asian American adults were victims of hate crimes in 2021, up from 12.5% in 2020; 31% worry "all the time" or "often" about being victimized because of their race; and 36% have changed their routines over concerns about personal safety. Despite the increase in anti-Asian hate crimes in the US, one-third of Americans remain unaware of the situation. The White House's invitation to BTS-the globally popular K-pop group-will go a long way toward raising awareness.

Refusing to stay silent after the mass murder in Atlanta, Georgia, last year that left eight dead, including six women of Asian descent, BTS issued a statement: "What is happening right now cannot be dissociated from our identity as Asians." Despite their inimitable success and stature, the seven performers have not been immune to anti-Asian racism; they know how it feels to have racial epithets hurled at them, be blamed for COVID-19, mocked for the way they look, and dismissed.

Dismissing Asians and Asian Americans comes easily when they are absent from one's imagination: 58% of Americans cannot name a single prominent Asian American; and only two states (Illinois and New Jersey) require Asian American history to be taught in their public schools. Not surprisingly, 42% of Americans cannot name a single policy or historical event related to Asian Americans. Even when prompted, 45% are unaware of the Chinese Exclusion Act, and 67% never heard of the murder of Vincent Chin in 1982.

Vincent Chin was a Chinese American engineer who was beaten to death with a baseball bat by two white autoworkers in Detroit, Michigan. Chin was blamed for the loss of auto jobs amid a rise in Japanese imports and a national recession. The two white men pled guilty to manslaughter, yet each was sentenced to only 3 years of probation and a fine of $3000.

The trope of Asian Americans as the foreign "other" is a product of decades of targeted exclusion. Asians are the only group who have been explicitly excluded from immigrating into the United States because of their race and national origin. Beginning with the Page Act of 1875 that banned women from any "Oriental country" on the presumption that they were prostitutes, laws of exclusion soon expanded to Chinese male laborers with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Chinese exclusion was not repealed until 1943, and America's long-standing policy of restricting immigrants from non-European countries was not abolished until 1965 when Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act.

Like two-thirds of Asian Americans today, I am an immigrant. I am also a child of immigrants; at the age of 3, I emigrated with my parents from South Korea because my father sought to pursue a PhD in religion and work with a professor at Temple University whose research he admired. My mother-who was trained as a nurse by American missionaries in Seoul-obtained a visa for our family, enabling us to immigrate after the 1965 change in US immigration law.

Soon after entering the PhD program, my father would feel the sting of racism because his spoken English did not match his reading fluency (nor his fluency in German, for that matter). Dismissed as a "foreign student," he had trouble finding professors willing to listen to his ideas and shepherd him into a dissertation project. The dismissal of Asian students is not unusual. In a 2012 study, researchers sent emails to more than 6500 professors in American universities across disciplines, posing as prospective graduate students with names signaling their race and gender. Professors were the least likely to respond to those with Chinese and Indian names. My father earned his PhD in spite of being dismissed, but it took years longer than it should have.

We may not know about their legacy of exclusion or even be able to name a prominent Asian American to be intimately familiar with the pernicious stereotypes of Asians-they are indelibly foreign, and therefore easily mocked and readily disregarded. This is the cost and consequence of failing to include the history of Asian America as an integral part of the history of America. Given their stardom, BTS could easily choose to turn a blind eye and dismiss anti-Asian violence and racism. They choose not to, and neither should anyone else.
Jennifer Lee is the Julian Clarence Levi Professor of Social Sciences in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University, New York, NY, USA. [email protected]

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The past 2 years have been a period of mourning, anger, fear, and exhaustion for Asian Americans: 16% of Asian American adults were victims of hate crimes in 2021, up from 12.5% in 2020; 31% worry "all the time" or "often" about being victimized because of their race; and 36% have changed their routines over concerns about personal safety.

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By: Leila Fadel , Published:October 22nd 2021 

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By: Leila Fadel , Published:October 22nd 2021 

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in north there have been spikes of hate crimes against people in the asian community driven by racism.many people don't feel safe leaving there homes .with many attacks against the elderly going like lisa lu and her 64 year old grandma who got assaulted and robbed in san jose. there was also another incident in oklahoma where a 52 year old woman was shot in the head my a flair gun. all these attacks made people realise the severity of the racism against asians . people believe most of these crimes are because of the fact that the first case of covid was in wohan china.so many people mostly racists and trump supporters blame the virus on the asian community and started assaulting and threatening the asian community.

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In the Bay Area of Northern California there has been a spike in hate-driven violenc e against Asian Americans.

A 64-year-old grandma assaulted and robbed in San Jose. A 52-year-old Asian American woman shot in the head with a flare gun in Oakland.

All of it feels too close to home for Lisa Lu, a new mom who lives in the Bay Area.

"I felt like during the height of the pandemic it didn't feel safe for me to go outside, and I was actually pregnant for most of the pandemic," Lu says. "So that was especially scary, like the thought of me going anywhere and being attacked and anything happening to my baby."

According to a new poll from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, 1 in 4 Asian Americans feared - in the past few months - that members of their household would be attacked or threatened because of their race or ethnicity. More than 20% of Native American and Black households also expressed this fear.

The attacks in Lu's area on Asian Americans are reflective of the nation. Last year, the FBI recorded the highest number of hate crimes in more than a decade, with 64% motivated by race, ethnicity or heritage. But that number is likely even higher, advocates and experts say, since some agencies don't report this data to the FBI and many agencies report no incidents.

Life changed when Trump used racist rhetoric

For Asian Americans, the spike in attacks and the rising fear came with the global pandemic and the racist rhetoric from the Trump administration, including the use of derogatory terms like "Kung Flu."

"Trump calling it the China virus, that's when I felt like life changed," Lu says. "And honestly I don't want to venture out to any areas that are not diverse, and even in San Francisco and Oakland, I wouldn't walk alone."

Lu always has a buddy when she's out walking and she urges her older parents to stay inside as well.

"What's different about our poll is that we asked about your personal fears," says Mary Findling, the assistant director of the Harvard Opinion Research Program, speaking about the new poll. "We were shocked that 1 in 4 Asian Americans and around 1 in 5 Black and Native Americans say that in the past few months, they've feared that someone might threaten or physically attack their household because of their race or ethnicity."

Based on the data, she says, crime may seem rare or random for white people.

"But if you're not white, what we found is it's not random or rare at all," she says. "And this is really capturing people's everyday lived experiences. One in 4 is a lot of people who are looking over their shoulders in fear."

The poll also found in the past few months alone that 31% of Native American households reported facing discrimination or unfair treatment because of their race or ethnicity, followed by 29% of Black households, 26% of Asian households, and 20% of Latino households.

Everyday slights add to growing fear

For Asian Americans, in the past year there has been a lot of focus on high profile incidents like the horrific killings of Asian American women in Atlanta this spring, or the mass shooting in Indianapolis where half of those killed were American Sikhs. But according to Stop AAPI hate, Asian Americans are also dealing with everyday hateful slights and transgressions that contribute to the growing fear.

"The fear is based not only on potential hate crimes, but even the hate incidents," says Manjusha P. Kulkarni,co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate. "They're refused service at a grocery store or at a coffee shop, they're worried about even just being verbally harassed."

One organization alone got 9,000 reports in 15 months

Incidents like those make up 90% of the 9,000 that have been reported to her organization in 15 months. And that, she believes, is "just the tip of the iceberg."

Kulkarni says Asian Americans have been depicted as the perpetual foreigner across centuries. Because they're treated as outsiders, these communities become easily scapegoated. That's what happened with COVID, which originated in Wuhan, China, she says.

"Immediately you had President Trump drawing correlations. Blaming outright COVID on the Chinese people, using the racist rhetoric that he did: 'Wuhan virus, China virus, Kung flu,'" she says. "Then, essentially, people sort of extrapolating that and saying 'Oh, well, you know, these people brought it.' It's not dissimilar to the Japanese American incarceration, even the bubonic plague in the 1800s where Chinese Americans were blamed."

Before the start of the pandemic, Bay Area resident Lu had faced discrimination. She grew up in a largely white neighborhood as an Asian kid. But she's never felt this acute sense of fear for her physical safety until now.

For 58-year-old Victoria though, as a Black woman, she says she's had that feeling as long as she can remember, because she's been targeted before. She's only using her first name for privacy. She's a survivor of sexual assault.

"Because of my race and also, even more especially, because of my gender," she said. "I'm already a target as being seen as weak [as a woman] and then the color of your skin [the assumption] that you will not possibly report it, you will possibly not be believed."

And for Chris in North Dakota - he's Native American - he also worries about threats or attacks. He spends most of his time on the reservation, where he works and takes care of his brother. Worried about repercussions, he wants to use only his first name as well. He says that when he's off the reservation he's been feeling growing anger from Trump supporters.

"Most people are really friendly here, but there are some people that brazenly discuss not wearing masks in public and discuss immigrants and discuss Native Americans to each other while they're in the store and around people."

He says he often hears offensive things, like the idea that Native Americans are lazy or there are too many Black immigrants in town. And the rhetoric has grown over the past year and a half, before and after the elections.

So he keeps to himself and doesn't discuss his ethnicity or his beliefs.

"They're so vocal about it and offensive with their comments about it," he says. "We're part Native American andthere's just this political divide in the country right now after the last president and everything. And so I just try to keep everything low key."

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With racial attacks on the rise, Asian Americans fear for their safety

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In the Bay Area of Northern California there has been a spike in hate-driven violenc e against Asian Americans. A 64-year-old grandma assaulted and robbed in San Jose. A 52-year-old Asian American woman shot in the head with a flare gun in Oakland.

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By: Office of Public Affairs, published: August 4th, 2022

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By: Office of Public Affairs, published: August 4th, 2022

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A man named Jose Gomez was sentenced to 25 years in prison for a hate crime against an Asian family. he believed the family was Chinese and was part of the majority that believed the Asian community was the cause of covid-19.supposedly this was not the only time he had committed a hate crime against people of the Asian community. he had assaulted and attacked many other people who were a part of the Asian community telling them to " get out of America".this incident shows how many of these assaults were because many of these people believed that the virus was because of the Asian community another excuse for plain racism toward the community.

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The Justice Department today announced that Jose Gomez III, 21, of Midland, Texas, was sentenced to 25 years in prison on hate crime charges for attacking an Asian family he believed was Chinese and therefore responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. Gomez had previously pleaded guilty to three counts of committing a hate crime.

According to the facts admitted in the plea, on March 14, 2020, Gomez entered a Sam's Club Warehouse in Midland, Texas, behind an Asian family with young children. Gomez had never seen them before and believed they were Chinese. Gomez followed them in the store for several minutes because he perceived them to be a "threat" as they were "from the country who started spreading that disease around." Gomez then momentarily left the family to find a serrated steak knife in the store. Gomez bent the blade so that when he held the handle in his fist, the blade rested against his knuckles, sharp-edge facing outward. Gomez returned to the Asian family and punched the father, B.C., in the face, cutting him. Gomez then left to retrieve an eight-inch knife from the store. When Gomez returned to B.C., Gomez abruptly turned towards B.C.'s two young children - then aged six and two years old - who were seated in the front basket of the shopping cart. Gomez slashed open the face of R.C., the then-six-year-old child. The blade entered millimeters from R.C.'s right eye, split his right ear, and wrapped around to the back of his skull. Gomez also stabbed a white Sam's Club employee, Z.O., who intervened to stop Gomez from further assaulting the Asian family. While being held down on the ground, Gomez yelled at the Asian family, "Get out of America!"

Gomez admitted he believed the Asian family was Chinese and that he blamed them for the COVID-19 pandemic. Gomez further admitted he had attempted to kill the six-year-old child. Gomez also admitted he had attacked Z.O., the store employee, because Gomez wanted to kill the six-year-old child and Z.O. was preventing him from doing so.

"Pandemic-driven and racially-motivated acts of violence are deplorable crimes, and the Justice Department stands ready to use our hate crimes laws to hold perpetrators accountable," said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke for the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division."Hate crimes targeting Asian Americans have spiked during the pandemic and must be confronted. All people deserve to feel safe and secure living in their communities, regardless of race, color or national origin."

"Hate-motivated violence will simply not be tolerated in our society and every person deserves to feel safe from such vicious harm," said U.S. Attorney Ashley C. Hoff for the Western District of Texas. "Today's sentence sends the message loud and clear that our office will aggressively prosecute federal hate crimes while seeking justice for victims."

"Mr. Gomez's cowardly and racially motivated actions do not represent our West Texas community," said Special Agent in Charge Jeffery R. Downey of the FBI El Paso Field Office. "It is our hope today's sentence will help the victims with the healing process. Rest assured, the FBI and our law enforcement partners will aggressively pursue anyone who commits these violent acts to ensure the civil rights of all Americans are protected."

The case was investigated by the Midland Police Department and the FBI. The case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Brandi Young for the Western District of Texas and Trial Attorney Angie Cha of the Civil Rights Division's Criminal Section.

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Texas Man Sentenced on Hate Crime Charges for Attacking Asian Family

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The Justice Department today announced that Jose Gomez III, 21, of Midland, Texas, was sentenced to 25 years in prison on hate crime charges for attacking an Asian family he believed was Chinese and therefore responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic.

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By:Angela R. Gover,Shannon B. HarperLynn Langton  Published: July 7th 2020

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By:Angela R. Gover,Shannon B. HarperLynn Langton  Published: July 7th 2020

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the coronavirus had been believed to have started in Wuhan, China in late December 2019. this sparked a thread of attacks and threats toward the Asian community. Throughout history, it showed that many viruses and pandemics have been associated with the stigmatization and "othering " of people in the Asian community. this shows how much the Asian communities history is not being told or educated enough about. Asian hate of racism and xenophobia has been going on since the 1700s. this is nothing new to the Asian community but now they feel like they can take a stand for themselves and educate people on Asian American history.

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Abstract

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is believed to have emerged in Wuhan, China in late December 2019 and began rapidly spreading around the globe throughout the spring months of 2020. As COVID-19 proliferated across the United States, Asian Americans reported a surge in racially motivated hate crimes involving physical violence and harassment. Throughout history, pandemic-related health crises have been associated with the stigmatization and "othering" of people of Asian descent. Asian Americans have experienced verbal and physical violence motivated by individual-level racism and xenophobia from the time they arrived in America in the late 1700s up until the present day. At the institutional level, the state has often implicitly reinforced, encouraged, and perpetuated this violence through bigoted rhetoric and exclusionary policies. COVID-19 has enabled the spread of racism and created national insecurity, fear of foreigners, and general xenophobia, which may be related to the increase in anti-Asian hate crimes during the pandemic. We examine how these crimes - situated in historically entrenched and intersecting individual-level and institutional-level racism and xenophobia - have operated to "other" Asian Americans and reproduce inequality.

Keywords: Hate crime, COVID-19, Coronavirus, Pandemic, Asian American, Asian

Introduction

" I have seen this incredible seesaw effect. We can go back to the turn of the century, when Chinese were the only people to be legally excluded from this country because people were so fearful of the jobs they were taking. That was seemingly a place that we would never go to anymore, that level of vitriol. We've seen it, though, in waves since then: World War II, we had an Asian enemy; Korean War, we had an Asian enemy; Vietnam War, we had an Asian enemy. And then we had Asian enemies that were economic in nature." ~ Janet Yang ( 2020).

In the last week of 2019, the world began to take notice of reports out of Wuhan, China hospitals about an increase in pneumonia cases of unexplained origin (Wang, Horby, Hayden, & Gao, 2020). Soon thereafter, scientists found that these illnesses were due to a new type of coronavirus (i.e., severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 [SARS-CoV-2]), which causes a disease referred to as COVID-19 (i.e., 2019 coronavirus disease) (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2020a). It is believed that the virus spread from animals to humans in Wuhan's open-air "wet markets" that sell fish and raw meat to consumers (CDC, 2020a), and by mid-January 2020, began to spread rapidly throughout Asia and globally (Schumaker, 2020). By the end of January, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a "Public Health Emergency of International Concern" (CDC, 2020b).

As all Americans grew accustomed to a "new normal" secluded lifestyle (e.g., social distancing requirements and stay-at-home orders) and mounting anxieties about the spread of COVID-19, Asian Americans (i.e., people of diverse ethnicities with origins in East Asia and Southeast Asia1) - have been additionally burdened by heightened racial tension and associated racist microaggressions and verbal attacks. Asian Americans have also reported a surge in a second epidemic targeting them specifically - racially motivated hate crimes involving physical violence and harassment - despite the disease impacting people of all races/ethnicities (Chiu, 2020). Under the Hate Crime Statistic Act (28 U.S.C. § 534), hate crime is defined as "crimes that manifest evidence of prejudice based on race, gender and gender identity, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity."

Hate crime may be used to "other" minority racial/ethnic groups who are perceived as dangerous (i.e., belief that people of Asian descent are solely responsible for causing and spreading COVID-19) and outside their place of belonging (Grove & Zwi, 2006). Othering is embedded in racism (i.e., perceptions of white racial superiority) and xenophobia (i.e., fear of foreigners). Othering involves a process whereby the group at the top of the racial hierarchy (exemplified by whiteness in America) and/or individuals who believe that Asian Americans do not rightly belong in the U.S., seek to maintain the status quo by defining which members of society do and do not fully belong (Perry, 2001).

Asian Americans have experienced physical violence/hate crime and harassment (e.g., violent attacks during establishment of Chinatowns in the late 1800s [Chen, 2000]), persistent marginalizing stereotyping (e.g., the perpetuation of the "yellow peril" myth at the turn of the 20 th century [Mudambi, 2019]), and verbal attacks and microaggressions motivated by individual-level racism and xenophobia from the time they arrived in America in the late 1700s up until the present day (Chen, 2000). At the institutional-level, the state (i.e., the federal and state governments) has often implicitly/explicitly reinforced, encouraged, and perpetuated this violence through racist and xenophobic discriminatory rhetoric and exclusionary policies (e.g., Chinese Exclusion Act of 1881 [Yung, Chang, & Lai, 2006]).

COVID-19 has enabled the spread of racism and created national insecurity, fear of foreigners, and general xenophobia, which may be associated with the increase in anti-Asian hate crime during the pandemic (Vachuska, 2020). Using the lens of othering theory, we examine how these crimes - situated in historically entrenched and intersecting individual-level and institutional-level racism and xenophobia - have operated to other Asian Americans, thus reproducing inequality. A mix of media and empirical sources are used to critically explore this dynamic. This paper positions anti-Asian hate crime during the COVID-19 pandemic historically and in relation to racist and xenophobic othering. We expand scholarship through examining the pandemic-driven hate crime experiences of Asian Americans to more definitively define the concept of othering.

Defining Hate Crime

According to the Department of Justice (DOJ, n.d.), a hate crime involves a criminal act, including violent crime such as harassment, assault, murder, arson, vandalism, or threats to commit such crimes against a person or his/her property due to their real or perceived race, color, religion, nationality, country of origin, disability, gender or sexual orientation. Conversely, some incidents of bias and hate that occur against marginalized groups meet the legal definition of harassment, but are considered "hate incidents" or acts of prejudice that do not rise to the level of a criminal act (DOJ, n.d.). These are defined as "acts of prejudice that are not crimes [...] and do not involve violence, threats, or property damage" (DOJ, n.d., n.p.). This paper primarily focuses on anti-Asian hate crimes involving criminal physical violence or harassment; however, we also examine studies and media accounts of anti-Asian "hate incidents" that involve verbal violence or microaggressions and violent crime (i.e., hate incidents and hate crimes were not disaggregated).

Hate crime statutes vary widely across states and jurisdictions and are defined to include varying bias motivations that often carry penalty enhancements (DOJ, n.d.). Some states require the prosecutor to prove that bias was a "substantial factor" in the perpetrator's motivation for committing the crime against a person or persons of a protected category if the crime is to be considered a hate crime and receive penalty enhancements under state law (DOJ, n.d.). Conversely, under federal hate crime laws, bias can be an "incidental factor" in the commission of the crime (DOJ, n.d.).

Othering Theory

Othering is a concept found in the literature in reference to a dominant group marginalizing a non-dominant group in some way. Originating out of prejudice and fear, the act of othering involves a process that labels those thought to be different from oneself (Weis, 1995), wherein the racial group with the most power in American society (e.g., whites) or the group that believes they have "civic belonging" (i.e., believe they intrinsically belong in the U.S.) (Kim & Sundstrom, 2014) stigmatize and distance individuals who are racially different (i.e., Asian Americans) (Grove & Zwi, 2006; Kim & Sundstrom, 2014). Othering also serves to reinforce these dominant groups' notions of their own "normality," and position those who are different as deviant through a historical and ongoing process of marginalization, disempowerment, and social exclusion (Grove & Zwi, 2006).

Asian Americans and Historical Experiences of Othering

In 2018, the estimated number of Asians in the United States was 22.2 million (U.S. Census Bureau, 2019), and they are projected to become the largest immigrant group in the U.S. by 2055 (Horowitz, Brown, & Cox, 2019). Among all racial groups in the U.S., Asians are the fastest growing, increasing by 72% between 2000 and 2015 (Lopez, Ruiz, & Patten, 2017). Recent studies show that as a bloc, voters from the Asian American community are wielding an influential voice in critical electoral battleground districts, and trends show that they have leaned increasingly Democratic in the past few elections (Zheng, 2019). The numbers of Asian American political candidates and elected officials have risen sharply as well (Zheng, 2019).

The following description of the early Asian immigrant experience seeks to place the othering of Asian Americans into a historical context, leading up to today's pandemic-driven experiences ranging from microaggressions and verbal harassment to assault and other violent hate crimes.

Early Asian Immigrant Experience

Established groups with civic belonging in the U.S. have long perceived new waves of immigrants with some degree of resentment (Fussell, 2014). Historically, all immigrant groups different from the existing white, English-speaking, Protestant American majority have endured high degrees of suspicion as they fought to gradually establish their place within American culture (Alba & Foner, 2006). Unfortunately, in various forms, this nativist attitude (intricately tied to xenophobia) has reflected institutional racism, including restrictive federal immigration policies and legalized racial quotas and exclusions, some of which specifically targeted Asian immigrants (Kil, 2012). Additionally, violent racialized attacks on Asian communities by white majority groups throughout American history, especially during the 19 th and 20 th centuries, demonstrate the social entrenchment of this xenophobic mindset in the U.S. over time.

The California Gold Rush of the mid-1800s lured the first large group of Asian immigrants to the continental U.S.: Chinese entrepreneurs seeking to strike gold (Yung et al., 2006). Unfortunately, most did not achieve the overblown promises of profit (Yung et al., 2006). Unable to return to China and forced to compete for their livelihoods with white "forty-niners" (i.e., white migrants named for the year they began to arrive in California - 1849) from the eastern U.S., these laborers were cast as scapegoats for white migrants' employment frustrations due to their different looks, language, and customs (Yung et al., 2006). Forced to work for less than their white counterparts, Asian immigrants labored and lived under harsh conditions, toiling in dangerous mining operations and railroad construction (Yung et al., 2006). During this time, Chinese laborers faced institutional racism from the U.S. government in the form of undue tax burdens and legislative barriers to citizenship (Yung et al., 2006). Additionally, Chinese immigrants brought opium to the United States when they arrived to participate in the Gold Rush, and eventually established opium dens (i.e., places to buy, sell, and smoke opium) in Chinatowns throughout the West (Ahrens, 2013). Many Americans eventually became addicted to the drug, which resulted in a national drug panic (Ahrens, 2013). Collectively, these historical events and injustices culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first legal decree banning an entire ethnic group from immigration and eligibility for U.S. citizenship (Kil, 2012). The Act was primarily fueled by racist and xenophobic fears among white working-class laborers about depressed wages, and fanned by a proliferation of "Chinese invasion" rhetoric in the media. Such language is just one example of the "hordes of immigrant invaders" trope long-used throughout U.S. history to support varying political agendas (Zimmer, 2019).

The Chinese American communities of the late 1800s responded to housing segregation policies by forming Chinatowns in major U.S. urban centers where they constructed governing bodies to maintain community order (Chen, 2000). Instead of facing severe, racially-motivated maltreatment in mines or factories, many Chinese workers chose self-employment through restaurants, retail establishments, and laundries (Chen, 2000). Unfortunately, several of these communities faced a rash of violent, deadly attacks perpetrated by the white majority, sometimes escalating to residents being run out of town with their homes burned to the ground (Chen, 2000).

The early 1890s saw a new influx of immigrants from Asian countries, primarily out of Japan, to work in agriculture as well as logging, fishing, mining, and service professions (Aoki, 2010). White resentment and calls for Japanese exclusion laws soon followed resulting in "The Gentleman's Agreement" of 1908 between the U.S. and Japan, whereby Japan agreed to stop further labor immigration to the U.S. (Aoki, 2010). However, thousands of wives, parents, and children of current Japanese residents were allowed to immigrate; and in the face of U.S. racial segregation, Japanese families came together to establish enclaves along the West coast (Aoki, 2010; Lee, 2002). Like the Chinese before them, Japanese and Korean newcomers faced legislative barriers to land ownership, citizenship, and education inspired by racism, which concluded with a 1924 amendment to the Chinese Exclusion Act that denied citizens from any Asian nation to immigrate to the U.S. These anti-Asian laws remained in place until 1943 (Lee, 2002).

After Japanese victories in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars at the turn of the 20 th century, a new "yellow peril" stereotype arose in the U.S typecasting Asians of all ethnicities, domestic and foreign, as threatening agents bent on world domination (Mudambi, 2019). This pernicious stereotype othered Asian Americans as bloodthirsty, sneaky foreigners who were not to be trusted in the same way as Americans of other ancestries. The yellow peril myth perfectly and troublingly set the stage for the next chapter in the American government's discriminatory treatment of Asian communities as the U.S. entered World War II (Lyman, 2000).

Japanese Concentration Camps

In what remains one of the most shameful violations of constitutional rights in U.S. history, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order allowing for the forced removal of the entire Japanese population of the U.S. West coast (the majority of whom were American citizens) two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941 (Conrat & Conrat, 1972). Allowed only to bring what they could carry, over 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry were herded into concentration camps surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by armed military personnel, where they remained through the duration of the war (Howard, 2009). Anyone with 1/16 th or more Japanese blood was eligible for removal, perceived as a potential threat (Burton, Farrell, Lord, & Lord, 2011).

Ironically, due to xenophobic paranoia and fear of Japanese American sabotage, the U.S. military at Hickham Base in Honolulu, HI had parked their airplanes in a contained area to be more easily guarded, making the planes "sitting-ducks" for air attacks by Japanese bombers (Miller, 1992). Despite the wide-ranging feelings of distrust by the larger society towards Asian Americans at that time, tens of thousands of Asian American soldiers of varying ethnicities enlisted and served with valor during the war (Parks, 2004).

With the passage of the Immigration Act in 1965 which struck down race as a barrier for immigration, Asian immigrants flowed into the U.S. once again (Yung et al., 2006). New waves of East Asian immigrants arrived in the U.S. through the mid to late twentieth century (Chin, 1996). As these new groups of Americans integrated into U.S society, a new stereotype proliferated: the myth of the "model minority" (Chou & Feagin, 2015). The model minority stereotype promotes the notion that Asian Americans are a monolithic group who have enjoyed great success in American society due to a cultural emphasis on a strong work ethic, natural-born intelligence, and through stressing the importance of education and achievement within their families (Chou & Feagin, 2015). Such a seemingly affirmative representation of an entire race masks a negative dynamic of consistently relegating Asian Americans to a permanent foreigner status (i.e., othering) when compared to other Americans (Chou & Feagin, 2015). Additionally, this myth works to confirm the belief that America does not have any racial discrimination problems, suggesting that all racial groups operate on an equal playing field with the hardest working groups inevitably rising to the top of their own accord, share equal privilege, and do not experience obstacles brought on by others' racist attitudes and behavior (Chou & Feagin, 2015). Finally, in some respects, this myth fosters suspicion and resentment towards Asian communities and immigrants as a whole (McGowan & Lindgren, 2006).

Stigmatization and Pandemics

The devastating impact of infectious disease has loomed large throughout human history causing more fatalities than any other medical cause (Pappas, Kiriaze, Giannakis, & Falagas, 2009). Unfortunately, eruptions of xenophobia have historically followed close on the heels of pandemics. Especially when viral outbreaks are deadly, fear often drives those at risk to place blame on some "other," or some group external to their own national, religious, or ethnic identity (Muzzatti, 2005). Sickness cultivates fear, which in turn cultivates bias (Muzzatti, 2005). Consequently, minority groups have often found themselves erroneously blamed for spreading germs, as insiders perceived them to be "dirty" or "sickly" (Taylor, 2019). As a nation built by waves of new immigrants, newcomers to the U.S. have traditionally borne the brunt of corresponding waves of othering in the form of ignorance and blame for a myriad of societal maladies, most notably those concerning infectious disease; a few examples include Irish Catholic immigrants held responsible for "Irish disease" (cholera), Jewish immigrants blamed for "consumption" (tuberculosis), Irish and German newcomers blamed for yellow fever (McKiven, 2007), and Italian immigrants blamed for polio (Cohn, 2012).

The COVID-19 pandemic is not the first time a public health crisis has resulted in the othering and disparate treatment of Asian Americans. When the bubonic plague began in San Francisco, CA in 1900, public health officials implemented a race-based response by quarantining Chinese residents in Chinatown, the epicenter of the outbreak, while allowing white merchants to leave (Barde, 2004). More recently, East Asians across the globe experienced stigmatization during the SARS outbreak of 2002-2004 (Eichelberger, 2007).

Despite comprising a tapestry of diverse ethnicities, Asian Americans have been historically viewed as a monolith, othered by the myth of the model minority in times of peace and economic security, while othered as a scapegoat in times of economic adversity, wars, or pandemics.

Anti-Asian Hate Crime during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Prior sections have explored how anti-Asian racism and xenophobia in the U.S. have been reproduced and historically entrenched at the individual- and institutional-levels during times of crisis and significant change so as to other Asian Americans and reinforce their inequality. The sections below examine how hate crime exacted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic is an extreme and exacerbated replication of this othering process; and how institutional-level racist and xenophobic rhetoric targeting Asian Americans has established the structure through which individual-level hate crimes occur.

What's in a Name?

The WHO ( 2015) followed their "Best Practices for the Naming of New Human Diseases" in selecting "COVID-19" as the name for the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2. These best practices endeavor to avoid offending any cultural, social, national, regional, professional, and/or ethnic groups (WHO, 2015). According to Dr. Keiji Fukuda, the WHO Assistant Director-General for Health Security, disease names can create significant consequences in terms of backlash against affected religious or ethnic groups (WHO, 2015). WHO ( 2015) best practices also advocate the avoidance of geographic locations or references to culture, population, or language that incites fear.

Disregarding the WHO's ( 2015) official nomenclature, President Donald Trump publicly used the terms "Chinese virus" or "China virus" for COVID-19 in various tweets between March 16-18, 2020 (Fallows, 2020), as well as in a White House press conference on March 19 th, and then repetitively defended his use of the terms throughout March and early April (Chiu, 2020). A widely circulated image captured at the March 19 th press conference shows the president's notes with the "corona" in "coronavirus" crossed out and replaced with "Chinese" (Smith, 2020). When confronted about his use of the "Chinese" descriptive rather than the WHO-official "COVID-19" term, the president responded, "It's from China. That's why. It comes from China. I want to be accurate" (Fallows, 2020). While President Trump repeatedly referred to COVID-19 as the "Chinese virus" or "China virus," Secretary of State Mike Pompeo preferred the term "Wuhan virus" (Rogers, 2020). Additionally, an unnamed White House staffer allegedly used the term "kung flu" (Boyer, 2020).

Some argue that such terminology is both racist and xenophobic (Chiu, 2020) as it promotes anti-Asian bias and exclusion (Little, 2020), which may increase the risk of hate crime (Cabanatuan, 2020). The president's early rhetoric undoubtedly did not serve to protect the Asian community. Before Trump made these remarks in mid-March, racist acts and harassment targeting Asian Americans had already surged; they continued to increase through March and April following his statements (Haynes, 2020). On the coattails of President Trump's remarks, other political officials have also used derogatory language to blame the Chinese for causing COVID-19. For example, Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) said in a press conference on March 18 th that China was to "blame" for the spread of COVID-19 because they are a " culture where people eat bats and snakes and dogs and things like that" (Wu, 2020). On March 23 rd, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a warning that white supremacists may use the crisis to justify harm or violence against Asian Americans (Mallin & Margolin, 220). Also in late March, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) anticipated that there would be a surge in anti-Asian hate crime during the pandemic and therefore alerted law enforcement agencies to be on heightened alert for bias-motivated incidents (Mallin & Margolin, 2020).

According to a recent not yet published news content analysis (detailed in the San Francisco Chronicle) conducted by Professor Russell Jeung of the Asian American Studies department at San Francisco State University, the number of "hate incidents" reported in the media increased in response to the xenophobic language used by public officials (Cabanatuan, 2020; Jeung, 2020). Moreover, Dr. Jeung remarked that the timing in the sharp rise in hate incidents specifically coincided with the president's use of the term, "Chinese virus" (Jeung, 2020; Kang, 2020). He argued that his findings demonstrate that political language can provoke racial hatred and associated violence (Sheyner, 2020). At the same time, it appears that the study defines "hate incidents" as involving aggregated hate crimes and hate incidents, making it difficult to distinguish between the two.

Similarly, in the week following the president's March 19 th press conference, the "Stop AAPI Hate" (AAPI refers to Asian American and Pacific Islander) website that includes an anti-AAPI harassment, discrimination, and violent attacks self-reporting tool, recorded 673 "racist incidents" (Cabanatuan, 2020); however, it is not known how many of these incidents apply directly to the Asian community. Similar to Dr. Jeung's ( 2020) study, "racist incidents" likely involve the aggregate of hate crimes and hate incidents.

Additionally, in a pre-print manuscript, Vachuska ( 2020) analyzed Google Trends data and found that attitudes toward minority racial groups have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, to measure anti-Chinese sentiment, the author examined the proportion of and relationships among searches for a specific racial epithet used to describe a person of Chinese descent, coronavirus searches, Chinese restaurants, etc. (Vachuska, 2020). The author reported strong evidence of a relationship between COVID-19 and an increase in anti-Chinese sentiment, including discriminatory treatment towards the Asian community and Chinese restaurants (Vachuska, 2020). More research is needed to clarify anti-Asian hate crime trends during and following the COVID-19 pandemic.

As awareness grew about the growing number of hate incidents and hate crimes against Asian Americans, accusations of racism and xenophobia around the president's insistence on using the term, "Chinese virus," exploded in the media. The White House responded to the uproar by accusing the media of manufacturing "fake outrage" over nothing, citing previous epidemics named after geographic locations: Spanish flu, West Nile, zika virus, and ebola (Mangan, 2020). However, the WHO ( 2015) appropriately named the novel coronavirus "COVID-19" to avoid a connection with a geographic area and therefore circumvent the stigmatization of people living in that area or of similar ancestry worldwide. The correlating increase in hate crimes against Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic (Jeung, 2020; Vachuska, 2020) underlines the importance of avoiding geography in the naming of communicable diseases (Little, 2020).2

On March 23, 2020, President Trump walked back his use of the term "Chinese virus," noting in a network news interview that the American people were already well aware of the virus' true origins; however, he declined to apologize for using the geographic descriptor (Leigh, 2020). Additionally, the president declared that Asian Americans should not be blamed " in any way, shape, or form" for COVID-19 (Samuels, 2020). He also denounced the recent spate of pandemic-related racial attacks on Asian Americans (Samuels, 2020). Unfortunately, for many hate crime victim advocates and Asian Americans, this change of heart came too late; too much damage had already occurred (Shyong, 2020). One could argue that in the critical early days when the language coming from America's leadership set the tone, concerns about its effects on Asian Americans had been negligent at best, and destructive at worst.

Hate Crime Data

The Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990 requires the federal government to collect data about crimes motivated by race, religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity (FBI, n.d.). The nation's largest sources of crime data, the FBI's Uniform Crime Report (UCR) and the Bureau of Justice Statistics' (BJS) National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), provide national estimates of hate crime (Masucci & Langton, 2017). Both sources define hate crime according to the federal definition noted in the Introduction. Hate crime data are also collected by advocacy organizations that provide assistance to marginalized communities (e.g., Southern Policy Law Center, Asian Pacific Policy Planning Council, Anti-Defamation League) (Gladfelter, Lantz, & Ruback, 2017; Jenness & Grattet, 2001). Each of these data sources have significant limitations (Gladfelter et al., 2017).

UCR and NCVS data have been utilized in the present study because they are the largest and most representative of the population. We examined hate crime data from the two collections for the 16-year period from 2003 to 2018, the years of data available for both sources.3 Both collections provide data on annual counts of racially-motivated hate crime. The UCR enables these counts to be disaggregated by the specific type of racial bias motivating the offense (e.g., anti-Asian bias; anti-African American bias; anti-Hispanic violence, etc.), while the NCVS statistics can be disaggregated by the race of the victim. The sections below describe the two collections and what they tell us about anti-Asian hate crime prior to COVID-19. Throughout these data sections, we refer to anti-Asian hate crime; however, both the UCR and NCVS numbers include hate crimes against Pacific Islanders and Native Hawaiians as well.

Because the NCVS is based on a sample, it is necessary to aggregate several years of data to have sufficient sample sizes for reliable estimates of anti-Asian hate crime. UCR hate crime counts were calculated from Hate Crime Statistics Program data available on the FBI (2003-2007, 2014-2018) website, and NCVS estimates were generated from the public-use data files available through the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data ( n.d.) (BJS, 1992 -2018).

UCR

The FBI annually collects summary crime data from thousands of city, county, college and university, state, tribal, and federal law enforcement agencies nationwide through the UCR Program. Through a supplementary collection to the UCR, the Hate Crime Statistics Program, the FBI additionally collects data on hate crime incidents, offenses, and victims, including details about the offender's bias motivation and whether he or she was motivated by anti-Asian bias. Although the UCR hate crime statistics can be used to identify victims of anti-Asian bias, it should be noted that the bias motivation is based on the offender's perceptions of the victim. In other words, the victim may not necessarily be of Asian descent, but if the offender believed they were and targeted them for that reason, the incident would be counted as an anti-Asian hate crime. The FBI data also distinguish between single-bias hate crime incidents, and multiple-bias incidents in which the offender(s) was motivated by two or more biases. The discussion below examines single-bias hate crimes, which account for the majority of UCR hate crimes (about 98% in 2018), as we are interested in hate crimes motivated by anti-Asian bias alone. It is also important to note that both the UCR and NCVS include hate crime data involving Asian Americans and documented and undocumented Asian immigrants (Addington, 2008).

UCR data reveal that during the 5-year period from 2003 to 2007, there was an average of 9314 victims of single-bias hate crimes. Of those victims, 67.0%, ( n = 6241) were motivated by racial/ethnic/ancestral bias. Among these 6241 racially motivated hate crimes, 4.1% ( n = 254) were motivated by anti-Asian bias. In comparison, during the most recent 5-year period from 2014 to 2018, there was an average of 7690 single-bias hate crime victims, of which 59.6% ( n = 4581) were targeted due to racial/ethnic/ancestral bias, and anti-Asian bias accounted for 3.8% ( n  = 176) of these crimes. Across these two 5-year periods, there was a 26.6% decrease in single-bias racially motivated hate crimes, and a 30.8% decrease in anti-Asian motivated hate crime.

When interpreting UCR hate crime statistics it is important to take into account the underreporting problems associated with these data. In 2018, for example, at least 80 cities in the U.S. with populations over 100,000 people reported zero hate crimes for the year. Underreporting may occur at the agency-level because reporting to the FBI is voluntary. Within agencies, underreporting may occur due to the difficulty law enforcement officers have identifying objective evidence of the bias motivation to determine whether or not the incident is a hate crime (Gladfelter et al., 2017). A victim must identify the crime as motivated by prejudice in order for law enforcement to classify it as a hate crime; and when detectives investigate, they must collect evidence to prove that the incident was motivated by bias, which is often challenging and unclear (Gladfelter et al., 2017). In regard to the latter however, the determination, about whether to charge the offense as a hate crime often falls on the prosecutor, not the police. In addition, UCR data may undercount hate crime if victims do not report to police because they do not believe the racially motivated violence was a crime, have language and cultural barriers, lack trust in the government and police, have a fear of retaliatory violence, and/or believe that they will not be taken seriously by criminal justice system actors (Davis & O'Neill, n.d.).

NCVS

The NCVS has been used to collect hate crime data since 2003 (Masucci & Langton, 2017). Unlike the UCR that includes offenses known to and reported by police departments, the NCVS collects information from a nationally representative sample of households about experiences with crime both reported and not reported to police (i.e., the "dark figure of crime"). Upon identifying that a respondent has experienced crime, the NCVS asks victims if they have any reason to believe that the victimization was a "hate crime or crime of prejudice or bigotry" (NCVS, 2016 [question 161]). Victimizations are only categorized hate crimes if the victim can provide certain types of evidence to support an affirmative response (Addington, 2008). Additionally, the NCVS asks hate crime victims about the types of bias they suspected motivated the crime (Masucci & Langton 2017).

NCVS data reveal that from 2003 to 2007, there was an average of 265,062 annual hate crime victimizations, of which 67.1% ( n = 177,946) were motivated by racial/ethnic bias. About 2.5% of hate crime victimizations were against persons identifying as Asian, Pacific Islander or Native Hawaiian ( n = 6625), and the vast majority (>99%)4 were motivated by anti-racial/ethnic bias. During the more recent 2014-2018 period, there was an average of 224,435 total hate crimes with 57.7% ( n = 128,474) motivated by racial/ethnic bias. About 2.7% of the hate crime victimizations were against Asians, Pacific Islanders, or Native Hawaiians ( n  = 6158), again with the vast majority (94%) motivated by the offender's racial or ethnic bias. Across the two periods, it appears that hate crime overall declined by 15.3%, and hate crimes against people of Asian descent declined by 7.0%; however, the differences between the estimates are not statistically significant when the confidence intervals are taken into account. Importantly, the NCVS data also reveal that less than half of hate crime victimizations overall (43.2%) are reported to police, and this is true among Asian victims as well (47.6%).

Reconciling Variations in Estimates

The UCR reported a large percentage decrease (30.8%) in anti-Asian motivated hate crime while the NCVS indicated a small percentage decrease (7.0%) across the two 5-year time periods. Discrepancies in percentages suggest vast underreporting of hate crime to police and magnify the hidden nature of hate crime against Asian Americans in the U.S. today. Indeed, NCVS hate crime data reveal that 47.6% of Asian victims do not report to the police. While both results reflect a decrease in hate crimes motivated by anti-Asian bias across time, the large differences between the two statistics make it unclear how extensive the decrease is. After the COVID-19 pandemic has subsided, scholars should compare old and new UCR and NCVS hate crime data to determine whether the prevalence of anti-Asian hate crime has markedly increased/changed.5 Inconsistencies in both sources' anti-Asian hate crime data collectively show the limitations of using official data to accurately estimate the prevalence of hate crime.

Additionally, the vast difference between the UCR's and NCVS's reported numbers of racially motivated hate crimes is striking and problematic. For example, from 2003 to 2007, UCR data indicate that there were 6241 hate crimes motivated by racial/ethnic prejudice, while NCVS data demonstrate that 177,946 hate crimes involved racial/ethnic bias motivation, which is an approximate 186% difference between the two. Discrepancies between the two data collections make it difficult to determine the actual pervasiveness of racially motivated hate crime in the U.S. across time. NCVS data is arguably more reliable than UCR data because it includes both reported and unreported hate crimes. With this in mind, NCVS data suggest that anti-Asian hate crime has remained an alarming problem across time, while UCR data imply the opposite (or a less alarming persistent trend).

Assessing 2020 Hate Crime Data

Data from the 2020 NCVS and UCR Hate Crime Statistics Program are expected to be released in late 2021. At that point, researchers will be able to assess both the extent to which law enforcement data show a spike in anti-Asian hate crimes known to police and whether there were changes in the numbers of Asian victims of hate crimes reported or not reported to police. Although the two data sources may not be consistent in terms of the magnitude of any spike, together they should provide empirical evidence about whether the qualitative, anecdotal suggestions of a pandemic-related increase in anti-Asian hate crimes was true nationwide. Together the two sources will show whether there were overall increases in the number of hate crimes against Asian Americans and whether the victims were comfortable seeking help from the police.

Personal Experiences of Hate Crime During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Social media has played a significant role in publicizing racialized attacks against Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic. Tweets have exposed instances of anti-Asian hate crime involving physical violence and harassment, mainly after bystander videos were posted and picked up by the broader media. Twitter hashtags such as #WashTheHate and #HateIsAVirus trended on social media platforms as users responded to the incidents they viewed on their screens (Elder, 2020). For example, New York City police urged the victim of a COVID-19 hate crime to come forward and make a report after a video surfaced on February 5 th of a man physically and verbally assaulting her while she was wearing a facemask in a Chinatown subway station, calling her a " diseased (expletive)" (Sosa & Brown, 2020).

In another incident on March 10 th, a Korean American woman in midtown Manhattan was grabbed by the hair, shoved, and punched in the face by an assailant (Miles, 2020). The perpetrator yelled at the victim, " You've got coronavirus, you Asian (expletive)" and " Where's your (expletive) mask?" (Miles, 2020). The victim suffered a dislocated jaw (Miles, 2020).

One of the most horrific examples of COVID-19-related hate crimes occurred on March 14 th at a Sam's Club in Midland, TX, when a perpetrator attacked a family from Myanmar, stabbing three victims including a 2-year-old girl and a 6-year-old boy (Aziz, 2020). The assailant told police he feared the victims were Chinese and infecting others with the coronavirus (Aziz, 2020). Another extreme example occurred on April 5 th, when an Asian American woman in Brooklyn was doused with acid by a man who snuck up behind her as she was taking her trash outside her front door, causing second degree burns to her body, face, and hands (Moore & Cassady, 2020).

In late March, a 26-year-old Asian American man in a Brooklyn subway explained how a man spat in his face, and when he asked the man why he did so, the perpetrator yelled at him, " You (expletive) Chinese spreading the coronavirus!" (Moore & Bensimon, 2020) The perpetrator then unzipped his jacket and pointed to a weapon saying, " You wanna do this?" (Moore & Bensimon, 2020).

Psychological Effects of Hate Crimes

Many scientific studies have established a correlation between racialized victimization and poor mental health outcomes (e.g., Gee, Spencer, Chen, Yip, & Takeuchi, 2007). Since the emergence of COVID-19, there has been a 22% total increase in people accessing the Mental Health America anxiety screening tool; among users, the increase in Asian American respondents has been 39% (Campbell & Ellerbeck, 2020). Research also suggests that hate crime victims experience more severe consequences compared to victims of non-hate crimes (Mellgren, Andersson, & Ivert, 2017). Specifically, McDevitt, Balboni, Garcia, and Gu ( 2001) reported that bias crimes impact victims differently than non-bias crimes in that victims of bias crimes are more fearful and experience intrusive thoughts following their victimization.

Institutional-Level Response

Federal Response

In the last week of March 2020, Congresswoman Grace Menge (D-NY) introduced a resolution calling for all public officials to condemn anti-Asian discrimination (Jeung, Kulkarni, & Choi, 2020). Additionally, the resolution called for federal law enforcement agencies to address pandemic-related hate crimes through data collection, documentation, and investigation (Jeung et al., 2020). Finally, Menge called for states to set up multi-agency task forces to address COVID-19-related racial bias concerning safe retail access, fair employment, and quality mental health services in educational settings for Asian American students and others affected by the pandemic (Jeung et al., 2020).

While many in the Asian community appreciated Trump's March 23 rd reversal regarding his use of the term "Chinese virus" and the positive comments he made about Asian Americans, advocates continue to await a meaningful response from the federal government, such as the creation of a DOJ Task Force to address hate crimes against the Asian community (Warner, 2020). As Matt Nguyen-Ngo, Civil Rights Fellow at the nonprofit OCA-Asian Pacific American Advocates expressed, " Trump did say Asian Americans are not to blame, but he hasn't done anything beyond that [...] It's been a very lackluster response" (Chapman, 2020; Kang, 2020). At a March 26 th White House press briefing on the pandemic, when asked what he is doing to stop anti-Asian hate crimes in the country, Trump replied, " I don't know" (Chapman, 2020).

In addition to the lack of response from the Oval Office, neither the DOJ nor the CDC have done much to respond to the pandemic. In the past, the CDC has responded quickly to prevent racialized violence, as it did during the 2003 SARS outbreak (far less prevalent or deadly than COVID-19), and the DOJ acted quickly after the 2001 terror attacks (Campbell & Ellerbeck, 2020). Lamenting the lack of action, a group of 12 U.S. senators penned a letter to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights requesting official guidance on federal response: " There has not been a concerted effort from federal agencies to prevent and address anti-Asian sentiment related to the COVID-19 pandemic" (Campbell & Ellerbeck, 2020). In response, Assistant Attorney General, Eric Dreiband stated that hate crimes would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law (Campbell & Ellerbeck, 2020).

State Response

On February 13, 2020, in response to the recent uptick in verbal attacks and other racial incidents targeting Asian Americans in Los Angeles, CA, county officials held a news conference denouncing racist incidents against the Asian community related to fears around COVID-19 (Capatides, 2020). Officials urged the public not to buy into stereotypes and misinformation about Asians, specifically citing two separate bullying incidents in public schools that resulted in the hospitalization of school-aged victims (City News Service, 2020). In a more concrete response to the increase in harassment and physical assault directed at Asian Americans due to COVID-19, New York's Attorney General, Letitia James established a state hotline for reporting hate incidents and hate crimes (New York Attorney General, 2020).

Discussion/Conclusion: Anti-Asian Hate Crime and the Reproduction of Inequality

Despite a long history in North America and increasing numbers and political influence today, Asian American communities have continued to experience a recurring dynamic of othering. Racism and xenophobia woven into the social fabric may generate harmful individual-level attitudes and actions against Asian Americans that other and exclude them from national belonging. Racially dominant and/or well-established groups in America that hold social power have historically resented the arrival and presence of less well-established and influential groups such as Asian Americans, perceiving them as "foreigners" outside of their "proper" place of belonging and a threat to notions of community and sovereignty (Grove & Zwi, 2006; Kim & Sundstrom, 2014). Such nativist and xenophobic resentments intricately overlap with racism, wherein those in power fear and resist those who look different, speak dissimilar languages, and have unique cultural practices in comparison. As a result, the othering of Asian Americans has been historically repetitive in the form of bigoted exclusionary practices and violence, thus serving to entrench their foreigner and marginalized status and maintain the racial and nationalist hierarchy.

One could argue that the social and institutional entrenchment of racism and xenophobia has resulted in the repetitive re-emergence of anti-Asian stereotypes across time. For example, the prevalent discrimination and bigotry wrought by the yellow peril and the model minority myths further marked and established Asian Americans as inherently different from the majority population (McGowan & Lindgren, 2006). Additionally, institutionalized processes and government policies (elevated tax burdens, education and housing segregation, land ownership restrictions, and barriers to Asian immigration and citizenship [Zimmer, 2019]), further sustained the othering of Asian Americans.

This othering process is amplified and replicated during pandemics when widespread fear of catching disease engenders prejudice against groups that are different from the majority population, positioning them as effective scapegoats (Muzzatti, 2005; Taylor, 2019). Ostracizing Asian Americans in this way metaphorically builds a wall between those socially perceived as most important (i.e., whites) and those perceived as less important (i.e., Asian Americans), creating a boundary where "never the two shall meet." This othering dynamic has reemerged during the COVID-19 pandemic, as illustrated by President Trump's and other political officials' use of racially derogatory language (Fallows, 2020; Rogers, 2020; Wu, 2020).

As cognitive linguists Lakoff and Johnson ( 2003) have long established, metaphors are ubiquitous in forming our world view. The adjective "Chinese" in "Chinese virus" is particularly problematic as it associates the infection with an ethnicity. Connecting group identities with explicitly medical language serves to categorize those group identities as other. Historically, this connection has influenced anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy in the United States. The WHO's ( 2015) best-practices in naming infectious diseases exemplifies the importance of severing this connection in order to avoid stigma against geographic locations and ethnic groups.

Though most public officials eventually reversed course in their "China virus" rhetoric, regardless of whether this reversal was motivated by a sudden altruistic understanding or by political calculation, the damage had already been done. At any rate, any commitment to avoiding the public othering of Asian Americans was short-lived. As late as April 17, 2020, President Trump put out a tweet criticizing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for making a February trip to San Francisco's Chinatown in support of Asian American owned businesses, after declaring in another tweet that he had already " closed the BORDER TO CHINA" (capitalized letters used by the president) (Behrmann, 2020). This seeming failure to distinguish between the residents of San Francisco's Chinatown and foreign nationals from the nation of China reinforces the idea of their enduring foreignness. Additionally, through the late spring of 2020, political focus increasingly turned to placing blame for the COVID-19 pandemic on the nation of China; a by-product of this focus is increased suspicion and fear in the American consciousness towards Asian Americans, creating the perfect climate to cultivate further hate crime (Jeung et al., 2020).

One could argue that the historical perpetuation of this othering process, embedded in fear of perceived outsiders and racial hatred, has allowed for more extreme, violent, and devastating violence and state abuse, such as the Japanese Concentration Camps following the Pearl Harbor attacks (Conrat & Conrat, 1972), and the seeming influx of hate crime we see today with the COVID-19 pandemic. Hate crimes during the COVID-19 pandemic are an extreme manifestation of othering illustrating the replicative and cumulative effects of the historical embeddedness of racism and xenophobia. That is, perpetrators exact violence to dehumanize and ostracize Asian Americans, stigmatizing and "marking" them as deviant to destroy their sense of belonging (Kim & Sundstrom, 2014), encourage and perpetuate ongoing exclusion, sustain feelings of superiority, and restore feelings of normalcy and comfort. It is likely that this rash of COVID-19 related hate crimes and incidents will have enduring deleterious psychological, emotional, and physical effects on Asian American victims and Asian communities, exacerbated by decades of generational trauma (Comas-Díaz, 2016). Arguably equally as devastating is the damage to society of normalizing the othering of any minority group based on race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, disability, gender identity, and/or sexual orientation. Although immigration status was not specifically explored in this paper, it is important to note that Asian immigrants without citizenship status may experience exacerbated devastating health effects of COVID-19 hate crime as they have reduced access to resources that may help to address that harm due to fears of deportation upon reporting (Dorn et al., 2011).

COVID-19 is a public health matter, not a racial one (Jeung et al., 2020). Not only is it critical to stop the spread of COVID-19, but also the racial hatred it has produced (Jeung et al., 2020). It is also essential that we take the lessons learned from racialized fear derived from historical events and apply that knowledge to feelings of fear and anxiety during the pandemic (Jeung et al., 2020). Unfortunately, the pandemic-related stigmatization of Asian Americans and Asians across the globe may continue long after the cessation of COVID-19. Americans must confront incidents of discrimination head-on: in schools, workplaces, businesses, and public spaces, in addition to demanding a robust response from law enforcement and the federal and state governments when hate crimes occur (Jeung et al., 2020).

In summary, across time, socially entrenched racism and xenophobia toward Asian Americans have repetitively recurred through individual-level prejudiced attitudes and actions. Moreover, these attitudes and actions have been reinforced by institutional-level support during times of crisis or great change, including the coronavirus pandemic. As a result, racial/ethnic inequality has been reproduced through the establishment of an " us. vs. them " modus operandi that relegates Asian Americans to the bottom of the social hierarchy, wrongly and maliciously marking them unworthy of the same rights and treatment as those at the top. Such othering has led to a climate in which Asian Americans are more vulnerable to racialized forms of aggression, including hate crimes.

Biographies

Angela R. Gover

, Ph.D., has been a Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Colorado School of Public Affairs since 2006. Dr. Gover received her Ph.D. in Criminology and Criminal Justice from the University of Maryland. Dr. Gover's published work appears in over 100 journal articles and edited volumes (i.e., book chapters) such as Child Abuse & Neglect, Violence and Victims, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, and Violence Against Women. Dr. Gover remains active in her profession by serving on editorial boards for several journals in her field. Her current research focuses on the criminal justice system's response to intimate partner violence, specifically, domestic violence offender treatment, personal protection orders, and law enforcement officer attitudes towards domestic violence.

Shannon B. Harper

, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of criminal justice in the Sociology Department and U.S. Latino/a Studies Program at Iowa State University. Dr. Harper's research explores the relationship between intimate partner violence and intimate partner homicide (IPH) and the gendered contexts through which both occur. She examines the neighborhood social and structural factors that influence IPH, as well as how the criminal justice system and community resources operate to address it and the abuse that precipitates it. Dr. Harper's work also investigates how race/ethnicity, class, and gender intersect to shape marginalized survivors' interpersonal victimization experiences, specifically Latina and African American women. Her published works can be found in multiple peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes.

Lynn Langton

, Ph.D., is a Senior Research Criminologist at RTI International. Her research focuses on victimization, victim services, sexual violence, hate crime, financial fraud and white-collar crime, police-community relations, and survey methodology. Prior to joining RTI in 2018, Dr. Langton served as Victimization Unit Chief for the Bureau of Justice Statistics where she directed numerous large-scale national projects, including the National Crime Victimization Survey.

Footnotes

¹ People with origins in East Asia (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Okinawan, Taiwanese, Tibetan) and Southeast Asia (Bruneian, Burmese, Cambodian, Filipino, Hmong, Indonesian, Laotian, Malaysian, Mien, Papua New Guinean, Singaporean, Timorese, Thai, Vietnamese).

² Additionally, it is important to note that hate crimes against Asian Americans may have increased following national awareness of COVID-19 regardless of the president's problematic rhetoric.

³ The NCVS hate crime data are available in public-use files beginning in 2003. For both collections, the most recent year of data available is 2018. Both data collections operate on a calendar year (January-December). Once the collections close on December 31st, the BJS and FBI spend several months cleaning and processing the annual files and typically release the data several months later in the summer or fall. In other words, 2019 data are expected to be released in the late summer or early fall of 2020.

⁴ NCVS data suggest that all hate crime victimizations against Asians were motivated by racial or ethnic bias; however, the data are based on a sample so this is not a true 100%.

⁵ It is important to note that when thinking about comparing any kind of percent declines, the FBI treats their numbers as a complete enumeration, when in reality, there is agency- and item-level missingness among the data. The FBI does not produce standard errors so it is difficult to determine whether an apparent change in a number is actually within the margin of error.
Publisher's Note
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Contributor Information

Angela R. Gover, Email: ude.revnedcu@revog.alegnA.

Shannon B. Harper, Email: ude.etatsai@reprahs.

Lynn Langton, Email: gro.itr@lletsual.

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Anti-Asian Hate Crime During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Exploring the Reproduction of Inequality

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is believed to have emerged in Wuhan, China in late December 2019 and began rapidly spreading around the globe throughout the spring months of 2020. As COVID-19 proliferated across the United States, Asian Americans reported a surge in racially motivated hate crimes involving physical violence and harassment.

# data[].attributes.headline
By: Brooke cheng, Joshua Ma  , Published:May 2022

# data[].attributes.subject
By: Brooke cheng, Joshua Ma  , Published:May 2022

# data[].attributes.body
covid-19 has made it harder for the asian community  not only in public or online even in  health care environment they receive racism from patients not wanting to me treated by people of a different ethnicity background other than white. this has made many people daily life's hard and made many fear for their lives in a place where they are supposed to feel and be free. '' The Asian population is no stranger to racial discrimination, having been scrutinized for their appearance, culture, and identity''they try and make efforts to educate the public about asian history and celebrate racial diversity while trying to fight the hate peacefully.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
As she stood in the lobby of a business at the end of her 12-hour shift, a Chinese-Canadian nurse couldn't help but notice that her food was being prepared by unmasked workers. What should have been a simple reminder to mask up instead turned into a barrage of racist drivel against her: "I never thought it would be death caused by China!" and "You people are always causing problems!"[ 1] This story highlights the quintessential experience faced by Asian health care workers in Canada as they juggle hearing the empty praise of being called a "health care hero" with facing day-to-day overt racism and microaggressions at work and in public settings.[ 2, 3]

While this story may surprise some, it is just one of thousands of anecdotes that continue to underpin deeper issues. The Asian population is no stranger to racial discrimination, having been scrutinized for their appearance, culture, and identity.[ 4, 5] Though efforts have been made to educate the public on cultural sensitivity and to celebrate racial diversity, the SARS outbreak in 2003 demonstrated the speed at which we can revert to unconscious biases of racist tendencies in the face of fear and uncertainty.[ 5] In a similar vein, the COVID-19 pandemic has reignited racism against Asians, exacerbated by initial public framing of the situation as being caused by the "Chinese virus."[ 2, 6, 7] This phenomenon transcends borders, occurring even in Canada where we pride ourselves for our multiculturalism. The propensity to scapegoat this ethnic group during periods of crisis has contributed to the unfair social exclusion of the Asian population and laid the groundwork for tragedies such as the targeted mass shooting in Atlanta in March 2021.[ 5, 8] Six Asian women were among the victims.

Unfortunately, racially driven prejudice has not been the only form of discrimination to increase during the COVID-19 pandemic. Health care workers have become a target of public fear, seen as a danger due to their higher risk for contact with environments and individuals exposed to COVID-19.[ 2, 7] The manifestations of this fear have been numerous and widespread, with reports of violence against health care workers in countless countries around the globe.[ 9-12]

Taken together, Asian health care workers are at a unique intersection of increased risk for prejudice and discrimination in both their personal and professional lives.[ 2, 7] A survey conducted by the Canadian Union of Public Employees reported an increase of COVID-19-related racism targeting health care workers in Manitoba.[ 13] Most significantly, while only 1% of health care workers who did not identify as Asian reported experiences of racism during the surveyed 1-month period, a staggering 20% of Asian health care workers reported racism during the same time frame.[ 13] This is supported by a series of interviews conducted with Asian health care workers highlighting experiences ranging from verbal microaggressions to outright violence.[ 2]

It is well established that the experience of racism and prejudice can have tremendous impacts on mental health among those inside and outside the medical field.[ 14-16] However, when paired with the busy and stressful environments of health care settings, discrimination is an unwarranted factor compounding the likelihood of burnout among health care workers. This sentiment is worsened by a shared frustration of a lack of acknowledgement from institutional and public authorities, as well as constantly feeling the need to prioritize patient trust over one's integrity.[ 2] The resulting burden is an invisible yet significant cost to the health care system, potentially manifesting as presenteeism among workers (the lost productivity to the work environment when employees cannot fully function due to illness or other conditions).[ 17, 18] Perhaps the most important implication is that workers experiencing anxiety and stress from racially driven prejudice could have decreased capacity to properly care for patients.[ 19] In this sense, the effects of discrimination are carried downstream to the home and the workplace. If racism is beginning to affect an outcome as critical as patient safety and care, then this issue must be treated as one of utmost importance.

It is also important to recognize that this issue does not differentiate based on age or experience.[ 2, 20, 21] Asian health care workers at all stages of their careers may face the negative effects of racist exclusion, not only those who are currently practising professionals.[ 3] Notably, Asian students studying in the medical profession have also been affected, and we suspect that the same applies for students of other health care occupations. A Polish study demonstrated through an online survey that Asian medical students have experienced increased xenophobia since the COVID-19 outbreak, receiving reactions such as individuals pointing fingers or spitting at them, and patients asking in terror whether they are infected with COVID-19.[ 20] This may have hindered their career development and worsened feelings of isolation, given that many of these students were studying abroad. Interestingly, the prejudice tended to more greatly affect Asian mask-wearing students, with anecdotes of lecturers requesting that these individuals remove their masks, even amid student concerns for safety.[ 20] We are reminded of a similar experience in Vancouver, where mask wearers were targets of prejudice until masks were mandated by the government. Asian individuals were overwhelmingly represented in this group.[ 22]

Nevertheless, it would be naive to believe that health care workers are solely the victims of prejudice during the COVID-19 pandemic. Cases of health care workers facing stigma from fellow colleagues during the pandemic period have also been reported. For an action as simple as opting to take a COVID-19 test, a female health care worker required psychotherapy and benzodiazepines to manage her psychological distress due to the stigma received from coworkers.[ 23] Another health care worker employed in a COVID-19 ward reported feelings of humiliation and worthlessness due to derogatory tones and comments made by colleagues after her exposure to COVID-19 patients.[ 23] Even experienced health care workers may lash out inappropriately as a result of overwhelming stress or fear. It is important to look both internally and externally to identify possible areas in the health care system for targeted interventions to address this issue.

Overall, in light of recent events surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, the increasing rate of anti-Asian racism has positioned this issue at the forefront of our minds. Public attention for the Asian population, one so often overlooked as a quiet "model minority," has reached an all-time high.[ 1] It is now up to the health care system to capitalize on this momentum and prevent the hardships experienced by Asian health care workers from being in vain.

To do this, we propose the following solutions:

Establishment of policy to prevent public framing of future global situations as being associated with a certain ethnicity or country (e.g., supporting neutral language in standardized nomenclature for viral variants).[24]

Increased government funding for Asian community-based care programs and medical resources provided in different languages (e.g., telehealth).[25]

Implementation of education on Asian history, racism, and psychosocial resilience targeted for health care students, beginning early during preclinical training years.[26]

As Asian medical students, we believe that an evolution at the political, community, and education levels is imperative to establish a sustainable environment where Asian health care workers feel safe and valued for their work.

This is in no way intended to downplay the experiences of other groups, or to suggest that Asians are the only victims of racism. It has been clearly established that members of minority groups such as Indigenous, Black, and Hispanic populations are also victims of racism in the health care system, each with their own devastating and unfair experiences of bias.[ 27-29] However, we believe that joining the fight against Asian hate is also joining the fight for all people of color. The Asian population should not be thought of as the centre of attention, but rather a facet of a larger issue that must be addressed congruently. We would be honored to have members of all ethnic backgrounds become allies in our journey for racial equality in our health care system. Likewise, this is a call to action for all Asian health care workers to stand up for our fellow peers and colleagues who may be suffering their own battles.

Although the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic will likely reach an end, the social aftermath of the situation may persist far beyond. Furthermore, should new worldwide health crises arise in the future, they will test our ability to grow from past experiences and to respond with empathy. It is critical that this issue is addressed in the health care system, lessons from the COVID-19 experience are used, and an action plan is created to ensure a safe and inclusive environment for all health care workers.

None declared.
This article has been peer reviewed.
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Ms Cheng and Mr Ma are second-year medical students in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia.

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The other pandemic: COVID-19 as a catalyst for hate against Asian health care workers

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As she stood in the lobby of a business at the end of her 12-hour shift, a Chinese-Canadian nurse couldn't help but notice that her food was being prepared by unmasked workers. What should have been a simple reminder to mask up instead turned into a barrage of racist drivel against her: "I never thought it would be death caused by China!"