U.S. needs to reckon with its anti-Asian roots
I’m scared.
I’m an Asian American, a Vietnamese American, the child of a Vietnam War refugee and nail technician who operates a nail salon with family. I’m scared the next time my mother walks out our front door and heads off to work with my aunt and uncle I’ll receive a text or call that a quarter of my family has been shot dead by a white supremacist.
I was scared when Noel Quintana, a 61-year-old Filipino man, was slashed across the face on a subway in Brooklyn. I was scared when Vichar Ratanapakdee, an 84-year-old Thai grandfather, was pushed onto the pavement in San Francisco and died because of his injuries. I was scared when Bawi Cung, a Burmese man, and his two sons were stabbed inside a Sam’s Club in Midland; and I’ll continue to be scared until we confront the anti-Asian roots of our country. We must support the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) community and organizers with anti-racist agendas to begin to heal.
The recent shooting in Atlanta, which resulted in the murder of eight, six of whom were Asian women, has rocked the AAPI community to its core. The incident is the latest in a series of reported attacks against the AAPI community. With Houston being home to over 150,000 Asians, anti-AAPI sentiment must be addressed or the city risks becoming the next destination for a targeted shooting that ends in the death of more Asians.
According to StopAAPIHate, a national coalition founded to address anti-Asian discrimination during the pandemic, 3,292 anti-AAPI incidents, ranging from verbal to physical harassment against Asians, occurred in 2020. So far, three months into 2021, the organization has received over 500 reports of similar incidents.
We do not need police to make excuses for white supremacist behavior. We need to instead redirect funds from police to organizations that address racism and the issues underlying violence. The police did not help Angelo Quinto, a Filipino man, who died three days after his family alleges police knelt on his neck for five minutes. Police did not help Tommy Le, a Vietnamese man, after they fatally shot him twice in the back for allegedly holding a pen thought to be a knife. Calls for additional policing could harm more than help us, so we must instead invest in community-led efforts.
Local leaders such as Black Lives Matter: Houston founder Ashton P. Woods and organizer Brandon Mack have demanded an end to AAPI racism. Woods said in a recent Facebook post, “The AAPI community is under attack from racist, xenophobic … domestic terrorists. Call it what it is! People have been MURDERED.” Similarly, Mack shared a post decrying anti-immigrant sentiment and voiced his solidarity with the AAPI community. Activists like Woods and Mack are already doing the work to dismantle racism in Houston, and we must support them.
But to end anti-AAPI sentiment, we must get to its roots. Many have said that recent attacks are due to the pandemic and Donald Trump, who referred to COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus” or “Kung Flu.” Although Trump has inflamed antiAAPI rhetoric in America, racism toward Asians started long before the pandemic and will continue long after unless we as a country reckon with our anti-Asian history.
The United States has a long history of marginalizing and targeting Asians. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited all immigration of Chinese laborers, and from 1942 to 1945, the U.S. government forced Japanese Americans to relocate to internment camps after the WWII Pearl Harbor bombing by Japanese soldiers.
We must acknowledge how anti-Asian sentiment in the states is connected to how the U.S. treats Asian countries abroad. Echoes of the U.S. colonization of the Philippines, the forced annexation of Hawaii and the Vietnam War still affect how the U.S. treats Asians. While movies like “Crazy Rich Asians” portray a luxurious lifestyle and promote the model minority stereotype, reports of Chinese women earning 4 cents for every $45 Disney doll they make and Apple ignoring labor laws to exploit its workers aren’t unusual. Asian lives, especially women’s, are still not valued.
We can start to help the AAPI community by uplifting and listening to Asian voices and supporting Asian organizations such as StopAAPIHate. By relearning U.S. history, reflecting on how we have internalized racist sentiments, and by committing ourselves to ending white supremacy, perhaps we can prevent another shooting and racist attack from happening.
As an Asian American woman, I want to be recognized and treated with respect as a human being in the U.S. I don’t want to be scared anymore.