Video: What’s Behind the Increase in Anti-Asian Racism?
Video: What’s Behind the Increase in Anti-Asian Racism?
Video: What’s Behind the Increase in Anti-Asian Racism?
Hate crimes against Asians and Asian Americans have surged across the United States by nearly 150 percent during the past year. In addition to aggressive and violent attacks, often random and unprovoked, increased verbal abuse and discrimination have occurred, often against the elderly. The latest—and the most shocking—happened March 16, when eight people, six of them Asian women, were killed in a rampage at three spas in the Atlanta area.
Many attribute the recent uptick in physical and verbal assaults to Donald Trump’s repeated xenophobic rhetoric—the former president often characterized COVID-19 as the “China virus” or “kung flu”—and to Americans who blame Asian Americans for the pandemic because it originated in China.
Across the country, Asian American college students, like Joshua Pei (CAS’21), have been having ongoing conversations with friends and colleagues, expressing growing anger, fear, and frustration with each new act of violence.
In our video, Pei talks with classmate and student activist Jessica Zheng (CAS’22) and Takeo Rivera, a College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of English and of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. They discuss what’s behind the latest wave of anti-Asian racism and what actions need to be taken to address it.
“We are being targeted as racially ‘othered’ at a moment when no one ever deserves to be,” says Rivera. “Racial otherness is intensified in moments of crisis, and becomes a way in which larger anxieties get projected onto a racial ‘other’ to protect the status quo.”
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