On May 6, the Massachusetts Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights held a web conference on hate crimes against Asian American and Pacific Islander individuals. Speakers shared personal experiences of racism and addressed the rise in attacks on AAPI people, with the intention of confronting xenophobia and anti-Asian sentiment in Massachusetts.
“As you can see, violence against Asian Americans, racism, and xenophobia are not new phenomena,” said Bora Chiemruom, executive director of the Massachusetts Asian American Commission. “They have been part of American history for centuries, and we have seen them manifest against different Asian American and Pacific Islanders communities in many ways, over the years. As the coronavirus escalated, we have seen more harassment, discrimination, and even violence directed at these communities. For me, I was lucky, but for other women, luck is not enough.”
Lisette Le, executive director of the Vietnamese American Initiative for Development, spoke to the plight of Asian nail salon workers, who are in the same industry as the spa workers who were targeted in the Atlanta, Georgia attack. This population experiences a number of vulnerabilities, she said.
“To be a nail salon worker, you work at the intersection of race, gender and class. You work in the service industry, often an invisible one. For our community, the nail salon industry is one where it’s easy to access a job, because you’re hiring your own. You don’t really need that much English,” said Le. “On the flip side, many workers have experienced racial slurs, have had customers threaten to talk to their bosses – which is code for, if a customer gets mad at you, you will lose your job. If you’re not a citizen in this country or you’re here on a green card, or you’re undocumented, [and] about 30% of the immigrant community in MA are undocumented Asians, you’re not going to risk that. So you will make yourself invisible. You will simply just work every day.”
Alvina Yeh, executive director of the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, outlined ways of responding to incidents of anti-Asian violence.
“What our communities really need is to invest in long term solutions that address the root causes of violence and hate in our communities,” said Yeh. “Short term solutions to address violent incidents can include funds to make sure that incidents can be reported anonymously and in language, to provide support for survivors and families and friends of victims of violence, to create bystander and ally trainings to empower the community to respond safely when possible, to fund and support restorative justice programs, instead of focusing on punitive measures that do nothing to help the immediate victims of incidents […] Long term structural investments we can make include [having] collective aggregated data to tell a fuller picture of our community needs, to fund equitable public school history curriculum that includes ethnic studies, to fund government programs that are culturally competent and accessible in the languages our communities speak, to support cross racial and community solidarity building, and finally, to support legislation that addresses the root causes of gender and race based violence and promotes economic justice for all members of our community.”