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Friend,
Asian Americans have faced an unrelenting barrage of hate since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Horrific attacks on elderly people, women and Asian-owned businesses have traumatized communities suffering under a drumbeat of taunts, harassment and threats.
But a movement is rising in response, and it’s personal. Asian American leaders working to end discrimination and societal inequity are exposing the hatred by speaking out forcefully about its roots, creating new ways of tracking racialized attacks and discrimination and directing concerted efforts to aid victims.
As members of a community that has endured generations of racist rhetoric, often in pained silence, they are also telling their own stories. Their hope is that by sharing how their own experiences shaped their consciousness of racism and led them to chart paths to help stamp it out, they will increase understanding of a problem with deep roots in our society.
One such leader is Margaret Huang, president and CEO of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The storied organization is a catalyst for racial justice in the South and beyond to advance the human rights of all people. The SPLC is responding quickly to this new threat, working with AAPI communities and organizations, adding its legal and organizing weight to their efforts to stem the tide of racial hate.
“People are starting to recognize the political power and opportunity that the Asian American and Pacific Islander community has,” Huang said. “The AAPI community has, to a really impressive and significant extent, organized to respond to this crisis. But this crisis is part of a larger challenge of white supremacy, which is raising its head at this moment. And we’re only going to be effective at countering it in the AAPI community if we are aligned with all of the other communities who are under threat. That means creating programs that actually focus on community resilience and prevention, helping children and families understand how our civic processes can help them and helping people understand why hate is so harmful.”
In recent interviews, Huang, along with John C. Yang, president and executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice - AAJC, decried the steep rise in hate crimes and bias incidents against AAPI communities but emphasized the significant ways those communities have organized, in many ways for the first time, to respond to the crisis. Across the country, community groups are delivering groceries to elderly Asian Americans, volunteering to accompany them on errands to ensure their safety and creating neighborhood watch systems and support groups.
The efforts come from every quarter of the community. As a case in point, on March 25 a coalition of Asian American theater artists and musicians established a fund to disburse car service or taxi fare to AAPI artists who feel unsafe on New York subways. More lastingly, Asian American leaders are encouraging political awareness and engagement in civic life, establishing hotlines and sophisticated databases to report hate incidents and crimes, and reaching outside their communities to educate society at large.
Horrific attacks
Just how harmful the hate has become is startling. In January, Michelle Go, a 40-year-old woman, was pushed in front of a New York subway train to her death. In March, a 67-year-old Asian woman was punched more than 125 times in Yonkers, New York. Earlier the same month, a man punched and elbowed seven Asian women in the face in a matter of two hours in Manhattan. And a month earlier, 35-year-old Christina Yuna Lee was followed into her New York apartment and killed.
The SPLC, the nation’s leading organization in monitoring hate groups, does not track individual acts of hate. But it has given advice and guidance to organizations that do. One, the Stop AAPI Hate coalition, documented almost 11,000 hate incidents against people identifying as Asian American and Pacific Islander from March 19, 2020, to December 31, 2021.
Another report, from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, a division of the National Institutes of Health, found that members of minority groups were more likely to report instances of being harassed or threatened than white people during the pandemic and situations in which other people treated them as though they might be carrying the disease. People of Asian ethnicity reported the highest rates of being taunted by racist comments, insults, threats and name-calling related to COVID-19.
The report found that 30% of that group had experienced such discrimination, while 44% had seen people act fearful around them.
Huang called the series of comments directed against China by former President Donald Trump after the COVID-19 virus emerged “a very clear instigating factor in the rise of hate and violence directed against the AAPI community.”
“All of those attempts to stigmatize an entire nation and people for the pandemic that was spreading across the world were embraced by a lot of his followers and a lot of others who have just been deeply hurt or concerned by the pandemic,” Huang said. “So, nobody was surprised when these incidents started increasing.”
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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