NASHVILLE, TN – Vicha Ratanapakdee, an 84-year-old Thailand native who lived in San Francisco, died several weeks ago after being shoved to the ground. Across the bay, another man injured three people in Oakland’s Chinatown neighborhood. According to CNN, the victims were a 91-year-old man, a 60-year–old man, and a 55-year-old woman.
Last Tuesday in the Flushing neighborhood of New York City, a 52-year-old Chinese-American woman was attacked outside a bakery. A man shoved her to the ground so hard she struck her head and passed out. The same day, two Asian seniors were assaulted on the subway in separate incidents, according to NBC.
House Democrats last week denounced a spate of recent anti-Asian violence in California and New York. They called for Congress and the White House to pass legislation to provide Department of Justice grants to states and local governments to improve reporting of hate crimes.
They want to meet with the DOJ about enforcement and called for more support for victims. They said they would hold hearings on the rise in racially motivated incidents.
Three non-profits in San Francisco set up the Stop AAPI Hate campaign last year. They began tracking Anti-Asian hate incidents and found there have been nearly 3,000 incidents of anti-Asian discrimination across the United States since March 2020. Incidents were reported from 47 states and the District of Columbia. Fifty-six percent of incidents took place in either California or New York. Women experienced hate 2.3 times the rate of men. Seven percent of respondents were seniors (60+).
“What we’ve seen over the past year is really an emergence of COVID-related racism in the United States,” said Manjusha Kulkarni, executive director, Asian Pacific Policy & Planning Council.
Kulkarni said most of the racial incidents they reported were not nice but not all hate crimes. Verbal harassment and name-calling were most common, followed by shunning, physical assault, and spitting. Most incidents took place in a business, then on a sidewalk or public street, followed by public parks. Chinese were most targeted, then Korean, Filipino, Vietnamese, and Japanese.
“Words matter. We cannot discount in which we had a full year in which we had a president and his colleagues calling this virus the ‘China virus’, the ‘Wuhan flu’, and even worse derivations of that,” said John C. Yang, president of Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAJC).
Yang noted a poll last year which found 40% of Asian Americans either experienced discrimination or heard someone blame Asia or China for COVID-19. He said people are afraid of COVID-19 and afraid about loss of income. Those are real fears but they’ve been conditioned to blame somebody else. Asians are easy targets.
“This fear that we have, this virus of racism is a virus that is very contagious and that affects all our communities…and we need to fight that virus together,” Yang said.
Advocates think tougher law enforcement towards hate crimes will help but won’t solve the problem. That would be sort of like playing Whack-a-Mole and doesn’t get at the underlying causes. One, of course, is white supremacy, but another one is inter-ethnic hostility.
“Rather than accept the premise that we’re against one another… I think we need to look back at the Civil Rights Movement and had it not been for Black leaders after the victories of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting rights Act, they said, ‘you know what? No more to racial barriers in immigration’,” said Kulkarni.
They didn’t have to say that. They didn’t have to do that. But they did. And because of what they did many of us, including my own family, is in the United States. So we owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to those Civil Rights leaders because without them we wouldn’t be there.
So let’s think about that and think about how we work together toward solutions rather than accept the premise of white supremacy that is ‘let’s pit these groups against each other.’
We have so much in common and we can work together for the right restorative and transformative justice solutions. I think that’s really what people are looking for– is this time healing rather than division,” Kulkarni said.
This story was brought to you by the Blue Cross Foundation of California and Ethnic Media Services.
