Mike Cerre: The surge in Asian hate crimes, oft not reported in the past, are
now being documented by surveillance cameras and eyewitnesses for all to see on
social media.They range from
harassment and petty crimes to terrifying physical confrontations and assaults
often resulting in injuries and in the case of several elderly victims death.
Dion Lim: An elderly Asian man, pinned to the ground in San Francisco…
Mike Cerre: Reporter Dion Lim has been covering this alarming local trend.
Dion Lim: And I think what happened in Atlanta was perhaps on a more
national scale, a catalyst, an explosion, because it combined something like a
mass shooting with the concept of hate and that hyper sexualization of
Asian-American women. So I think that's why many see
it as a turning point.
Mike Cerre: Shocking as these images are of this recent surge in Asian hate
crimes, they’re not surprising here in Oakland’s
Chinatown. California has the country’s oldest and largest Asian community, and
as such, a long and tortured history of discrimination and harassment.
Russell Jeung: Knowing the yellow
peril history that whenever a disease arrived from Asia that Asians would be
met with violence and with racist policies, we knew we had to document the
racism we're experiencing.
Mike Cerre: Russell Jeung, Professor of Asian
American Studies at San Francisco State University started the Stop Asian
American Pacific Islanders hate crimes online tracking system in March 2020, at
the start of the COVID crisis.
Donald Trump:The Chinese virus...
Russell Jeung: That's exactly when the
same week President Trump began to use the term insistently on Chinese virus. So when we were flooded, we knew that that rhetoric was
exacerbating.
Russell Jeung: People ask, is there a
surge? Well, in twenty nineteen, nobody was spitting and coughing on other
people.
Mike Cerre: Anti-Asian political rhetoric and the backlash it can cause isn’t
unique to recent political figures, according to UC Berkeley Sociology
Professor Andy Barlow .
Andrew Barlow: Probably the classic example of it was the success of Ronald
Reagan in weaponizing anti-Japanese sentiments in the early 1980s to explain
the collapse of the manufacturing sector of the United States, which he argued
was caused by Japanese unfair competition. In Detroit, a young man named
Vincent Chin, who was out celebrating his nuptials the next day, was accosted
outside a bar and killed by out of work white auto workers because they thought
he was Japanese.
Mike Cerre: He believes the recent China bashing over trade and defense
issues is continuing this cultural demonizing for political advantage.
Russell Jeung: I think that China
bashing from government and from politicians, it's
probably the second primary source of the racism we're facing first is that
perpetual foreigner yellow peril stereotype that we don't belong.
Mike Cerre: This perfect storm of historical racism, political rhetoric and
the rise in extremism has asian communities here and
across the country taking more security precautions. These volunteer street
patrols in Oakland's Chinatown and GoFundMe campaigns for hiring private
security are a reflection of the Asian community’s
frustration with local law enforcement’s ability to stem the attacks.
Aarti Kohli: One of the challenges for the Asian community is, you know, when
we migrate to places, we're often seen as perpetual
foreigners, even if we might have been there for generations.
Mike Cerre:
As a South asian,
Aarti Kohli, Executive Director of Advancing Justice- Asian Law Caucus dealt
with a similar surge in hate crimes against Muslims after 9/11.
Aarti Kohli: What we learned is that whenever that there is conflict with a
foreign country and people think that Americans residing here come from that
country, there is deep racism and animosity aimed at those communities. And what's hard is, you know, you don't you can't predict it.
You know, it just comes out.
Mike Cerre:
Her offices on the edge of San Francisco’s
Chinatown have also been targeted by extremist groups.
Aarti Kohli: Last year, the Patriot Front, which is a white supremacy group,
actually tagged our office sign.The
Bay Area is considered a very liberal, progressive place, but you don't have to
go far to find a white supremacy group.
Russell Jeung: I think there are two two ways that racism is expressed in the United States is
the clear white black divide. There's a binary, but
there's also that insider outsider divide that you're
either really inside America or you're cast as not belonging as an outsider.
What Black Lives Matter did is it exposed the structural racism of the United
States.
The model minority myth
that Asian-Americans are successful, the myth that because we're
hard working and value education, that we're more achieving? I think that myth
has been really problematic. It masks the fact that
there we have the highest income inequality among any racial group. And then
what it does is it drives a wedge between us and other racial groups. It pits
us because others might say, why can't you be like
Asians who are successful, just work hard and keep quiet.
Aarti Kohli: Hate is learned. You know, you don't
come out of the womb hateful. You learn it along the way. And there are many
messages in our society and stereotypes that we are teaching our children that
we really have to pay attention to.
Mike Cerre:
After Asian basketball star Jeremy Lin was
recently subjected to an asian slur by another
minority player during a game he went public with it without naming names
rather than remain silent. He also privately followed up with his offender with
a one–on-one discussion on racism.
Jeremy Lin: I got to talk to the player directly. And we talked a lot about
other things. And one of the things that stuck out the most to me was the other
player was like, hey, I like I didn't know. I went
online and I didn't realize how much was happening to
the Asian-American community.
Dion Lim: It's unlike anything else I have ever covered, wildfires, shootings,
nothing compares. And I feel myself getting emotional periodically. At any
time, because unlike those situations, this is ongoing, it is constant, and it
is people who look like me. It is people who look like my mother and father,
people that I care about. And they feel so helpless. And they are looking to me
because they see that I have a voice and I can help them.
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(COURTESY) KGO-TV/ABC7 |
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ALL TEXT ON SCREEN HERE IS FROM THE SOURCE AND CANNOT BE
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DION LIM KGO-TV |
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OAKLAND, CA MIKE CERRE SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT |
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RUSSELL JEUNG STOP AAPI HATE |
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ANDREW BARLOW UC BERKELEY |
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AARTI KOHLI ADVANCING JUSTICE – ASIAN LAW CAUCUS |
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JEREMY LIN NBA PLAYER |
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(COURTESY) AMANPOUR AND COMPANY, MARCH 17 |