Discrimination increased with pandemic
Report documents incidents in Texas since March, shows percentage of assaults was twice the U.S. rate
A man walked up to an Asian fusion restaurant in Richardson last March and asked a worker if she had the coronavirus.
“No, why would you ask that?” she said. She was wearing a cloth mask. “Well, because you work with him,” the man said, pointing to an Asian American man behind her. Later, another person from the same group posed the same question to the employee.
Discrimination and violence against Asian Americans has increased as the COVID-19 pandemic, which started in Wuhan, China, has spread across the U.S. and around the world, according to a new report from Stop AAPI Hate, a group that documents anti-Asian incidents.
The report comes as part of an initiative by the Asian Pacific Planning and Policy Council, Chinese for Affirmative Action and San Francisco State University’s Asian American studies department.
“The shift in the attitude and the anxiety in the Asian American community is like that I’ve never seen before,” said state Rep. Gene Wu, D-Houston. “I have never seen the community this fearful, this angry, this disjointed about what their future is going to be.”
Fort Bend County Judge KP George, who was born in India but is a U.S. citizen, recently spoke out about hateful comments directed at him.
George posted a collage featuring some of the hatefilled comments he has received. Many of the posts contained profanity, and others attacked his origin of birth. He said the comments have become more frequent and aggressive since the COVID-19 pandemic has made him the primary response authority in the county.
“I’ve had to make a lot of decisions over the last few months to tackle the COVID crisis head-on,” George said. “When someone criticizes my decisions, that is their right as Americans. However, when people choose to hurl racist, antiimmigrant garbage at my family, colleagues and me — that crosses a line.”
Based on self-reported data, the Stop AAPI Hate report documented 72 incidents of anti-Asian American hate in Texas from March 19 to Aug. 5. The incidents ranged from antiAsian slurs in grocery stores to a Jeep driver in Fort Worth who yelled racist epithets and tried to run down an Asian American person.
A majority of the reported incidents involved verbal harassment, while about 10 percent could be potential civil rights violations, such as workplace discrimination and being barred from establishments. The study also found that physical assaults made up more than 20 percent of reported incidents, more than twice the national rate of 9 percent.
Another study by the same group found over 2,500 incidents of discrimination against Asian Americans across the U.S. from March 19 to Aug. 5. The FBI, meanwhile, warned of a surge in hate crimes against Asian Americans.
Nationally, about 4 of 10 incidents occurred at places of business, and 2 of 10 occurred on public streets. Women reported discrimination more than twice the rate that men did.
One high-profile act of violence occurred in Midland on March 14, when a man stabbed several members of a Burmese family, including two young children, apparently because of fears about the coronavirus. The case was listed as a hate crime.
President Donald Trump and others have referred to the coronavirus as “the Chinese virus.” Trump has defended his language, saying the term isn’t racist — he’s simply reminding people about where the virus came from.
Natalie Chou, a UCLA basketball player and former star at Plano West Senior High School, blames political leadership for the increased racism against Asian Americans. Chou has spoken out against anti-Asian racism after an acquaintance called the coronavirus “the Chinese virus.”
“The reason why we’re still having this conversation is because people are still using the same rhetoric and vocabulary to describe the coronavirus,” she said.
Even when crimes involving hate are reported, they don’t necessarily get taken seriously.
Laura Nodolf, the district attorney of Midland County, is the lead prosecutor in the case of the Burmese family that was attacked. Nodolf is pursuing the state hate crime enhancement, which, upon conviction, could potentially lead to additional years in prison for the assailant. Proceedings have not begun yet.
But reporting from ProPublica shows that, from 2010 to 2015, only eight cases in Texas resulted in hate crime convictions, even though 981 cases were reported to police as potential hate crimes. That is partly because it’s hard to prove the intent of the accused, lawyers say.
Stanley Mark, an attorney for the New York-based Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, said police have to determine if an assault was motivated substantially by animosity against someone’s race or other identifiers, including gender, religion and national origin.
Some cases have a “context of racial animus, but it’s not exactly clear what the motive was,” he said. “You can’t get into the mind of the perpetrators unless you catch them. In these instances, a lot of the people are not caught by the police or arrested because they can’t be found.”
Moving forward, Chou said educating people about the inaccuracy of stereotypes is the first step to stopping anti-Asian discrimination. For example, people sometimes cast Asian Americans as a monolith, rather than a mosaic of diverse ethnic groups. “We are really complex, just like everyone else,” she said. “We have our own history, and our road in America has not been easy.”