As Hate and Hardship Rise, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders Seek Support from Non-Asians

In March 2021, Lisa Sun, a young Asian American fashion CEO in New York City, was concerned about her Asian immigrant seamstresses.

During the pandemic, they had continued to commute on public transportation to work in her factory in the Garment District. One woman had reported to Sun that other riders moved away from anyone Asian; her male head designer was screamed at and blamed for COVID-19.

Were her employees at risk of more serious physical attacks?

The Taiwanese American small business owner discovered she was not immune from this harassment, either: One evening, as Sun was walking to New York’s main post office nearby, a man poured beer over her while another bumped into her and told her to “go back to China.” Sun reported that passers-by witnessed what was happening, but made no move to intervene.

May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, a time to raise awareness not just of the contributions of these citizens to this country, but also to the sharp rise in attacks against this ethnic group.

May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, a time to raise awareness not just of the contributions of these citizens, but also to the sharp rise in attacks against this ethnic community. National Security Council

In 2019, even before the pandemic, Asian Americans reported experiencing racism at the same rate as Black Americans. Now, over the past year of the pandemic, reports of anti-Asian harassment and hate crimes, including many attacks on elderly people, have surged 169%. Sadly, Black Americans have been responsible for some of these attacks.

According to a national report by Stop AAPI Hate, a nonprofit coalition of community organizations based at San Francisco State University, the number of anti-Asian hate crimes during the first quarter of 2021 alone increased by 50%, from 3,795 cases from March to December 2020 to 6,603 cases from January to March 2021. The majority of reports — 65% — involved verbal harassment. Shunning made up 18% of reports, and physical assault 13%. Most of these incidents involved attacks on women and girls.

New York, where fashion CEO Lisa Sun lives and works, saw the biggest jump — 223%. “You don’t understand it,” she said, “and then it happens to you.” Immediately afterwards, she was at a loss about what to do.

Many Asian Americans have been brought up to keep their heads down, to avoid drawing attention to themselves. A new organization, Leading Asian Americans to Unite for Change (LAAUNCH.org), reports that Asian Americans are least likely to report harassment to the police. An AAPI survey found that only 30% of Asian-Americans said they felt “very comfortable” reporting incidents of harassment and discrimination to the police; most worry that no one will listen to them. So, as shocking as the new count of attacks is, the actual number is probably higher.

Sun was relatively lucky: She talked to “a reporter friend” who called the NYPD for her, and an officer responded from the department’s new Asian Hate Crime Task Force.

Crimes against Asian Americans continue to be reported all over the country, at the rate of at least one per day. Asian Americans consider the current racist climate a second epidemic. At one demonstration, a young man carried a sign that read, “Asians are not viruses. Racism is.”

Part of the problem is the U.S.’s current relationship with China. Asian Americans are caught in the middle as tensions have escalated between Washington and Beijing over China’s rapidly expanding economy, its government’s record of human rights abuses and the fact it did not inform other countries when COVID-19 broke out in the city of Wuhan. The rest of the world learned about coronavirus from one heroic doctor’s tweet.

While hate crimes against the AAPI community in the U.S. go back to 1849, when Chinese workers began arriving in large numbers to work in gold mines and building railroads, the current spike dates from the start of the pandemic last year. During the Trump administration, the president and other politicians regularly referred to the pandemic as “China virus,” “Kung flu,” and “Wuhan virus.” In March 2021, polling found almost half of Americans consider China their country’s “greatest enemy.” 

At the same time, many Asian Americans report feeling invisible. No wonder: 42% of Americans cannot name a prominent Asian American — even though one of them is our nation’s vice president and another is golf champion Tiger Woods, whose mother is from Thailand. About one in four White Americans does not consider anti-Asian discrimination a problem. Lawyer Christopher M. Kwok, co-executive editor of a new study on Asian American hate in New York, researched what brought about this Asian American feeling of being invisible. Kwok discovered that an 1854 California Supreme Court decision, People v. Hall, declared that Chinese had no standing under American law.

Besides hate crimes, Asian Americans have suffered economic blows. At the very start of the pandemic, many Asian restaurants lost customers because of the myth that coronavirus could be transmitted through food. Many Asian businesses have closed permanently. Wellington Z. Chen, executive director of the Chinatown Partnership Local Development Corp. in New York City, says that in his city, Asian Americans now are the poorest. Chinatown restaurants, Chen says, continue to lose business because they close early; they want to ensure their employees travel home safely.

Leaders like Chen say the AAPI community needs allies from other ethnic communities to help stamp out the virus of hate. Even going to an Asian restaurant is a show of support. This guide, organized state by state, provides resources and more suggestions for standing up to anti-Asian hate.

 Ann Marie Cunningham is a Columbia University Lipman Fellow for 2020 who will be working with the Mississippi Center for investigative Reporting. She is a veteran journalist/producer and author of a best-seller. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Technology Review, The Nation and The New Republic. Contact her at amc@mississippicir.org.