Today, Explained - The surge of anti-Asian violence

Episode Date: March 5, 2021

The United States is stumbling through two racial reckonings at once. Author Jeff Chang says it’s an inflection point centuries in the making. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. Hello, listener. Today's show is about anti-Asian hate crimes and features some strong language and descriptions of violence. The second Joe Biden got into office, he started cranking out executive orders. A lot of stuff you'd expect. Immigration, climate, COVID. But there was also one specifically about Asian Americans. In that order, Joe Biden explicitly condemned anti-Asian racism, which we've seen surge during the pandemic. Lizzo, politics, Vox. And on top of that, he called on agencies to strip any racist language that they may see in official documents. So terms like the China virus, for example,

which, as we know, Trump used frequently to talk about the coronavirus. The China flu. The China virus. The plague from China. We have to be accurate. Kung flu. Biden also asked the DO plague from China, we have to be accurate. Kung flu. Biden also asked the DOJ to do a better job tracking incidents of hate crimes against Asian Americans. And that's an effort that's ongoing until today.

And today, as many Americans look forward to vaccines and moving on from this pandemic, Asian Americans are being attacked. Yes, it's been a huge spike in anti-Asian incidents. There have been more than 2,800, according to Stop AAPI Hate, an organization that's been tracking these reports. And those are self-reports from people. So the number could be much higher than that. And what we've seen is these incidents are wide-ranging. This car vandalized in California. The language, too disturbing to show you. And the Chandy family is devastated.

Why are they being racist to us? We don't even have the coronavirus. Verbal assaults in stores. Sandy Fong-Navalta of San Francisco tells me while walking to work near Chinatown, a man directed racist comments at her. Put on my effing mask because I'm spreading the coronavirus, you effing whore. People yelling China virus at people, people being spat on at parks, in public places. The racist ranting woman was captured here by a Torrance man and his 11-year-old son while trying to enjoy their

morning at the park. Respect. Respect people. Lady. I don't understand your language. And also more violent incidents. So there was a family last year in Texas that was stabbed. In Midland, Texas in March, a hate crime attack there left a man and his two-year-old with knife wounds across their faces. In April in New York, a man poured acid on an Asian-American woman. We saw incidents surge as the coronavirus has spread around the U.S. And we've also heard that incidents spike after President Donald Trump's remarks and statements. But even with Biden now lowering the temperature, there have been these really violent incidents.

Surveillance video captures a horrifying assault in San Francisco's Anza Vista neighborhood. The suspect charges at 84-year-old Vishwa Ratanapakde, knocking him to the ground, ultimately killing him. 52-year-old woman in New York City experiencing a similar violent altercation. The 52-year-old woman in New York City experiencing a similar violent altercation. The 52-year-old victim's son says she needed about 10 stitches to close the gash down her forehead after striking it on a metal newspaper stand. Witnesses say the suspect

was cursing at the victim moments before he unloaded on her. And then more recently, we've heard about attacks that are against younger people as well. So there was a 36-year-old man in New York who was recently stabbed. The latest attack, 6.30 Thursday evening in front of the U.S. courthouse on Worth Street. Caught on camera, a man with a knife runs up behind a stranger walking home. What we won't show you is the attacker plunged that knife into his back. And a 27-year-old man in Los Angeles who was punched in the face while people used racial slurs against him. Okay, so a lot of brutality against Asian Americans.

But do we know if they're all hate crimes? Could some of these be more random? It's important to be super careful about how we use that term because it is very specific and it does talk about the motivation of the attack, which we really don't know for a lot of these. In the case of the Los Angeles man, for example, police are investigating that as a hate crime because of the racial slurs that were used against him. The important thing to remember is that there is a broader context to everything that's happened. And there has been a definitive concrete surge in anti-Asian sentiment and anti-Asian actions during the pandemic. So we're looking at these incidents in that context.

And I think that's why that's generated a lot of focus about what exactly is happening and what's motivating some of these attacks. Beyond how much this is surely scaring Asian Americans of all ages and ethnicities, how are communities across the country responding? they can rally together and really build solidarity to help keep communities safe and also just generate support for Asian Americans who live in these places. So in Oakland and San Francisco, for example, there's been a big push to focus on asking city councils for funding that can help victims and help them cover costs that they may face related to medical issues and other matters. And on top of that, there have been developments of these different programs. So they're calling them strolling programs. They're aimed to help escort seniors as they go from place to place,

asking volunteers to go to stores, to go shopping. So you're just generating activity there. And Biden's executive order is largely seen as symbolic. Is anyone trying to do anything more focused on a local level? There are a couple efforts in play. In California already, they've passed a measure that would allocate $1.4 million to help track anti-Asian incidents. So the group that we talked about before, Stop AAPI Hate, was effectively doing this just themselves informally. And that money would help them really expand the ways that people can report these incidents to them and help increase outreach

to the community so people know about it. Also in Congress, there's a focus from lawmakers to pass a bill called the No Hate Act, which would allocate grants to local governments to set up hotlines. And it would emphasize that people who are prosecuted and convicted for hate crimes go through education and rehabilitation as part of the penalty versus the standard process that's experienced right now. Okay, so there are some long-term efforts. What about action to keep people safe in the short term? There are definitely a ton of different approaches that people have already put forth. One of the tensions that has already emerged is the question of how big of a role does policing

play in the response to this? And for many of the communities that have been particularly affected, organizers in those communities have emphasized that they don't want that to be the solution and the end-all approach to these incidents of violence because of how policing has disproportionately harmed Black Americans and continues to do so. And were the perpetrators of these violent attacks against Asian Americans Black? Some of the perpetrators of these violent attacks against Asian Americans Black? Some of the perpetrators have been Black. And so there's been this concern of that particular dynamic activating anti-Blackness within the Asian American community. One of the things that raised awareness about these incidents was the actors Daniel Dae Kim and Daniel Wu offer a $25,000 reward for information about the person that pushed a 91 year old man in Oakland. We were, we felt so exasperated and frustrated that somehow this wasn't escaping the echo chamber of the Asian American community. And so we wanted to raise

the stakes. This is why Daniel and I offered this $25,000 reward. And in so doing, got the issue more visibility. That call for information about a suspect, for basically that person to get apprehended, really centers the criminal justice system in all of this and centers policing in all of this in a way that community activists have not wanted. Before the rally, several Black leaders, including Oakland council members, gathered at City Hall in a show of unity. They acknowledged anti-Asian hate and violence and anti-Blackness are not new. The way that we address it is by getting to the root causes of what causes violence and crime,

violence and poverty, and that's health care, education, housing, jobs. All marginalized people combined. We are the majority. So we need to come together to support each other, protect each other, and tap into that collective power. The push has been, let's have solidarity among people of color to fight this problem, and let's be allies for one another in each other's respective movements. It's been many times that we've had protests for Black Lives Matters, for Breonna Taylor, for George Floyd and the Asian community. We're there protesting with us. And I feel like we as a community need to come and return the favor to them.

It sounds sort of like there's a reckoning going on within the Asian-American community while the whole country is going through this reckoning and sort of this movement for racial justice around the Black Lives Matter movement? Can both of these things happen at the same time? Yes, yeah. The increasing thing that organizers especially are stressing is that these movements aren't mutually exclusive in one another. So like Asian Americans want to explain the pain that they're experiencing from these attacks, but at the same time, be cognizant of not perpetuating racism and not perpetuating bigotry against another group of people and against Black Americans, that Asian Americans can continue to be allies toward Black Americans and support the Black Lives Matter movement, that all of these can happen at the same time, that it's a complicated conversation, certainly,

but that it's important to have to continue to learn about the experiences that different groups have endured. © transcript Emily Beynon Thank you. Member FDIC. Terms and conditions apply. in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season.

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If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Verbal and physical assaults against Asians living in the United States got

worse in 2020, but this kind of phenomena has been around just about as long as Asians have been in the United States. To understand the history, we got in touch with Jeff Chang. He's a writer and a cultural critic based in the San Francisco Bay Area. You have Asian immigrants coming in the 18th century and then really it picks up in the middle of the 19th century as you have Chinese coming over during the gold rush to seek their fortunes, coming up literally against a number of white folks who have kind of moved west to seek their fortunes. And so competition happening right away in the mountains of violence happening right away against Chinese folks.

And this really starts to expand as more and more immigrants are brought to the U.S. to fill in really necessary types of jobs to build the West up so that you have a movement by the late 1800s to try to stop Chinese immigration. And this results in all kinds of racist violence. You have Chinese really literally being run out of town on a rail where mobs are attacking them, burning down their homes. And this is something that I think is a part of the history that gets suppressed or is never told. I certainly never learned it when I was growing up. And I can't say that my kids have been able to learn a lot about this kind of history, even now, in a more enlightened kind of period of time.

Tell me more about how the government is reinforcing these racist attitudes. Well, what you have, I think, in the late 19th century that sounds a lot like now, that has resonances to now, is politicians, demagogues, using this notion of the Chinese as invaders. And they play on very, very old stereotypes. Stereotypes that were old then, is what I'm talking about, Sean. This notion of Chinese being carriers of sickness, of Chinese as being the sick people of Asia that goes back to the 1700s, that outbreaks of smallpox in China during that period against the backdrop actually of European invasion, European colonization actually, is something that's recirculated in the 1800s in the U.S. You have a situation literally in San Francisco, which is the largest Chinatown in the U.S., where one Asian American, in fact, dies of mysterious causes. they assign it to an outbreak of the bubonic plague. And the next day, literally,

police go down to Chinatown, escort all the white people out, start building a wall around Chinatown. It's hard not to look at historical examples like that and think about the present day, where you've got folks that are talking about, you know, sick people coming over from China, where you've got politicians that are talking about building walls to keep out immigrants. And in the present day, the blaming of Asians is uniting Asians to organize and collaborate on strategies to protect each other. How did people react way back then? The Asian American civil rights movement is not a new thing. Between 1882, which was the year of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was the result of

these movements to ban immigration and actually resulted in the first law in U.S. history banning a specific race of people. That from 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act, into the next decade, there were literally almost 10,000 lawsuits that were filed by Asian Americans around everything from education, access to education, violence, getting reparations for violence to prevent deportation, to be able to establish birthright citizenship. This is the movement that Asian Americans continue today that has picked up again since the 1960s. And that has actually led us to being called Asian Americans, right? This is a movement that said, don't call us Orientals anymore. And so Asian Americans deciding in the 1960s to say,

call us Asian Americans, call us who we are. It feels like there's this sort of duality of the Asian American experience. On the one hand, there's this long, painful history of racism. And on the other hand, there's this idea that Asian Americans are the model minority, which paints Asian Americans in these broad strokes as compliant and rule-abiding and industrious, and of course, just super smart and good at math. And quiet, right, Sean? Quiet. Just the of thing where like people wouldn't expect us to say anything that we'd be in a room and could kind of walk in and walk out and nobody would

notice that we'd been there right that we're invisible how does that come to be how does that come to be the stereotype well you have to kind of look at that in relationship to the rise of the modern day civil rights movement, of course, coming from the Black Freedom Struggle, which itself, right, dates back 400 years plus. And people who are against the Black Freedom Struggle saying, why is it that you minorities are making so much noise? Why don't you look at the Asian Americans, right? These folks are quiet, they keep their head down, and they're becoming exactly the kinds of folks that we in the U.S. believe you can be if you just follow the right path. And so at that moment, as Asian Americans begin to

come in in larger numbers, this is the point at which the backlash is setting in against the Black Power Movement and the civil rights movements. And so Asian Americans are always the model minority, again, in comparison to somebody else. And what are the repercussions of Asian Americans being elevated over Black Americans? Yeah. Well, you know, there's this sort of, you can even call it an existential kind of crisis that Asian Americans find themselves in, which is that we're kind of in between, right? We're pitted in between whites and blacks. And you find yourself defining yourself in relationship to whiteness or in relationship to blackness. Because that's in so many ways how the racial hierarchy has been set up in the U.S. If you're looking now at kind of the primary lens

through which black and Asian relationships are seen, it has to do with the images that attended the 1992 Los Angeles uprisings, in which blacks were criminalized and Asians were seen sort of as surrogate whites. Dramatic videotape obtained by Channel 5 News shows what appears to be a group of LAPD officers beating a suspect. The violence erupted after the acquittal of four white policemen in the beating trial of black motorist Rodney King. Angry mobs set scores of fires in the predominantly black south-central part of the city. Many Koreans who yesterday were the shopkeepers of south-central Los Angeles today have lost the businesses they took years to create. 41 Korean businesses in south- South Central have been torched,

dozens looted. In this overwhelmingly black and Hispanic area, Koreans own many of the small businesses. You know how it all started? The first thing when a girl got killed from the Oriental. March 16th, 1991. Latasha Harlins, a black teenager, is shot and killed by a Korean store owner, Soonja Do.

Do is convicted of voluntary manslaughter, but is sentenced only to parole and a small fine. The black community is outraged and remembers. What can I say? I don't have any words to say. And that has been the frame through which we've seen any video that includes Asian faces and black faces in them. And I think it continues to be that frame. And so we, in this particular moment, I think, are living kind of with this narrative that blacks and Asian Americans don't get along, that we're cat and mouse or we're natural enemies. And are people trying to point to that narrative now that some of these violent acts against Asians have been caught on video and, you know, clearly perpetrated by black Americans? Well, it's more complicated than that. I mean, if you really look at, and we have, right,

looked at the data around anti-Asian violence, the perpetrators come from all backgrounds. Right. What happens is, is you get one video and it begins to circulate in the same way that the LaTosha Harlins video and the Rodney King videos circulated. And then you get media that put a narrative around that kind of thing. On the ground level, I work in Oakland, Chinatown. Black folks, Latinx folks, and Asian American folks all live up on top of each other. And what you've seen instead in Oakland is that there've been politicians who have tried to exploit it to

make sort of cheap political points. Because it's very easy, I think, to be able to play into this established media narrative of, oh, it's the Blacks and the Asians who are fighting again. This is not to minimize that crime is taking place. It's to be able to say, what's our positive vision of how we move forward together around these kinds of things. And it's much, much more difficult than being able to say, oh, let's put another $200,000 and hire another 10 police people to police the Chinatown beat. And so sometimes these moments, as dark and as divided as they are and as like very fraught as they are, right? Are moments in which people are able to say,

oh, wow, like I haven't been doing enough of this. I need to be out there for my folks. I think that that's what's happened for a lot of Asian Americans as they've seen the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement since 2014. You know, it's to say, I haven't been there. I haven't shown up for my Black neighbors or my Black community members as much as I should be.

Does that feel doable in this moment where there are so many grievances across so many communities, minority communities, plus a pandemic that's being blamed on this one specific community? You know, I think in this moment, what Asian American communities are asking for is to be seen. So now when we're raising our voices, we're saying, hey, recognize what's happening here. We need your aid, right? We need your support. We're nowhere near being able to crush this kind of narrative of Asian Americans as being carriers of disease, as being the sick people that are coming in from outside to corrupt or contaminate our communities. We have to fight that. We have to be real about what that is and why people are using those type of words against us. But we also have to be able to see beyond the ways in which we're actually being forced to divide ourselves.

And we don't want to emerge from this worse off and more divided. We want to figure out the ways to be able to live in community when we're able to get out of this in better ways. You know, it's been a long time in the making and it doesn't get fixed overnight. So I'm just saying like, get in this for the long haul. Like we all got to do this for the long haul. Jeff, thank you so much for speaking with me today. I really appreciate the time. Jeff Chang is the author of We Gon' Be Alright, Notes on Race and Resegregation. He also wrote a book about hip-hop back in the day called Can't Stop, Won't Stop. I'm Sean Ramos for him.

This is Today Explained. The team includes Cecilia Lay, Will Reed, Halima Shah, Muj Zaydi, Noam Hassenfeld, and our engineer, Afim Shapiro. Amna Alsadi is our supervising producer. Jillian Weinberger drops edits. And Liz Kelly Nelson is Vox's editorial director of podcasts. Extra help in recent days from Paul Mounsey, Amy Drozdowska, and Lauren Katz. Facts checked by Lulu Orozco-Perez.

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