Ryan Horio
Starting at the end of 2019 and still lingering to this day, violence against the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) community has ingrained its traumatic scars on individuals, families, and a whole generation of AAPIs. With the death of 8 Asian women at a spa shooting in Atlanta, GA, continuing hate crimes towards elderly in the Bay Area, and deadly attacks on individuals such as Michelle Go, everywhere we look are fragmented pieces of our nation’s xenophobic ideals that resurfaced with time and in the right conditions. According to the Department of Justice’s 2020 Hate Crime Statistics, there was a 77% increase of hate crimes towards Asians from 2019 to 2020. However, these numbers are not representative of the situation as a whole due to low reporting through official channels within the AAPI community. #STOPAAPIHATE, a movement and social organization formed to combat AAPI violence during the pandemic, received over 9,000 self-reported hate crimes from March 2020 to June 2021. Furthermore, a study conducted by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that 25% of Asian Americans reported fears over another person threatening their safety because of their race or ethnicity. The COVID-19 pandemic was not simply an issue over public health but was rooted in the socio-political powers that ran our country at the time and influenced the rise of anti-Asian hate. During the Trump administration, anti-Asian rhetoric when describing COVID-19, such as “China virus” or “kung flu,” added fuel to the flames as white supremacists took this as a sign to harm members of the AAPI community. Maybe it was a ploy to reduce China’s power on the world stage, but hundreds of thousands of Asian Americans across the nation suffered its repercussions. My friends felt these repercussions, my family felt these repercussions, and I felt these repercussions. Whether that meant fearing for the safety of my mother and sister every time they went out in public or worrying about my grandparents who lived by themselves when they went out for groceries, the actions of the administration at the time taught me this—words, and how you use them, hold their weight in gold. Unfortunately, this is not the first time in our nation’s history that xenophobic sentiments excluded AAPIs. Legislation such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907 limited Asian immigrants from entering? America, and from these feelings coined the term, the Yellow Peril. Scapegoating Asian communities as the reason for public health crises and societal issues is not a new concept, and we saw glimpses of this during the Trump administration. When things start to go wrong, our country has always wanted to find others to blame, starting with the people who “don’t belong.” Although almost a century and a half has passed since this time, it is a shame to see how we have not changed our beliefs one bit. COVID-19 not only highlighted these social issues, but also revealed health inequities within the AAPI community. Before the pandemic, AAPIs had a sense of invisibility regarding health data. Due to racialization and the aggregation of different cultures and ethnicities under the broader umbrella of Asian or Pacific Islander, language barriers and cultural differences cause inaccurate data and data gaps. Moreover, due to historical events and everyday microaggressions, many lack trust in the government and public health sector. With a global pandemic on our hands, this sense of invisibility came into the limelight and displayed itself through the inequalities we see today in the accessibility to healthcare, misinformation about vaccinations, and misrepresentation within health data. Paranoia from seeing people getting attacked on national and local news outlets leads to increased rates of mental health issues, especially when these people look exactly like you. For a community that historically uses mental health specialists less than our white counterparts, we may be seeing an influx of depression, anxiety, or other mental health cases coming out of the pandemic as many refuse to talk about mental health, similar to other BIPOC communities. Faced with the truth about these social and health inequities, we can feel discouraged and pessimistic—I know I did—but we can also feel frustrated and impassioned to enact change. To take up arms, we can start by using our voices to amplify these untold stories. Now, more than ever, is the need for our lived experiences to penetrate into the mainstream instead of residing on the sidelines of such issues. Grassroots organizations such as Dear Asian Youth, an organization of Asian youth dedicated to uplifting and promoting the Asian community through intersectional activism, and J-Town Action and Solidarity, a collective building community power in Los Angeles Little Tokyo that is rooted in a history of activism and community care, were formed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic to combat the inequalities and inequities minority communities have been facing. Taking initiative is something that we need. We should be creating spaces to learn about the history of AAPIs in our education system, not through a white-centric lens but through the perspectives of our own people. We need to bridge the cultural disconnect between white society and AAPIs through promoting diversification and understanding intersectionality. We need to reform the current narrative on AAPIs by doing it ourselves—not by letting others do it for us. Through the COVID-19 pandemic, we have learned about the flawed ideals this nation has continued to survive off of, and only through consistent action and unyielding solidarity can we move this country forward with our own two hands.
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