The Atlanta Spa Shootings and the Year of Asian American Hatred
A Series of high-profile attacks against Asian Americans have made national headlines in recent weeks, eliciting public outrage, legislative statements, and President Joe Biden’s condemnation. Then, on Tuesday, it took a dramatic turn when a gunman opened fire at a spa in suburban Atlanta, killing eight people, six of whom were Asian women.
Over the last year, Asian Americans have been met with an additional scourge: an insidious increase in racial abuse, bigotry, and aggression, as all Americans have faced the health threats and economic anxieties of the pandemic.
The killings this week brought anti-Asian racism and violence to the forefront of the national discourse, and they amplified feelings of deep sadness, rage, and fear among Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.
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Russell Jeung, an Asian American Studies professor at San Francisco State University and co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate, a West Coast-based group committed to monitoring and resolving hate crimes targeting Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, says, “People are treating us subhumanly.”
AAPI must be stopped. From March 2020 to February this year, Hate received 3,795 reports of hate crimes against Asian Americans, according to a study released Tuesday just hours before the killings in Georgia. The two most common types of incidents recorded were verbal abuse and shunning, with physical assaults and aggression accounting for 11.1 percent of the total.
The shootings, as well as a rise in anti-Asian abuse, bigotry, and violence over the last year, have occurred amid inflammatory rhetoric from public figures and government officials. Former President Donald Trump used xenophobic and derogatory words to describe the pandemic, which was shared by some Republican lawmakers and Trump supporters.
Another recent study stresses the seriousness of the issue. Anti-Asian hate crimes reported to police in 16 of America’s largest cities increased by nearly 150 percent in 2020, according to a study released this month by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.
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An elderly Thai American man was killed while walking outside his home in San Francisco in January. A man brutally knocked down three elderly Asian Americans in Chinatown in Oakland, California. A guy stabbed a 36-year-old Asian man in the back in New York City’s Chinatown at the end of February.
Aside from the Asian American community’s and allies’ outrage, politicians, particularly those of Asian descent, spoke out against the attacks. Biden strongly denounced the violence during a prime-time address to the nation marking a year after the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic.
The hearing became contentious after Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy characterized it as “policing free speech,” criticized China’s treatment of the coronavirus, and appeared to glorify lynching as a means of justice.
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“The president, your party, and your colleagues are free to discuss issues with any other country. But you don’t have to do that by putting a target on the backs of Asian Americans all over the country – on our grandparents, our children, and our grandchildren “Meng said, her eyes welling up with tears.