Racists find a new way to harass AAPI students by 'Zoombombing'

SCREEN CAPTURE / ZOOM

A meeting of Filipino American students at San Diego State was interrupted by racist 'zoombombers.'

Damn those racists! They've found a new way to harass people of color.

Even when POC, like the Andres Bonifacio Samahan — a Filipinx cultural organization at San Diego State University  -- are minding their own business and keeping to themselves, racists want to interrupt, yell racial slurs and just make life a little more uncomfortable for POC. 

So-call "zoombombers" interrupted a virtual meeting of Filipino American students using the popular Zoom app by interrupting the online gathering, said Lana Bautista, chair of the campus group, to the Daily Aztec.

“It was so random to hear these voices that were so unfamiliar and they were being so disruptive and they all came in at the same time,” Bautista told the Daily Aztec. “I felt violated.”

For a few minutes last Friday (April 10), the unwanted crashers unleashed a torrent of profanities and racial slurs, that left the Filipino American students stunned.

“All of you have coronavirus, every single one of you — coronavirus, coronavirus,” yelled the disruptors.

“We sit silent not only to prevent any reaction but out of some mix of shock, anger, confusion, and maybe most of all fear, fear that we were being violated and degraded in our homes and I hope no one else experiences that,” club member Julian Natividad said to Balitang America.

Zoombombing, which is the term used to describe a new form of online harassment in which videoconferences are hijacked and attackers post hate speech and other offensive content, has become more common in recent weeks as the nation’s universities moved to online learning and meetings during the self-isolation rules mandated by the current coronavirus crisis.

Zoombombers crashed an AP high school class on Wednesday (April 15), at Newton South High School in Massachusetts.

In his second week of remote learning, senior Sam Qian joined a Zoom meeting, ready to learn in his advanced placement Chinese class.  

Instead, he, his classmates and teacher Lanlan Chen were subjected to what Qian described as “five minutes of pure hatred and disgust.” 

Around 30 intruders joined the meeting and began shouting, all while images with phrases including “corona” and “China” took over students’ screens.

“All we could hear was just racial slurs and derogatory remarks and hundreds of comments about coronavirus,” senior Joshua Liu told WDHD.

Both incidents were reported to school authorities. In the Newton case, the incident was reported to the police.

The San Diego student club, named after a leader of the Philippine War of Independence,  issued a statement after the incident that marred their meeting:

“We will press on, AB Samahan will not be let down because we will not be put down. We will not have our experiences invalidated by people who do not even look like us. We will not stand for it. We will not let the anti-Asianness in the United States go unnoticed any more. We will no longer be the silent majority.”

“What I want people to take away from this experience is that we shouldn’t disregard small comments,” Bautista told Balitang America. “We shouldn’t let microaggressions pass. If we see something wrong we should deal with it on the spot and make sure people realize what effect their actions have.”

ASAM NEWS contributed to this article.