Artists counter hate
The rise of racist attacks, some horrifyingly lethal, has galvanized Asian American artists around the country to push back against hate.
Early in the pandemic, word started to travel among Asian American artists: Racist attacks were on the rise. Jamie Chan told a fellow artist, Kenneth Tam, about getting kicked out of an Uber pool ride by the driver who noticed her sniffling. Anicka Yi, an artist based in New York, called Christine Y. Kim, a curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, to talk about being spit at on a Manhattan street; Kim, in turn, recounted being accosted in a Whole Foods parking lot.
Tam decided to start recording these incidents in a Google spreadsheet he named “We Are Not COVID.” It circulated on social media first among arts communities, then to wider audiences. Over the past several months, the document has filled up with reports ranging from microaggressions to outright violence.
“I had assumed that things like this were going to start happening, but not so quickly, and not to people I knew,” Tam said in a phone interview. “It made me realize that I needed to educate myself and perhaps other people about it.”
The rise of racist attacks, some of them horrifyingly lethal, has galvanized Asian American artists around the country.
They are leveraging social media to raise awareness, gathering to protest despite the pandemic precautions, making new work, and — perhaps above all — finding new grounds for solidarity with one another and with other affected communities to figure out how to respond to the current climate.
Recent anti-asian sentiment may have been stoked by former President Donald Trump’s xenophobic response to COVID-19
— which he repeatedly called “the Chinese virus.” But it existed long before him, since the arrival of Chinese workers in the 19th century, and stubbornly persists, even after his departure from office.
“The way to fight this kind of xenophobia and white supremacy is to organize and fight the root causes of structural racism and capitalism,” said artist Betty Yu, a founder of Chinatown Art Brigade (CAB).
With co-founders Tomie Arai and Mansee Kong, and a network of other artists and organizers, CAB has been working over the past five years to oppose the gentrification of New York’s Chinatown neighborhood and the resulting displacement.
As the group grew, the question of how to leverage their own positions in the art world became central.
“It was one of the compelling things that we thought that we as arts workers could contribute to, just because of the fact that so many art spaces, at least in New York and LA and even the Bay Area, were physically adjacent to Asian communities,” Tam said.