{"id":103688,"date":"2021-05-18T21:58:22","date_gmt":"2021-05-18T13:58:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mediaintel.asia\/?p=381527"},"modified":"2021-05-18T21:58:22","modified_gmt":"2021-05-18T13:58:22","slug":"who-will-march-for-asian-americans-after-the-killings-in-atlantaquest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/2021\/05\/18\/who-will-march-for-asian-americans-after-the-killings-in-atlantaquest\/","title":{"rendered":"Who will march for Asian Americans after the killings in Atlanta?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"MediaIntel.Asia\"<\/a><\/div>\n

Between March 19, 2020, and Feb. 28, 2021, the nonprofit group Stop AAPI Hate collected 3,795 first-person accounts of incidents ranging from casually racist comments to vicious assaults. According to data from California State University at San Bernardino\u2019s Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, in 2020, anti-Asian hate crimes in 16 of the country\u2019s largest cities increased almost 150 percent over the previous year, even as the overall number of hate crimes reported to the police declined. The numbers don\u2019t capture the ugliness of these attacks. \u201cGo home,\u201d a man yelled while throwing a glass bottle at a woman placing her baby in a car seat, appending a racial slur to the insult. Another man kicked a dog and spat on its owner, saying, \u201cTake your disease that\u2019s ruining our country and go home.\u201d Scores of Asian American elders have been senselessly assaulted by random strangers on the street. These are painful statistics and stories \u2014 especially when it feels like no one actually cares. Having marched in my share of streets, I am left asking, who will march for us? Racism against Asian Americans often goes unrecognized and unchallenged because of stereotypes that depict Asian Americans as people who don\u2019t need protection from abuse \u2014 or who don\u2019t deserve it. It\u2019s clearly no coincidence that the surge in anti-Asian conduct has occurred during the covid-19 pandemic. The former president called the pathogen the \u201cChina virus\u201d and the \u201ckung flu,\u201d even as he hosted superspreader events and disparaged basic public health guidelines. Supportive pundits and politicians echoed his rhetoric, seemingly indifferent to the fact that their followers don\u2019t always differentiate between the government of China and fellow Americans who appear to be of Asian descent. The broad impact on Asians and Asian Americans was clear: Stop AAPI Hate reports that fewer than half of the reported anti-Asian bias incidents involved Chinese victims. The bridge from anti-China sentiment to attacks against Asian Americans is a manifestation of the xenophobic \u201cperpetual foreigner\u201d stereotype, in which even native-born citizens are perceived as unassimilated outsiders. A celebrity radio DJ I listen to daily has undoubtedly \u201cevolved\u201d from his shock-jock days and yet still invokes a stereotypical accent for comedic effect. I\u2019m half Chinese, half White (Asian Cajun as I call my specific mix). When asked, \u201cWhere are you from?,\u201d I say Kansas. The even cringier version is \u201cWhat are you?,\u201d to which I respond, \u201ca writer\u201d \u2014 or better yet \u201ca law professor,\u201d because that\u2019s a surefire conversation killer. \u201cGo back to where you came from\u201d? Please, I qualify for membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution. You go home. And xenophobia and misogyny often intersect. Less than a day after the appalling shootings in Atlanta, Cherokee County Sheriff Frank Reynolds said the suspect cited \u201csexual addiction\u201d as his motivation and saw the spas he targeted as \u201ca temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate.\u201d With every casual \u201cme love you long time\u201d or \u201chappy ending\u201d joke, our culture hypersexualizes and dehumanizes Asian American women, portraying us as victims while treating us as targets. When New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft was accused of paying for an act of prostitution, the cultural chit-chat, not to mention thousands of racist memes, focused on his right to privacy, or why he didn\u2019t pick a classier joint. Last year, Florida dropped the soliciting charges against Kraft but continued to pursue felony prostitution cases against some of the women involved \u2014 who law enforcement had initially presented as human trafficking victims. As I read the coverage of the Atlanta shootings, I was sad and angry and frustrated. I found myself thinking, If this were happening to any other racial group, we\u2019d treat it differently. But I reminded myself that there\u2019s nothing to gain from comparing the various and pervasive forms of racism and bias. The \u201cmodel minority\u201d stereotype of Asian Americans that is used to argue that we are an exception to the gravitational force of American racism \u2014 good students, hard workers, nonthreatening people of color \u2014 is constantly weaponized to simultaneously demonize Black and Latino communities and constrain Asian American activism. Under the prior administration, the Justice Department blatantly pitted Asian Americans against other people of color by suing elite universities in an attempt to ban admission policies that valued diversity and inclusiveness. When communities of color fight with one another, the racists win. And finally: Because people in power see us as either model minorities or the permanent foreign, subservient class, they assume we won\u2019t make noise, that we won\u2019t fight back and that we have no allies to stand up for us. Let\u2019s all prove them wrong. Read more: Read a letter in response to this op-ed: We stand with Asian Americans against violence The Post\u2019s View: The Atlanta shootings cannot be dismissed as someone having a \u2018bad day\u2019 The Post\u2019s View: The surge of attacks against Asian Americans requires attention and swift solutions Andrew Wang: Anti-Asian violence is surging. But we can\u2019t answer bigotry with bigotry. Helen Zia: Targeting Asians and Asian Americans will make it harder to stop covid-19 Jennifer Rubin: Robert Menendez called out Ron Johnson\u2019s racism. The full Senate should follow suit.<\/p>\n

This data comes from MediaIntel.Asia's Media Intelligence and Media Monitoring Platform<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Between March 19, 2020, and Feb. 28, 2021, the nonprofit group Stop AAPI Hate collected 3,795 first-person accounts of incidents ranging from casually racist comments to vicious assaults. According to data from California State University at San Berna…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":253,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[639,144,325,288,194,1108,843,92,334],"tags":[10382,3686,7007,10424,3472,10324,10391,10328,1977],"class_list":["post-103688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-california","category-china","category-education","category-medicine","category-news-chinese-law","category-police","category-racism","category-statistics","category-university","tag-activist","tag-boycott","tag-car","tag-china-general-news","tag-chinese","tag-covid-19","tag-florida","tag-pandemic","tag-senate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/253"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103688"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103688\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":103689,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103688\/revisions\/103689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}