Anti-Asian hate attacks explode to 1500 in only a month

SCREENCAPTURE

San Francisco school nurse Kyle Navarro says a white man spit on him and called him a “gook” as he tried to
deliver prescriptions to a family shut in by the stay-at-home order.

In the month since civil rights organizations have been collecting the data, there have been almost 1500 incidents of attacks against Asians and Asian Americans related to the coronavirus pandemic.

“The volume of incident reports continues to be concerning. But, beyond the sheer numbers, we hear the impact of hate in the pain, humiliation, trepidation and fear in the voices of AAPIs today,” stated Manjusha Kulkarni, executive director of Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council (A3PCON). 

Most of the victims were Chinese Americans, but almost every Asian ethnicity was victimized by bigots according to a report issued last week by the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council (A3PCON), Chinese for Affirmative Action (CAA) and the Asian American Studies Department at San Francisco State University who launched the STOP AAPI HATE website.

Much of the anti-Chinese and anti-Asian assaults were spurred by Donald Trump and senior members of his administration who -- when they belatedly began to realize the seriousness of the pandemic -- repeatedly referred to the coronavirus as the "Chinese virus."

Although he later stopped the practice and called on the public to stop blaming Asian Americans, the damage was done as bigots continued their attacks.

This report reviews 1,497 reports of coronavirus discrimination submitted on the website from March 19 - April 15, 2020. The following patterns emerged over the course of one month:

• Incidents from California and New York constituted over 58% of all reports.
• Civil rights violations involving workplace discrimination and being barred from businesses and transportation or refused service made up almost ten percent of all incident reports.
• Forty-four percent of incidents took place at private businesses.
• AAPI women were harassed 2.3 times more than AAPI men.
• Nine percent of respondents were AAPI seniors (over the age of 60).
• Reports came from 45 states across the nation and Washington DC.
• Even as shelter-in-place policies were implemented across much of the country and AAPIs interacted less with others, the rate of acts of racism remains alarming.

“The data reveals three trends," said Russell Jeung, Ph.D., chair and professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University. 

"First, the high number of hate incidents, especially assaults, reflects the impact of China-bashing by politicians. 

"Second, high proportions of vulnerable populations--children, youth, elderly and limited-English speaking communities -- are sadly impacted. 

"Finally, combining cases of workplace discrimination and being barred from businesses indicates that Asian Americans' civil rights are being violated,” Jeung concluded. 

The groups stressed that the data they’ve amassed is just “a snapshot of what AAPIs are experiencing on a daily basis,” Cynthia Choi, the co-executive director of CAA, said in a statement, adding that “we can expect the situation to worsen as the anti-China, anti-Chinese rhetoric becomes normalized.”