VIOLENCE AGAINST ASIANS: AN OLD INJUSTICE

On March 16 a 21-year old white man, Robert

Long, allegedly attacked three Atlanta area spas, killing eight people, six of them women of Asian descent. The shootings became a part of a larger discussion about violence against the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) community. StopAAPIHate, a group

formed at the beginning of the pandemic, says over 3800 acts of verbal or physical assault or harassment against Asians occurred in the United States in the year since, an average of 11 incidents a day. President Biden signed an executive order aimed at combatting the problem a few days after he took office. 

                     

Violence against Asians in the U.S. goes back to

the 1870s. Asian women suffer particularly egregious treatment, given how American culture and media often objectifies them as little more than sex items.  The Atlanta shootings present a critical opportunity for examining the problem and what the country does about it.

The Roots

Animus towards Asians began when Chinese migrants first arrived in the western U.S., many to work on the Transcontinental Railroad and other public works projects. Fearful the Chinese would take jobs from them, whites attacked the newcomers,  such

as in 1871 when a mob in Los Angeles shot and hanged 18 Chinese men and boys. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese  Exclusion

Act which shut down legal Chinese

immigration until the 1940s. These atrocities against Chinese Americans and many more are chronicled in Iris Chang’s book, “The Chinese In America”.

During the Second World War, the United States government perpetrated one of its great injustices when it rounded up about 120,000 Americans of Japanese heritage and locked them in internment camps. They committed no crime except being Japanese.

In 1982, two white auto workers murdered Vincent Chin, a Chinese man, in Detroit.  His assailants mistook him as being Japanese and blamed him for the decline in the American auto industry. These atrocities previewed a broader assault on Asians during the Trump era. A significant uptick in attacks on Asians followed the president’s derisive language about the origins of the coronavirus, including calling it the “China Virus” and “Kung Flu.”

A Complex History

Despite these dastardly events, the history of bias

against the AAPI community presents a complex narrative. It runs from the governmental and individual bad acts

described, to the election of Kamala Harris, whose mother came to the United States from India, as the first woman vice president. It also involves a nuanced relationship between Asians and other minority groups during the struggle for racial equality in America.

Asians have sometimes been viewed as the “model minority,” whose members achieved success in science, medicine, business, and other fields, including the media. In many academic endeavors, some Asians outpaced whites, particularly in mathematics and pure science. According to Iris Chang, “It is in connection with these immigrants, not surprisingly, that the term ‘model minority’ first appeared. The term refers to an image of the Chinese as working hard, asking for little, and never complaining.” Asians have been held up to blacks and browns as examples of how far hard work and a willingness to operate within the system can take an otherwise disfavored group. Some Asians decided against identifying with those protesting race discrimination and opposed affirmative action programs in higher education and employment. According to Chang, “[model minority] is now a term many Chinese have mixed feelings about.”

During the 1960s some Asians saw the virtue in allying themselves with blacks in the civil rights struggle. Writer and podcast host Jeff Yang, for

example, noted, “There would not be an Asian American community as we know it had it not been for both the civil rights victories that African Americans won with blood and sweat and tears, but also the desire by early Asian American activists to create common cause” with them.  

Following the Atlanta shootings, some AAPI

leaders, when asked what would help stem the wave of violence against Asians, called

for strengthening alliances with other people of color. They noted historical associations between blacks and Asians, such as support the Reverend Jesse Jackson offered in connection with Chin’s murder in 1978.

 

The Matter of Women

The Atlanta killings highlighted the special vulnerability of AAPI women. Asian women report 2.3 times more hate incidents than

Asian men. Time Magazine’s cover story on the subject quoted an American Psychological Association report that asserted Asian women are frequently “exoticized and objectified in popular culture and media as ‘faceless, quiet and invisible or as sexual objects.’”

The Atlanta shooting suspect claimed he suffers from a “sex addiction” and believed the shootings would eliminate the temptation the spas constituted. Leaving aside the plausibility of that assertion, the fact he targeted Asian women made clearer the danger women of Asian descent face in America. As Arizona State University professors Karen Leong and Karen Kuto observed in reporting that an armed white man was detained outside the official vice presidential residence, even Harris is not exempt from “this culture that racializes and sexualizes Asian women and all women of color. None of us is.”

The task of fighting violence against the AAPI community falls on everyone. All Americans must speak out because of the moral imperative and

because we never  know who will become the next target. The words of the great German minister, the Reverend Martin Niemoller, about the Holocaust still ring true:

First, they came for the socialists and I did not speak because I was not a socialist;

Then they came for the trade unionists but I did not speak because I was not a trade unionist;

Then they came for the Jews but I did not speak because I was not a Jew;

Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me.   

For whom will you speak?