For most of the last year, Asian-Americans have sounded the alarm over the rising discrimination they've experienced and witnessed, fueled in part by racist language and false claims about the coronavirus by former President Trump and other public officials, says The New York Times.
In 16 of America’s biggest cities, the number of reported anti-Asian hate crimes increased nearly 150 percent in 2020, according to an analysis from the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at CSU San Bernardino. The advocacy group Stop AAPI Hate released a report this week saying it had received more 3,800 reports of verbal harassment, civil rights violations, and physical assault from March 2020 to February 2021.
Then came the fatal shootings of eight people, six of them women of Asian descent, in Georgia on Tuesday.
Many people in America are ignorant of the history of Asian-Americans, which isn't taught well enough in schools, says Erika Lee, a professor of history and Asian-American studies at the University of Minnesota.
There's also a stereotype that people of Asian descent are economically and educationally successful, which can lead to the incorrect assumption that the discrimination they face can’t be that bad, says the Times.
In fact, some of the Asian-Americans who've been subjected to the most vicious violence have been people living on the socioeconomic margins. They tend to be invisible to much of society, which only furthers a widespread dismissal of anti-Asian violence, says Chris Lee, a founder of Plan A Magazine, an online journal focused on Asian-American culture and politics.
The marginalization of Asian-Americans has a long history.
Chinese immigrants who built the railways and mined gold in the 19th century were shunted into Chinatowns in San Francisco and other cities, redlined by financial institutions and often left to fend for themselves, says the Times.
Further immigration from China was restricted by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first immigration law to target working-class immigrants from a specific country. It was followed in 1917 by the most restrictive immigration law in the country's history, the Asiatic Barred Zone Act, nearly eliminating all arrivals from the South Asian subcontinent and Southeast Asia.
For decades, Japanese residents in the United States were kept out of white neighborhoods through covenants written into real estate deeds; tens of thousands of American citizens of Japanese descent were incarcerated in internment camps during World War II.
Asian ethnic groups, though distinct from one another, have at times been lumped together under the umbrella of an Asian-American identity. But the anti-Asian violence that's come during the pandemic seems to have solidified a greater sense of solidarity among a group that's diverse in income, religion and culture, says Will Lex Ham, an actor who's helped lead a campaign of awareness of violence against Asians.
“As long as we share the same physical features, we are being treated the same in this country,” Ham says.
On Friday, President Biden and Vice President Harris, the first person of South Asian descent to hold national office, are to visit Atlanta, "consoling a community whose growing voting power helped secure their victory in Georgia and beyond,” says The Associated Press.
On Thursday, witnesses at a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing called for a shift in public rhetoric surrounding the coronavirus and foreign policy, as well as the passage of hate crime legislation to address rising discrimination and violence against Asian Americans.
“The conversation we are having today is long overdue, and it is vital that Congress shine a light on this issue,” Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said. “The last congressional hearing held on violence against Asian Americans was in 1987, in this subcommittee.”
Here is a brief list of national and community-focused organizations you can contribute to, from Vox.