The spa shootings in Atlanta are perhaps the most visible recent act of anti-Asian discrimination, but represent a larger disturbing trend. Research released by Stop AAPI Hate reveals that there were 3,800 anti-Asian racist incidents across the U.S. over the last year—a 2,500% increase from previous years. In Los Angeles, there has been a 114% increase in cases over the last year, while Boston has experienced a 133% increase in cases. In New York, there has been an astounding 833% increase in anti-Asian hate crimes. Moreover, 68% of this discrimination has been directed towards women.
According to a Boston University (BU) professor, some of these incidents can be attributed to the former president’s disparaging comments about the origins of COVID-19 and the Chinese people. As BU professor Hyeouk Chris Hahm noted, then-President Trump branding COVID-19 “the China virus” was largely responsible for the rise in discrimination. “We all felt it,” said Hahm, who is Korean-American. “I live in Newton, which is a nice community, but even in Newton, there were incidents. My Asian friends were yelled at: ‘Go back to your country!’”
While some of this might be new, there has been a long history of anti-Asian discrimination in this country and many local academics are doing their best to expose the history that often goes untaught in schools. Erika Lee, Tufts class of 1991 and now the Rudolph J. Vecoli Chair in Immigration History and Director of the Immigration History Research Center recently spoke at her alma mater. She discussed how acts of hatred against Asian-Americans “are not random acts perpetrated by deranged individuals [but rather] an expression of our country’s long history of racial violence and discrimination targeting Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders. And they are part of the same processes of systemic racism impacting Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and other peoples of color that have defined America since its founding.”
Not only have East Asians been affected by this discrimintion, but South Asians have experienced it as well. On April 18th, Sikhs and Companions of Harvard (SACH) hosted a vigil to honor the victims of the recent mass shooting in Indianapolis, where four of the eight victims of the attack were Sikh. 18 other organizations from both Harvard and Wellesley College co-sponsored the vigil, and more than 90 people attended virtually. It included a live musical performance of kirtan, Sikh devotional music, as attendees entered the virtual space. The attendees also held one minute of silence to honor the lives lost a few days before.
SACH member Tarina K. Ahuja (’24) said at the start of the vigil that, “We demand the police investigate the role of bias. But meanwhile, we don’t need a hate crime classification in order to grieve with the families, the Sikh community.” She led an open discussion to allow members of the local community to share their thoughts, field their opinions and express their emotions.
Mukesh Prasad ’93, VP of Asian American alliance and a member who attended the vigil, wrote an email to Harvard stating, “May we always remember we are stronger together and an attack on any one of us is an attack not only on all of us, but also an attack on the diversity which constitutes our nation’s greatest strength,”
Another local institution, BU, also held a forum to discuss the reasons behind the increase in Anti Asian Hate Crimes. Jessica Zhang (’21) believes “because COVID-19 started in China, and was called the China Virus or Kung Flu, it attacked us as a people, adding to the other hardships and really terrible things that came from this pandemic.” Mariette DiChristina, dean of Boston University’s College of Communication, gave an official statement in March 2021, stating, “Today, as we continue to struggle through a global pandemic, we also suffer from, and know that we as a nation must cure, a terrible social illness: the abhorrent rising tide of racism and xenophobia against those of Asian descent.”
Addressing this social problem requires us to look harder at American history. Assistant Professor of English at BU Takeo Riviera echoed that, “Anti-Asian racism is baked into the DNA of this country, even as early as 1492, when Christopher Columbus gets lost in the Antilles. There is this notion that the indigenous people here are Indians. So even those who have been perceived as Asian have been the targets of expansion and imperial violence.”
In time, some things improved for Asian immigrants, but many things did not. The Chinese Exclusion Act, a federal law signed by President Chester A. Arthur on May 6, 1882, prohibited the immigration of Chinese laborers and was the first such law of exclusion based on race. Then on February 19, 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 to incarcerate Japanese Americans in internment camps and strip them of their land and property. 9/11 in 2001 also set off a wave of Anti-Islamic sentiment that also affected many Asian immigrants who were all painted with the same brush.
This streak of discrimination might not be new, but it has been made more visible in the current climate and has become more urgent for us to finally address. As Professor Rivera says, “We are being targeted as racially ‘othered’ at a moment when no one ever deserves to be…racial otherness is intensified in moments of crisis, and becomes a way in which larger anxieties get projected onto a racial ‘other’ to protect the status quo.”
