So you've probably seen headlines in the news,
or an increase of videos in your feed, of all the recent anti-Asian hate crimes
and violence that are happening.
>> Brazen attacks against Asian Americans.
>> A man throwing a box at an Asian woman, then shoving her into a row of newspaper boxes.
>> Eight people were dead and one injured.
The killing spree, in which most of the victims were Asian-American women,
happened in the span of just a few hours.
So across the US, we've seen a drastic increase in anti-Asian hate crimes in 2020 versus 2019.
In Los Angeles, we've seen a 114% increase.
Here in Boston, a 133% increase.
And in New York, an astounding 833% increase.
So what's provoking all this? Where is all this racism coming from?
How do we advocate for ourselves alongside very important movements like Black Lives Matter?
Well today I'm going to be talking with my fellow student Jessica Zheng,
as well as College of Arts & Sciences professor Takeo Rivera,
to try and figure some of this out and share it with you all.
Hey, Professor Rivera.
>> Thank you very much for having me. Appreciate it.
Hey, Jess, how you doing?
>> I'm really really excited to talk about this.
It's a heavy topic, but I'm really glad we're talking about this, and able to share this with more people.
So first off I'm curious. How do you feel about what's going on right now?
It's pretty simple. I'm pretty pissed off.
So we're talking today. It's a day after white supremacist murdered eight people in the Atlanta-based massage parlor, right?
Six of whom we understand to be Asian women at least.
So much of what's been happening could happen to any one of us.
And could happen to anybody that we know and love.
And it seems like it's predominantly also happening to members of our community who are the least protected.
For example our elderly and then, you know,
these women who are working service jobs. And it just really, really, really saddens me to see this.
Do you think these attacks are isolated,
or do you think there was some sort of immediate trigger that kind of led to this violence?
I think that COVID-19, specifically the direction of how it moved,
of it starting in China, being called the China Virus or Kung Flu,
all of that I think that attached us as a people to
all of the other hardships and really terrible things that came from this pandemic,
Right, we've never been in something that stopped us so globally,
and of course we're looking for an enemy. There has to be someone for us to blame.
So there's a lot of news coverage on this now, but do you want to talk about a lot
of the long-standing anti-Asian racism that we've seen throughout this country?
Anti-Asian racism is baked into the DNA of this country
even as early as 1492, when Christopher Columbus gets lost in the Antilles.
There is this notion that the indigenous people here are Indians.
So even those who have been perceived as Asian have been the targets of expansion and imperial violence. Right?
We see that legislated much more explicitly against East Asians in 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act, for example,
which was the first race-based immigration restriction that the United States implemented
You saw that again with the Japanese-American concentration camps during World War II.
You know, historical examples abound.
However, I do think that it's important for us to also understand
that the kinds of racism that Asians experienced in the United States may sometimes be different from
the types of racism that say African-Americans and Latinos experience.
it's commonly addressed in the discourse how Asian-Americans are
seen as these sort of model minority figures, quote unquote.
But that always falls apart once it's convenient. Once the white capitalist mainstream needs a scapegoat.
Okay yeah, I think that history is super important for people to know, too.
Especially those who might not be in the Asian community, and even those who are
because it isn't really taught in our education system.
So how do you think people can advocate for the Asian community moving forward?
I think number one, what's really important is the listening and the learning.
Listening to Asian people's experiences and not invalidating them, right? And I think learning about the history
of exclusion, the history of discrimination that is so rich within all of our histories. And I think
that's a very, very important first step.
I can start by saying what we shouldn't do. >> Yeah.
We do see for example a lot of cultures saying, "Oh well you know like Black folks had their turn.
Why don't we have our turn." Right? Why can't we talk about our struggles in the same way? In response to that,
I would say that, you know, combating racism is not a zero-sum game and in many respects,
the Movement for Black Lives, if anything, is a benefit to the ways in which we can talk about anti-Asian racism, right?
That means that we can build bridges and solidarities with Black communities who have
developed newfound activist infrastructures for combating these these forms of prejudice.
and frankly a lot of Black and Asian American organizations have already been doing that
over the last month, and that's been really heartening to see.
At the end of the day we're all stronger together.
How we respond to this will in many respects determine how we
define what it means to be Asian American at all.
There are many ways in which we think about Asian Americanness is
just this kind of funny thing where we drink boba and go on Subtle Asian Traits, right?
But it's a lot more than that. Asian Americans do need to look out for each other. We need to care for each other.
But we also need to make some political choices about who
we decide to build bridges with, and how we fight the fights that we need to fight.