Anti-Asian bias is pervasive
As our nation grapples with its legacy of anti-Asian racism, it’s important to consider the subtler forms of racism too. Racism occurs on a spectrum, from social degradation all the way to — as we saw recently in Atlanta — mass murder.
I cannot speak for Asians, nor do I wish to. But as a white woman who majored in East Asian studies and learned Chinese in college two decades ago, I learned a lot about biases others may not see.
It started with my parents. My mom loves “culture” and “languages” — but it turned out that her affection didn’t extend to Chinese. “I’m sorry,” she would say to me on the phone. “I just don’t find China interesting.”
My non-Chinese peers, meanwhile, treated Chinese as if it were incomprehensibly foreign, like it could be understood by nobody.
Once, after college, I went to a Chinese restaurant with coworkers. The server’s English was shaky, but I could communicate with him easily in Chinese. I watched a coworker act as if the waiter was not capable of communication at all, which was rude and dehumanizing.
At school, peers would say things to me like “Ping ping ting ting — hey what does that mean in Chinese?” I hope I replied, “You just said ‘I’m an idiot,’ ” but I think usually I was too stunned to respond.
If I was able to learn this much about anti-Asian bias just by telling people I’d studied Chinese, imagine what Asians and Asian Americans experience.
Unlike me, Asian Americans are still treated like perpetual foreigners, even though some of their families got here decades before mine did. My family immigrated to this country about a century ago — after the passage of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act barred Chinese people from coming here but before the KKK-supported 1924 immigration act that would have kept my Eastern European ancestors out.
These less violent forms of anti-Asian racism still contribute to a pattern of dehumanization that can lead to the kind of racist, sexist violence we saw in Atlanta. We as a nation condemn antiAsian racism in all its forms.