Last July a Chinese American attorney was approached as she left her office at Tremont Street and Washington Street in Boston. A person came up to her, pulled on her reusable mask, and let the force of the elastic bands slap the mask back against her face. The perpetrator then ran away as the attorney demanded to know: Was she attacked because she was Asian?
“I can do whatever I want,” was the response.
After the attack, the attorney, who requested her name not be printed, said she was afraid to return to her office for a month. “I bought mace. I get scared. I get startled when someone is walking close to me.”
The attorney contacted the police but was unable to convince them the attack as a hate crime. Without legal evidence of racial motivation, such as an explicitly racist statement accompanying the assault, an incident cannot be prosecuted as a hate crime. When she insisted that racism prompted the attack, the hate crime specialist reportedly called her statement “self-serving.”
“How do they define Asian hate? That’s what I’m curious about,” said the attorney.
The attorney’s story highlights both regional and national trend of increased threats to Asian Americans and the challenges of defining such incidents.
Nearly one in three Asian American adults have feared threats or physical attacks since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, a proportion far higher than any other racial group, according to a Pew Research Center study in April 2021.
A year later, it seems little has changed.
While the total number of hate crimes in Massachusetts has increased by 2 percent from 2015 to 2020, those targeting people of Asian and Pacific Islander descent have escalated by 47 percent. And over the past year, anti-Asian hate crimes in Massachusetts have skyrocketed even more dramatically by 70 percent.
Over the past two years, 208 instances of racially motivated hate crimes have been reported to the Boston Police Department. Of these, nearly one in five have been perpetrated against Asians and Asian Americans, despite that only 9.7 percent of Boston’s population is of Asian descent. The crimes ranged from willful destruction of property to assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, but simple assault and battery and harassment by racial epithet made up the vast majority of the crimes at 42.5 percent and 35 percent, respectively.
The Quincy Police Department also reported similar instances of anti-Asian assault and battery and property damage. Hate crimes in Cambridge in 2020 are 7 percent higher than the ten-year average and are not broken down by race. However, there are widely-known incidents of anti-Asian hate crimes in Cambridge. For example, Michael Cheng, the former president of Harvard Undergraduate Council, received racist notes containing anti-Chinese slurs in his college dormitory this February.
The police departments of Malden, Lowell, Chelsea, Revere, Everett, and Brookline did not respond to requests for information.
These data, however, do not tell the full story. The actual number of anti-Asian hate crimes is likely much higher because of the stringent legal criteria for hate crime categorization, and fail to capture incidents like the attorney’s.
Other crimes may go unreported altogether.
“The Asian illegal immigrants who are here, they do not want to report such incidents because then their own legal status is questioned,” said Yasmin Forbes, executive director of the Massachusetts Asian American and Pacific Islanders Commission.
“There are lots of actions we can take. One is looking at where one needs to build broad-based coalitions across all different colored communities, so you’re working together on systemic racism that exists across America.”
SAMPAN, published by the nonprofit Asian American Civic Association, is the only bilingual Chinese-English newspaper in New England, acting as a bridge between Asian American community organizations and individuals in the Greater Boston area. It is published biweekly and distributed free-of-charge throughout metro Boston; it is also delivered to as far away as Hawaii.
