Crimes Against Asians & Asian Americans

On March 16, 2021, a man named Robert Aaron Long was suspected of being responsible for the killing of eight people, six of them women of Asian descent. Later that week, a man named Erick Deoliveira assaulted an Asian American mother during a Protect Asian Lives protest.

These are only two incidents out of 3,800 in the past year. If I kept going, you would notice a pattern, if you haven’t already.

The victims are Asian.

Looking at some of the things that happened during the spike in anti-Asian hate incidents, a few reasons that Asian people have been targets could be that Covid-19 arose in China and that people with large platforms created biases against Asian people.

An example of this is when former President Donald Trump referred to Covid-19 as the “China virus.” This led to a wave of anti-Asian posts using the hashtag #ChinaVirus, which created negative bias against Asian people and increased hate crime rates.

Violent events like these have a long history. An example is the Japanese internment camps that were established in several U.S. states after Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese. From 1942 to 1945, roughly 120,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated due to the president’s fear of another attack.

I believe that a reason that anti-Asian hate crimes have soared is because people often view Asian people as weak and docile, creating this view that they can just harm them whenever they feel like it, or because they view them as the “yellow peril,” a racist label that makes it seem as if Asian and Asian American people pose a threat to people in the West, more specifically, the U.S.

As more and more Asian and Asian American people have been speaking up about racist things that have happened to them, this has sparked protests all across America. Additionally, people on different social media sites, notably TikTok, have been using their platforms to bring awareness to the things that have been happening and shedding light on crimes against Asian people.

President Joe Biden has also decided to do something about the anti-Asian and Asian American violence by providing $49.5 million to help Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) who are survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence. And the National Science Foundation will be spending $33 million to study xenophobia. But this is not all. The Justice Department also established a cross-agency initiative in response to anti-Asian violence that will include an online tool to better study and share data about hate crimes as well as new training for state and local law enforcement agencies to promote accurate reporting of hate crimes.

Hopefully, these actions will help in the fight to give Asians and Asian Americans the respect and protection they deserve from the violence that they have been facing for years.