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Documenting and Contextualizing Anti-Asian Racism During the COVID-19 Pandemic


Since the start of 2020, racist and xenophobic incidents against Asians and Asian Americans have spiked, with the website StopAAPIHate reporting over 2,600 incidents of harassment, bullying, verbal assault, and violence since mid March, with many, many more going unreported.  Each of these incidents are painful but important to hear about. One recent example from their site, an encounter in Marietta, Georgia, is particularly notable: “I was in line at the pharmacy when a woman approached me and sprayed Lysol all over me. She was yelling out, You’re the infection, Go home! We don’t want you here. I was in shock and cried as I left the building. No one came to my help.”

This incident links to historical constructions of Asian Americans as the Yellow Peril; in other words, some form of threat to the White majority population, either in being political or economic in nature. As scholars like Madeleine Hsu point out, although Asian Americans are seemingly praised as the model minority, if they become too successful and seem to pose a threat to the White majority, then again they are quickly and easily turned into the Yellow Peril.

The Yellow Peril trope can also portray Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners who are perceived as culturally unassembled, as Jack Tchen and Mia Tuan argue, depictions which are particularly relevant for the current situation of a public health threat. Nayan Shaw’s book Infectious Divides, for example, has shown how early Chinatowns were depicted as filthy and diseased. The spraying of the woman with Lysol in Georgia clearly shows this construction of Asian Americans as a public health threat and, secondly, as an undeserving outsider, unworthy of any help or sympathy. Further, the Pew Research Center finds that 58% of Asian American respondents said it’s more common now for people to express racism towards Asian Americans than before the pandemic.

In this context, Asian Americans are grappling with the complexities of stopping these incidents of hate. At the same time, we do not want to over-criminalize and contribute to the carceral state. In this context, Asian Americans are not getting any help from the government.  As NBC News reported, federal agencies such as the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the CDC implemented specific steps to counteract hate crimes following the SARS outbreak and 9/11. But no such plans exist when it comes to the COVID pandemic.

Instead, our current president has repeatedly referred to the pandemic as the “China virus” or “kung flu” and, in the process, has blame an entire country and people, reinforcing Yellow Peril stereotypes and ultimately condoning and even encouraging hostility against, not only Chinese, but millions of Asians and Asian Americans in the U.S. and globally.

As such, the responsibility for addressing these hate crimes continues to fall on community-level efforts, such as pro bono services from Asian American organizations such as the National APA  Bar Association, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, and Massachusetts’s own Asian American Commission, all of whom are mobilizing collective efforts in publicizing these events, documenting their severity and the need for those in power to address these forms of hate and to help those in vulnerable situations, including Asian American-owned businesses that have been impacted by vandalism and loss of revenue.

My colleagues will discuss various forms of resistance by Asian Americans. But I want to focus on the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin, which inspired the creation of a multiracial coalition of individuals and organizations that demanded justice and succeeded in compelling the Justice Department to issue murder charges against those who violated Vincent’s civil rights, even though they ultimately were never sent to jail. Nonetheless, the Vincent Chin case offers one important example of how Asian Americans have fought back against oppression, rather than quietly and passively accepting such dehumanizing treatment.

The Vincent Chin example also highlights the critical need to unite in solidarity with other groups of color, especially with the Black community, and to support their efforts to demand racial justice, stop the systematic killing of Blacksand the rise of white nationalist movements, and to address fundamental institutional inequities related to economic insecurity, healthcare, unemployment, housing, and incarceration, etc..

Ultimately, recent events show conclusively that, if we as Asian Americans want others to stand up in our defense during these situations, we also have to show up and do the same without hesitation to support movements such as Black Lives Matter. Indeed, the groups, such as “Asians for Black Lives” are organizing such efforts, but there needs to be much more awareness and involvement by Asian Americans, both on campuses and beyond.
 

C.N. Le is a Senior Lecturer II in Sociology and Director of Asian/Asian American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. 


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