A National Outcry Over Anti-Asian Hate

In the days since he first heard about the mass shootings in Atlanta in which six Asian American women died, 17-year-old Michael Fu has been thinking a lot about something that happened to him when he was about 8. 

He and his younger brother were in an Atlanta park when a group of boys started throwing rocks at them and yelling a racial epithet directed toward Asian people. Michael went to a nearby police officer, who just happened to be Asian American and was sympathetic.

“He told me things like this will happen,” recalls Michael, whose parents are both immigrants from China. “As an Asian in this nation, you’ll have to develop a thick skin.” 

Incidents like that have become more common over the past year, fueled in part by false claims about the coronavirus pandemic and racist language by some public officials. Then came this week’s fatal shootings at Atlanta-area massage parlors of eight people, six of them women of Asian descent. Amid fear, sadness, and pain, the carnage has evoked another emotion among some Asian Americans: anger over the country’s longstanding failure to take discrimination against them seriously.

“I do think that what we’ve seen in the past year is very significant and different than what we’ve seen before,” says John C. Yang, president and executive director of the nonprofit Asian Americans Advancing Justice. “The level of fear and hate that the Asian American community is facing right now is very real.” 

The suspect in the Atlanta-area shootings, Robert Aaron Long, 21, has been arrested and charged with eight counts of murder. Authorities say it’s not yet clear whether the shooting spree will be designated a hate crime—Long himself told police that the attacks were not motivated by racism. But many say the race of most of the victims can’t be overlooked. 

“While we’re relieved the suspect was quickly apprehended, we’re certainly not at peace, as this attack still points to an escalating threat many in the Asian American community feel today,” says Margaret Huang, president and chief executive of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group that tracks hate crimes.

Indeed, the Atlanta shootings were just the latest example of a surge in violence against Asian Americans. In January, an 84-year-old man from Thailand was slammed to the ground in San Francisco and died two days later from his injuries. In February, a Chinese man walking near Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood was stabbed in the back. And many instances of Asian Americans being spat at and accused of spreading Covid-19 have been caught on video and posted on social media.

Reports of hate crimes against people of Asian descent in the U.S. increased 150 percent in 2020, according to a report by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University at San Bernardino, which examined police records in 16 of the country’s largest cities. That spike is all the more startling because, overall, reports of hate crimes were down 7 percent nationally. 

The marginalization of Asian Americans has deep roots. The first significant wave of Asian immigrants to the U.S. were the Chinese, who began coming in the 1850s, largely to the West Coast to work on the transcontinental railroad and in gold mines. The history of hate and violence against Asians in America goes back almost as far.  

In 1871, at least 17 Chinese were lynched by white and Hispanic rioters in Los Angeles after a white man was killed in the crossfire between rival Chinese groups. In 1882, the U.S. formalized anti-Chinese discrimination by passing the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned immigrants from China. In 1900, an outbreak of bubonic plague in San Francisco was unfairly blamed on the Chinese community, and the city’s Chinatown was quarantined as a result. And most infamously, during World War II, tens of thousands of Japanese Americans were imprisoned in internment camps for years, on the unfounded suspicion that they might threaten the U.S. war effort against Japan.

Many Asian American community leaders say the current wave of bigotry was spurred in part by the rhetoric of public officials, including former President Donald Trump, who frequently referred to the coronavirus as the “China virus.” 

Demographics may also be a contributing factor. According to the Pew Research Center, the Asian-American population increased by 72 percent from 2000 to 2015, making it the fastest-growing ethnic group in the U.S., surpassing even the Latino population’s growth rate of 60 percent. 

Based on 2018 data, the Census Bureau estimates that there are 22.6 million people of Asian descent living in the U.S., representing nearly 7 percent of the country’s total population, with the largest communities coming from China, India, and the Philippines.

President Biden denounced the attacks against Asian Americans. He and Vice President Kamala Harris plan to meet in Atlanta on Friday with community leaders and state lawmakers from the Asian-American and Pacific Islander community.

“Whatever the motivation here,” Biden said, “I know Asian Americans are very concerned. Because as you know I have been speaking about the brutality against Asian Americans for the last couple months, and I think it’s very, very troubling.”

Harris, the first Asian American to serve as vice president, added, “I do want to say to our Asian American community that we stand with you and understand how this has frightened and shocked and outraged all people.”

With reporting by John Eligon, Thomas Fuller, Jill Cowan, Nicole Hong, and Jonah E. Bromwich of The New York Times.