On Tuesday, eight people at three different parlours in and around the US city of Atlanta were killed. Six of the eight victims were women of Asian descent.
White supremacy and hate are haunting Asian Americans:
- Hundreds of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders turned to social media to air their anger, sadness, fear and hopelessness. The hashtag #StopAsianHate was a top trending topic on Twitter hours after the shootings that happened Tuesday evening.
- Asian American leaders dismayed that discrimination and harassment continues to be downplayed by federal and local police.
- “It’s taken six Asian American women dying in one day to get people to pay attention to this,” Sung Yeon Choimorrow, executive director of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum (NAPAWF) told the Guardian. “Record keeping of hate crimes against Asian Americans is so low because they are not even willing to accept that we are discriminated against and harassed because of our race.”
- “We don’t even have a clear picture of the true amount of hate crime in the US. The FBI can tell you how many bank robberies occurred last year, but they can’t tell you a real assessment of bias crimes,” said Michael German of the Brennan Center for Justice who worked in the 1990s as an undercover FBI agent infiltrating white supremacist groups.
- German pointed out that between 2017 and 2018 there were 230,000 violent hate crimes, according to a Department of Justice survey of victims. Yet over the same period the DoJ only prosecuted 50 hate crime cases.
- Activists and advocates have pointed to an increase in racially-motivated attacks against Asian Americans throughout the pandemic. “I think the reason why people are feeling so hopeless is because Asian Americans have been ringing the bell on this issue for so long … We’ve been raising the red flag,” said Aisha Yaqoob Mahmood, executive director of the Atlanta-based Asian American Advocacy Fund.
In late 2020, the UN issued a report detailing an “alarming level” of racially-motivated violence and other hate incidents against Asian Americans.