As the COVID-19 pandemic enters its third year, the wave of anti-Asian racism and violence that began in early 2020 has shown no signs of abating. Stop AAPI Hate, a coalition of advocacy organizations and scholars, has been compiling a database of self-reported anti-Asian incidents nationwide since March 2020.
The coalition has now recorded 10,905 reports of racism and discrimination against Asian Americans, according to its latest report, released Thursday, which includes incidents that occurred between March 2020 and December 2021.
“This is a really challenging time for our community. Even with hopes that the pandemic will be behind us, we know that these fears that our communities have, the suffering, the pain, needs attention,” said Cynthia Choi, the co-executive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action and one of Stop AAPI Hate’s co-founders. “We need more support for healing, for recovery, for joy, and to work towards efforts that are really going to bring about meaningful change, both within our communities and across communities, too.”
Asian Americans know this is not a new story, and many of the trends outlined in Stop AAPI Hate’s newest report have been all too familiar. For instance, the data suggests women are about twice as likely to be targeted as men: Sixty-two percent of the reported incidents involved AAPI women, while 31% involved men, 3% involved nonbinary people, and 4% were unspecified. For every incident that makes headlines, such as a recent spate of deadly assaults in New York, so many others go unnoticed or unreported. The true number of incidents is likely far higher, given that Stop AAPI Hate’s data is self-reported.
According to the report, verbal harassment continues to be the most commonly reported type of incident (63%), followed by physical assault (16.2%), the avoidance or shunning of AAPI people (16.1%), and civil rights violations (11.5%), including workplace or housing discrimination and being refused service or barred from public transportation.
For the first time, the group’s gender breakdowns of the incident reports included nonbinary AAPI people. Stop AAPI Hate found incidents involving nonbinary AAPI people are more likely to include deliberate avoidance or shunning (21.4%), being coughed at or spat on (13.9%), denial of service (8.3%) and online harassment (12.1%), compared to AAPI women and men.
Some of the most high-profile incidents of anti-Asian racism have been hate crimes, and policymakers and leaders have often responded to these incidents with calls for more law enforcement involvement. But for many kinds of attacks, like being harassed in a public space, more policing or criminalization is not the answer and will only cause further harm, as Choi pointed out.
“We are really concerned that the immediate kind of reactive response is more law enforcement,” Choi said. “You know, even the police will say that they’re not equipped to deal with people who are having a mental health crisis. So why not have people who are equipped to do that? So I think that we have been accustomed to think about community safety in a very narrow way.”
Instead, Stop AAPI Hate and other AAPI advocacy groups have called for more community-based and systemic approaches. For example, among the group’s recommendations is treating street harassment as a gender-based and public health problem, instead of just accepting it as a fact of life for women.
“We as a society have essentially said: ‘Women, you’re on your own. Street harassment, there’s nothing we can do about it. Navigate the world, the decisions you make, based on the fear for your own safety,’” Choi said. “It’s incredibly important that we not just accept that this is happening. Just because it’s not criminal doesn’t mean that we don’t take it seriously and that there isn’t something that we can do.”
Long-term problems require long-term solutions, such as those geared toward education and prevention. Choi said she would like to see lawmakers better engage community-based organizations that have already done the groundwork. For example, many AAPI groups are building solidarity with other communities of color and working together to combat structural racism and white supremacy, forces that too often pit communities of color against each other.
In New York and California, legislators recently enacted state budgets that include millions of dollars in funding for community-based AAPI community organizations, such as those that provide culturally specific and language-specific legal, health and mental health services. Choi hopes more state lawmakers start to take this kind of approach.
“We would really appreciate lawmakers working with community-based organizations that are on the front lines, who understand the needs of our community the best,” Choi said. “And we have been consistently calling for, along with our partners within the movement, to recognize that even though the focus has been on interpersonal forms of hate, that it’s a systemic problem, and so we need to have systemic actions.”