Asian American find their voices amid rise in hate
Le réveil politique de la communauté asio-américaine.
Le 16 mars dernier, à Atlanta, une fusillade ayant causé la mort de 6 femmes d’origine asiatique dans un salon de massage a provoqué le réveil politique de toute la communauté asio-américaine. Depuis l’ère Trump, cette minorité a en effet fait face à un nombre accru d'agressions et de stigmatisations. Retour sur leur histoire commune, souvent ignorée par le plus grand grand nombre...
Natty Jumreornvong was outside Mount Sinai hospital on the Upper East Side of New York around 11am one morning in February when a man approached her. “Chinese virus,” he spat out. She told him she was a medical student and tried to walk away, but he followed her, kicked her knee and dragged her across the ground. She called out for help, but nobody came to her assistance.
2. The incident was just the latest and most severe case of anti-Asian hate Jumreornvong has seen over the last year. Last April, a woman with a child spat on her and called her racial slurs. Patients have called her “Kung Flu”, and she’s seen Asian patients with bruises who say someone came and hit them but would not say who, potentially out of shame. “It’s been going on for a while,” said Jumreornvong, who grew up in Thailand and came to the US for college.
3. Since the attack in February, Jumreornvong has made a point of speaking out against anti-Asian hate. She wrote an op-ed about her experience, rallied other students to push their medical school to critically look at Asian discrimination and spoke at a rally of New York City healthcare workers against antiAsian hate.
4. Such vocal activism is new to Jumreornvong. She recalls “shaking like a leaf” when she was speaking at the healthcare workers rally, and she has received hateful messages online from people for talking publicly about her experiences.
5. “It’s still all new to me, activism, and I think that’s what a lot of Asian Americans are starting to feel too,” Jumreornvong said. “We’re not really taught to speak out.” But Jumreornvong said many people have reached out to her saying that her experience resonated with them.
6. Jumreornvong is a part of what has become a massive movement to stop antiAsian violence in the US as the number of hate-related incidents reached an alarming high over the course of the pandemic. Stop AAPI Hate, a not-for-profit coalition that has been tracking anti-Asian incidents since the beginning of the pandemic, has reported at least 3,800 incidents ranging from being spat on to verbal and physical assault.
7. While hate-related incidents have been taking place throughout the course of the pandemic, two high-profile, violent incidents in January against elderly Asian men, one of whom died from his injuries, gave momentum to the issue. After the murder of six Asian American women in a mass shooting in Atlanta, many Asian Americans say that the fear of being attacked has hit a breaking point.
8. The last few weeks have seen dozens of rallies against anti-Asian hate across the country, viral social media campaigns spreading awareness of the issue and over $25m in donations to groups supporting
Asian American and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) causes.
9. For many historians and advocates, this mobilization feels like the first time in decades when Asian American activism has been seen at such a widespread scale. The rise in haterelated incidents and crimes, along with the racial reckoning provoked by the police killing of George Floyd, has caused a broad coalition to form within a diverse racial group.
TIME TO SPEAK OUT
10. Asian Americans make up 20 million of the US population and have backgrounds in more than 20 countries in Asia, each with distinct languages, cultures and history. No single ethnic origin dominates the group, and about 60% of Asian Americans were born in another country, according to the Pew Research Center.
11. Despite their vast ethnic, generational and cultural differences, Asian Americans have found common ground over the discrimination. “In this moment, you see Asian Americans coming together because we all recognize that shared pain and that shared sense
of being othered,” said John Yang, president and executive director of the advocacy group Asian Americans Advancing Justice. “We understand what it’s like to be labeled as a foreigner, regardless of whether we were born in this country.”
12. This experience of racism and xenophobia is something that Asians in America have shared since the 1800s, when immigrants from Asia started coming to the US. No matter whether a person was Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Filipino, they were regarded as “yellow peril”.
13. “They were different, but they were merged together” in the US, said Linda Trinh Vo, a professor of Asian American studies at the University of California at Irvine. The phenomenon worked “to prevent them from being integrated into this country”.
14. Up until the late 1960s, people of Asian descent identified themselves by their ethnicAAPI ity and were broadly referred to as “Oriental”, “Asiatic” or “Mongolian”, Vo said, with some frequently called racial slurs.
15. But in 1968, a group of graduate students at the University of California at Berkeley, inspired by the Black Power Movement, wanted to band together to join the broader fight for racial equality. They chose to name their political alliance under a new umbrella term for themselves: Asian American.
NEW CONVERSATIONS 16. Activists say they have been encouraged by the number of Asian Americans who have not only started to become vocal about their experiences with hate-related incidents, but also are starting to grapple with broader conversations about how race plays a role in their lives.
17. “The kinds of conversations we’re having now were unthinkable even two years ago … getting at questions of being perpetual foreigners, being told you speak English well,” said Manjusha Kulkarni, co-founder of Stop Hate. Asian Americans have been talking about the experience of changing their names to ones that are more palatable to Americans and being hypersexualized as women.
18. In response to pressure to address the growing number of racist incidents against Asian Americans, the White House unrolled a series of measures, including $49.5m of funding dedicated to community programs that help victims of attacks, and called on the justice department to make new efforts to enforce hate crime laws and collect data. Advocates praised Biden’s actions, but have emphasized that attention to the issue needs to continue and ultimately go below the surface to address the root causes of discrimination.
19. “Racism preceded the pandemic, [and] racism will continue after the pandemic ends,” Kulkarni said. “The pandemic is just the latest iteration of this racism, but it could have been something else that prompted it. The ‘something else’ will prompt it once again unless we’re able to take really decisive action against white supremacy.”
1. around ici, vers / to spit, spat, spat out cracher (fig.) / to walk away s'éloigner (à pied) / to kick donner un coup de pied (dans) / to drag traîner / to call out appeler.
2. severe grave / over au cours de / slur insulte / to call traiter de / flu grippe / bruise contusion / to hit, hit, hit frapper / out of shame par honte / to go, went, gone on ici, se produire / for a while depuis un moment / to grow, grew, grown up grandir / college université.
3. attack ici, agression / to make, made, made a point se faire un devoir de, tenir à / to speak, spoke, spoken out ici, dénoncer / op-ed (page) face éditoriale (article d'opinion situé sur la page faisant face à l'éditorial) / to rally mobiliser / school ici, université / rally rassemblement.
4. vocal qui se fait entendre / activism militantisme / to shake, shook, shaken like a leaf trembler /
hateful haineux.
5. to reach out to entrer en contact avec / to resonate with trouver un écho chez.
6. hate-related haineux / to reach atteindre / high niveau record, pic / not-for-profit à but non lucratif / to track suivre / to report signaler, rapporter / to range from... to aller de...à / assault agression.
7. throughout (tout) au long de / high-profile (très) médiatisé / elderly personne(s) âgée(s) / injury blessure / to give, gave, given momentum to donner un nouvel élan à; ici, visibiliser / issue problème / mass shooting fusillade / to hit, hit, hit a breaking point atteindre son paroxysme.
8. dozen douzaine, ici multitude / to spread, spread, spread awareness sensibiliser / over ici, plus de / to support soutenir, défendre.
9. advocate défenseur, militant / decade décennie / at a widespread scale à grande échelle / rise augmentation / reckoning règlement de comptes / killing meurtre, assassinat / broad vaste.
10. to make, made, made up représenter / background ici, origine / single seul / to dominate ici, être majoritaire / according to d'après, selon.
11. despite malgré / common ground points communs / over ici, au sujet/à propos de / to come, came, come together se rassembler, s'unir / shared partagé, (en) commun / pain douleur, souffrance / sense ici, sensation, impression /
to other altériser / executive director directeur(trice) général(e) / advocacy défense / to advance faire progresser, promouvoir / to label qualifier de / regardless indépendamment de.
12. no matter peu importe (que l'on soit) / to regard as considérer comme.
13. to merge together fusionner, mélanger; ici, considérer comme un seul et même groupe / to prevent from (+ger.) empêcher de.
14. up until jusqu'à / late (à la) fin (de) / descent origines, ascendance / to identify as se considérer comme / broadly généralement / to refer as appeler, désigner.
15. graduate student titulaire d'une licence, étudiant de troisième cycle / Black Power terme qui recouvre la position de divers mouvements politiques, culturels et sociaux noirs aux États-Unis luttant contre la ségrégation raciale / to band together se (re)grouper, s'unir / umbrella term terme générique.
16. to grapple with faire face à.
17. unthinkable impensable, inconcevable / foreigner étranger / co-founder cofondateur(-trice) / palatable agréable, ici, conforme aux goûts (de).
18. to address faire face à, répondre à / to unroll déployer / a series of plusieurs / funding financement / to call on exhorter / to enforce mettre en vigueur, (faire) appliquer / law loi / data données / to praise applaudir (fig.) / to emphasize insister sur (le fait) / ultimately à terme / root racine.
19. to precede ici, exister avant, être antérieur à / iteration version, manifestation / to prompt déclencher, provoquer / once again une fois de plus / unless à moins que / decisive résolu, déterminé.