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| Photo Credit: Stop AAPI Hate |
2020 was the year that everyone wanted to forget. The world was welcomed with the COVID-19 pandemic, which was initially believed to have originated at Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, China.
“In fact, most of the earliest cases in December 2019 had no link to the market,” according to an NRR sum up of the World Health Organization’s investigative report into the origins of the outbreak.
About 25 percent of the cases in December 2019 “visited one of 27 other markets in Wuhan besides Huanan, the investigation found. Two of 174 cases in December 2019 were healthcare workers.” However, the conditions of the market such as live animals, and narrow alleyways, made it a super-spreader location and at least 51 cases, most of whom were employees, were linked to the market.
The pandemic was not the only problem the United States was facing. Racial tensions were especially high as protests across the country erupted after the shocking video of moments before George Floyd’s death was released and the country’s focus was on police brutality.
The U.S. also had to deal with Trump’s racist rhetoric, who repeatedly called COVID-19 “Chinese virus” and “Kung Flu.”
When asked to address how his rhetoric can lead to an increase of attacks and discrimination, the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, denied to admit the immorality of his actions.
“It’s not a discussion about Asian Americans, who the president values and prizes as citizens of this great country. It is an indictment of China for letting this virus get here,” she said.
John H. Song, a criminal justice professor at the State University of New York Buffalo State College, says that the messages political leaders send have consequences.
“Any political leaders must be aware of their moral, social and legal responsibilities to all their citizens, not just those who might have voted for them,” he said.
As an Asian American, I have never been confronted, nor has my mom, but if the time were to come, we are ready.
“I’m proud to be an Asian American, and if somebody were to confront me, I would tell them to educate themselves because we all come from a cultural background,” she said.
However, she is still careful where she eats.
“I’m cautious about eating in a restaurant because when they find out you’re Asian, you don’t know what they’ll do to your food like the movie, ‘Waiting,’” she said, referring to the 2005 Ryan Reynolds film about an eight-hour shift at a restaurant, which sends a message to audiences to never complain about one’s food.
“For me, I’d rather cook or pre-order ahead of time, so that way, they don’t know who you are and how you look because we live in a different world now.”
Stop AAPI Hate is a reporting center created by Asian Pacific Planning and Policy Council (A3PCON), Chinese for Affirmative Action (CAA) and the Asian American Studies Department of San Francisco State University.
From March 19 of last year to February 28, the reporting center received 3,795 incidents, but the number is greater as there are incidents that go unreported.
Of the total, 68.1 percent of those incidents were verbal harassments and 11.1 percent were physical assaults. On the national level, women reported hate incidents 2.3 times more than men.
In New York City, an Asian American woman on her way to church was brutally kicked several times in the face. The doorman at the hotel who witnessed the incident didn’t intervene and closed the door on her.
A criminal justice professor in Western New York, who wishes to remain anonymous, suspects that it may just be “some sort of panic after a particular event and might be short-lived,” similar to the panics of 9/11.
“Based on the available FBI hate crime data, in fact, the number of race — and ethnicity— related incidents started declining after 2001 until 2015 and that the trend started gradually reversing upwardly in 2015 through 2019,” he said.
He says that the numbers were quite low during Obama’s second presidency term from 2011 to 2016.
“One thing that deserves mentioning is the 9/11 attacks in 2001. There was a spike in the number of hate crime incidents in the category of ‘Anti-Other Ethnicity/National Origin,’ by 420 percent in that year specifically. The number was quickly cut [to] 60 percent in 2002 and 2003 and went down to the somewhat normal level after three years in 2005,” he said, referring to the spreadsheet he made based on statistics gathered from the FBI hate crime data.
Credit: Statistics from FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR)
In an email, he said that the FBI releases new data every year around October or November, and after observing the statistics for incidents for three to five more years, he argues that is when conclusions can be drawn to see if this is similar to the hate following 9/11.
There is a distinction between a hate crime and a hate incident. A hate crime is defined as “at the federal level, a crime motivated by bias against race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or disability,” according to the Department of Justice. A bias or hate incident are “acts of prejudice that are not crimes and do not involve violence, threats, or property damage.”
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| Photo Credit: Department of Justice |
The bill addresses the rise in hate crimes against the AAPI community. President Joe Biden responded with a statement applauding the Senate and the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus (CAPAC). It just awaits to be signed into law.
Is this enough to prevent these crimes and incidents?
Song says that law and policy can only do so much, and that it takes “the change of the mindset of the whole community to work.”
“The media, schools, churches, families, and other social institutions must have the moral guts to stand up against such un-American conduct. Unfortunately, we still have a long way to go. Though our great American society has inherently the self-correcting capability, we in general tend to believe that social problems can be effectively dealt with by politicians through the after-the-fact process of legislative and administrative actions,” he said.
According to the criminal justice professor, who wishes to remain off the record, other possible solutions should be focused on bettering the character of the offender.
“If something more needs to be done for offenders, we may focus on some approaches such as enhanced civil compensation, services in the victim’s community, and additional education related to cultural and racial/ethnic diversity,” the source said.
When the offender volunteers to the community, it is an educational approach for him to understand that group and promotes diversity. Additional educational opportunities provided in jail can also include anger management courses, according to him.
“Many bias-motivated crimes take place in the heat of the moment. A person may more or less embrace some sort of bias, which is within the domain of free speech. However, when bias escalates into a behavior of intimidation, harassment, and other harms or injuries, it becomes a crime. Biased motivation plus a criminally punished behavior will constitute a hate crime,” he said.
Trump’s rhetoric had negatively impacted Asian businesses, including a decrease in visits to New York City’s Chinatown. In response, many organizations and initiatives were launched in solidarity with the AAPI community including Welcome to Chinatown, “a grassroots initiative to support Chinatown businesses.” Hollaback!, a global movement that started in 2005 whose goal is to end all forms of harassment, partnered with Asian Americans Advancing Justice | AAJC to offer free bystander training and de-escalation training.
Unfortunately, this is not the first time that the AAPI community faced discrimination in the United States.
The California Gold Rush led to a large migration of Chinese immigrants. After an 1852 crop failure in China, more than 20,000 came through San Francisco’s customs house, according to History. Soon after their arrival, they faced racial discriminations from their white miner counterparts. In May of that same year, a Foreign Miners Tax of $3 a month was imposed and aimed at Chinese miners.
A decade later, The Pacific Railroad Act called for the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific Railroad companies to build a transcontinental railroad linking the east and the west of the United States.
Despite these obstacles, about 14,000 Chinese immigrants persevered and were hired by Charles Crocker, the one in charge of constructing the Central Pacific, to work under harsh conditions in the Sierra Nevada. On the other side of the soon-to-be connected transcontinental railroad in the Union Pacific were mainly Irish immigrants and Civil War veterans, according to History. The railroad was completed in 1869 with a golden spike in Utah.
Despite their contribution to the construction of the transcontinental railroad, the Chinese were met with another obstacle.
With the intention of decreasing the amount of Chinese immigrants, because apparently there were too many Chinese immigrants, the Chinese Exclusion Act was signed into law by President Chester A. Arthur in 1882. It was expanded for another decade with the Geary Act of 1892.
The criminal justice professor says that education plays a crucial role in understanding diversity and says it is equally important as public policy and legislation. He says that it should start from primary education and continue through postsecondary education. A major issue, he said, is that Asian Pacific Islander and Native American studies do not get as much attention.
“Compared to the Black or Hispanic group, the Asian group accounts for a much smaller portion of the racial/ethnic minority population. This often generates less interest in studying the Asian group. Therefore, it is often difficult to create an Asian-centered program at middle or small-sized universities colleges,” the source said. “Class discussions in a diversity course are frequently limited to Black and Hispanic groups, not to mention that the topic of immigration is largely overlooked. The curriculum in many Asian studies programs has been focused mainly on the history, literature, or lifestyles of several Asian countries. If a college can have a course studying Asians from the diversity and sociological perspectives under the general education requirement, perhaps offered by the Sociology Department, I feel that it should be beneficial, as students of this generation will become parents of the next generation and will be more likely to educate their children in the way they have learned.”
Song says that if the Asian Pacific Islander classes are filled with only Asian and Asian American students, then it would be of no help in preventing xenophobia.
It’s a matter of promoting an appreciation for AAPI culture every day and not just during May, Asian Pacific American Heritage Month.
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