While walking down the bleachers one afternoon in high school, I suddenly heard a group of students mockingly shout, “Coronavirus!” and chortle amongst themselves while pointing at me. As enraged as I felt, I walked away face flushed instead of confronting the band of jeering aggressors, driven by a fear of verbal altercation turning physical and embarrassment at being labeled something I had no relation to.
My hometown Torrance, located in the Los Angeles suburbs, is 36% Asian, a shockingly high percentage when considering the average Asian demographic in major cities, Los Angeles and New York, are both less than 20% (United States Census Bureau, 2021). Despite the dense concentration of Asians in my vicinity, the intensification of COVID-19 in early January of 2020 inspired a sudden rise in anti-Asian hate crimes in Torrance as well as nationwide (Campa, 2020); (Jeung et al., 2021). Experiencing racism firsthand in such an Asian-centric neighborhood was shocking as I had grown up around what seemed like a ubiquitously cordial community; for the first time, I was exposed to the festering hate concealed beneath a facade of solidarity.
A Brief Summary of a Long History
The first group of Chinese sojourners who set foot in North America during the California Gold Rush were met with immediate opposition from Westerners (Lee, 2005). From blatantly racist court cases, such as People V. Hall, where the Supreme Court revoked Chinese immigrants’ rights to testify against white citizens (Murray, 1854), to inhibitory legislation, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that banned the immigration of Chinese laborers (Kil, 2012), Chinese experiences were marked by unjustified malice from the United States government. The San Francisco Chronicle’s use of “evil” to describe Chinese immigrants 52 times throughout articles they published in 1882 bear witness to the prejudiced rhetoric that the media utilized to engender racial tensions in polyethnic communities.
At the turn of the century, an unreasonable distrust and disdain towards Asians persisted. Shortly after Pearl Harbor was bombed by Japan in late 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, driven by an irrational nationwide scapegoating of Japanese-Americans as primary perpetrators of the attacks. This incarcerated approximately 120,000 Japanese individuals in the West Coast in fear of espionage despite no spies being found in the aftermath (Napolitano, 2014). Nearly half a century later in 1982, twenty-seven year old Vincent Chin was brutally murdered by two white men who, assuming Chin was Japanese, blamed him for layoffs in the Detroit motor industry that were only partly induced by a rise in imported automobiles from Japan (Wu, 2009). In 2020, former president Donald Trump displayed unashamedly racist rhetoric as the coronavirus escalated in the United States, calling it the “Chinese Virus” through Twitter (Fallows, 2020) and “Kung flu” during a 2020 youth rally (Lee, 2020). Akin to Roosevelt, though much more radical, Trump leveraged his position as president to influence public opinion.
Can We Break the Cycle?
Although the condition for some Asian American groups in the United States has seemingly improved within the past several decades (“The Rise of Asian Americans”, 2013), the dismal truth is that very little has changed and hate still simmers beneath the surface. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Asians have been subject to mass scapegoating, verbal harassment, and physical assault. The murder of Thai immigrant Vicha Ratanapakdee in 2020, who was slammed onto the pavement while on an early morning stroll, bears chilling similarities to Vincent Chin’s case and reveals hostility towards Asians remain entrenched in modern American society (Lee, 2021). Despite the ongoing anti-Asian violence, many local and state government responses to these crimes have been minimal, marked by lukewarm condemnations dotted with vague rhetoric that try to dodge the issue of race (Arroyo and Lee, 2022). Furthermore, Trump is not alone in weaponizing social media; a sharp rise in anti-Asian tweets correlated to the proliferation of coronavirus throughout the United States in early 2020; albeit digital, the hostile vocabulary found in the tweets are no different from the San Francisco Chronicle’s use of xenophobic language to sway mass opinion in the 19th century (He et al., 2021).
Looking Towards the Future
In retrospect, I realized that the personal harassment I had experienced was not simply an isolated event but the culmination of hundreds of years of prejudice present throughout United States history. The scapegoating, racism, and violence towards Asians are perpetrated by bigoted individuals in power, government, and media who sway and inflame mass-opinion. Granted, with the greater interest and media attention on Asian discrimination in America now, more exposure is being illuminated on Asian American struggles, such as spikes in “#StopAsianHate” on Twitter (Fan, Yu, and Gilliland, 2021). To combat the plethora of Asian hate crimes going unreported due to distrust and lack of information, organizations such as the newly established Stop AAPI Hate provide extensive resources and an outlet to report hate-crime incidents (Takasaki, 2020); (Thorbecke, 2021); (Gover et al., 2020). However, the prejudice is extensive and deep-rooted in the United States, illustrated by parallels between early Asian immigrant experiences and the modern-day plight of Asian Americans. Unless major reformation is enacted, targeting those who wield significant influence over public sentiments, change will not come easily and this history of hate will recur in future generations.
References
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