On the one-year anniversary of the shootings in Atlanta that killed eight people, including six Asian women, people are rallying in cities across the country to call for justice for Asian women facing ongoing attacks and racism.
On Wednesday, the Asian Justice Movement organized rallies in nearly a dozen cities, from Atlanta to San Francisco to New York, in an effort to “remember the victims and #BreakTheSilence on anti-Asian hate and violence that continues unabated.”
In Atlanta, Georgia House Rep. Bee Nguyen (D) spoke at the rally of how last year’s deadly shooting spree by a white man in three local spas targeting Asian women “hit home because the women who were killed could easily have been our grandmothers, our aunties, our mothers.”
“I am angry,” Nguyen said. “To my Asian brothers and sisters, we must rally, we must stand in solidarity, we must protect each other.”
Over the past two years, there has been a dramatic increase in anti-Asian hate and violence across the country.
Stop AAPI Hate — a coalition of advocacy groups that has been tracking self-reported anti-Asian incidents since the COVID-19 pandemic hit in the U.S. in March 2020 — recorded nearly 11,000 incidents of racism and discrimination against Asian Americans through December 2021. Twice as many incidents involved AAPI women, compared to men.
In just the past two months in the New York area, Christina Yuna Lee was stabbed to death in her Chinatown apartment, Michelle Alyssa Go was pushed in front of a subway train, and a Asian American woman in her 60s was brutally beaten in Yonkers — all unprovoked attacks.
“Let’s take our pain and anger and turn them into strength in action,” author and activist Min Jin Lee wrote on Twitter, ahead of a Times Square rally she is scheduled to speak at Wednesday evening. “Brothers and sisters, see you at the rally.”