The COVID-19 pandemic and the framing of Asian Americans as the ones to blame has brought an increased number of hate crimes against Asian Americans, with advocacy group Stop AAPI receiving over 2,800 incident reports over the past year and the UN issuing a report detailing the increase in hate crimes targeting Asian Americans. Here are two takes on the uptick in Anti-Asian hate crimes from HC Conn members.
Kendall’s take on recent events:
I grew up in an area where I felt well-represented as Asian American—I always had Asian friends, I went to the Asian market with my Japanese grandparents, and celebrated Japanese holidays. Reflecting back on my childhood, one of the reasons my experience as an Asian American felt wholly good was because I had the privilege of being half-White and White passing. I had the privilege of avoiding the racism that typically comes with being Asian—I was never teased my about my eye shape because of my European genes, I never worried about being preemptively judged on paper because I have a white-sounding name, and I never felt like I didn’t belong with the White kids.
With the privilege of being half-White has come my privilege of viewing these crimes as numbers and data, and overlooking the individuals and communities that have been deeply impacted by the Anti-Asian rhetoric heightened by the COVID-19 pandemic. But recently I had a wakeup call when a distant family friend became the victim of the increasing and violent anti-Asian sentiment, brutally assaulted in Seattle’s Chinatown. It made it clear to me anti-Asian hate crimes weren’t just another article or Instagram activism post that I could click through, rather that it is a real and urgent issue impacting people I knew and within my community that I had felt was so accepting of Asians.
The sad thing is it shouldn’t take someone you know experiencing a hate crime for an issue to “feel real,” and too often big issues are downplayed because they don’t feel personal. In my opinion, the media has played a significant role in desensitizing people to serious issues and making them seem impersonal by its high-frequency of depressing news that is often data-focused. However, if you are conscious and do choose to take these issues seriously, it’s daunting to figure out how to go beyond signing petitions and sharing resources, and simply being aware of all that’s going on can feel overwhelming. Additionally, the rise of social media activism can make you feel obligated to reshare posts that condense these huge issues into cute infographics, at the risk of seeming ignorant if you don’t share them, but seeming disingenuous if you constantly do.
It’s easy to get caught up within the balancing act of it all, and, consequently, lose sight of the issues at hand. What I’ve found to be helpful is to focus on the people and their stories because in understanding who exactly you are fighting when addressing big social issues such as anti-Asian racism, the issue can feel less impersonal and provides grounding that can then be contextualized within the articles, statistics, and social media posts. My hope is that moving forward, more people will begin to focus on the individuals and communities impacted within these issues, and then in turn their empathy will help drive out hate.
Jasmine’s take on recent events:
I am from New York City, and I spent a lot of my time in Chinatown growing up. I grew up in an Asian household; we celebrate all the major Chinese holidays. The biggest holiday for me growing up was Chinese New Year. When Covid broke out, it was around the time of Chinese New Year, so my family started taking more precautions and limited the amount of family members we visited.
In the past year so much has changed because of Covid-19 as more and more hate crimes are emerging towards Asians and Asian Americans. The media has only recently been reporting the hate crimes towards Asians and Asian Americans, but it started in January 2020 when the pandemic broke out. Slowly, as the pandemic spread worldwide, there have been more hate crimes committed towards Asians throughout the world. At the beginning of the pandemic, the beginning of February, a number of Chinese people started to wear face masks in public, but the media criticized and spread false information telling people not to wear face masks. During this time, someone who wore a face mask in public would be a target for hate crime, it happened throughout New York, yet the media barely made comments or mentioned it.
It wasn’t until this month that hate crimes against Asians and Asian Americans have been more publicized in the media. At first, the victims of these attacks were mostly elderly Asians because they do not have the ability to fight back. When I first heard about elderly Asians being attacked and pushed to the ground, I thought, “what is wrong with these people, pushing elders?” It made me frustrated that people who are attacked are the ones who can’t fight back, and most of the time, these crimes go unreported because many do not know where to report these crimes.
However, in recent weeks, I learned that an Asian American was stabbed in Chinatown near the Southern district courts in New York. That hit home to me because that’s the place where I have always felt safe. I think about my parents and other family members, worried about their safety.
I am glad that the media has been covering more and more about the crimes committed against Asians, bringing more awareness to the general public about the issues that we are facing today. These crimes committed should be told, and I also hope the media will educate people about how to stop or step in when they see someone is being targeted rather than just reporting the crime because if no actions are taken, these racist acts are not going to stop.