Asian Americans share experiences with hate
‘It’s nothing specifically malicious, but still obviously racist’
Shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic started a year ago, a man walked in to an Asian grocer store in Hammond and started yelling at the Asian woman behind the counter. He said he would shut down Camotes Island Market because the woman brought the COVID-19 virus to the U.S. from China.
“He really scared me,” said owner Maria Gillespie, who was born in the Philippines. “He said ‘You Asians brought the COVID here.” I was like, ‘Why are you accusing me?’ ”
Asian Americans have experienced more racially targeted violence since the COVID-19 pandemic began, which was further perpetuated by former President Donald Trump’s rhetoric about the virus, area Asian Americans said.
The violence against Asian Americans captured the nation’s attention again last month after a gunman drove to spas around Atlanta and killed eight people — six of them women of Asian descent.
Then, about two weeks later, a man attacked a 65-year-old Filipino woman in New York City while three men inside a nearby luxury apartment building watched. One of the men closed the door to the lobby.
The pandemic is not the first time Asian Americans have been attacked following a catastrophic event, for example the internment of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans from 1942-45 during World War II, said Hannah Lee, assistant professor of psychology at Indiana University Northwest.
Stop AAPI Hate, a nonprofit social organization, created a
reporting center for people to report incidents of Asian hate across the country. The center was created March 19, 2020, “in response to the alarming escalation in xenophobia and bigotry resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic,” according to the organization’s website.
The reporting center has received 3,795 reports of discrimination against Asian Americans between March 19, 2020 and Feb. 28, 2021.
Of the 3,795 reports, 68.1% of the reports are verbal harassment and 20.5% are reports of shunning. Physical assault amounts to 11.1% of the reported incidents, according to the report.
But, because no governmental agency collects data on the number of crimes against Asian Americans, it is difficult to gauge a long-term trend of these crimes. In Hammond, Merrillville, Munster, police officials said there have been no reports of Asian hate crimes in the last five years.
Lee said the difficulty i n charging someone with a hate crime against an Asian person is proving hate, which is challenging considering there are no symbols of anti-Asian sentiment.
While there has been a rise in physical violence against Asian Americans in recent weeks, the most “problematic” form of discrimination, Lee said, is the microaggression Asian Americans experience. The, “where are you really from?” question, for example, after an Asian American said he or she was born in the U.S., she said.
“Those microaggressions can impact mental health,” Lee said, leaving Asian Americans with potentially long-lasting trauma.
Ben Kontney, 22, an engineering student at Valparaiso University, said he has experienced microaggressions growing up in the suburbs of Chicago.
He and his twin brother are South Korean, and they were adopted by a white family when they were 7 months old. They also have an older sister, who was adopted from China.
The three of them heard it all growing up, Kontney said, from comments about their eyes to mentions of “kung fu,” a form of Chinese martial arts.
Kontney said that he and his brother played basketball throughout grade school, and his teammates would compare them to Jeremy Lin, an Asian American professional basketball player.
While they didn’t think much of it growing up, Kontney said, looking back on those moments “highlight some of the issues” that Asian Americans face today. The backhanded compliment of being compared to an NBA player, wrapped in the realization that he and his brother were being compared to the “one or two people we could be called,” Kontney said.
While looking for colleges, Kontney said he recalls going on a visit to the University of Alabama. At the time, Kontney said the university was offering a full-ride scholarship for students whose ACT scores were above a certain number.
Kontney said he and a friend did very well on the ACT, so they decided to visit the school together. While on the visit, Kontney said a number of students told him that he would get accepted so that the school would meet a race quota.
At Valparaiso University, Kontney said he’s experienced microaggressions, like classmates saying “of course you’re an engineer.” He’s also heard his classmates call COVID-19 the “China virus.”
“It’s nothing specifically malicious, but still obviously racist,” Kontney said.
Gillespie, the Asian grocery owner, said she has lived in the U.S. since 1990, and has experienced microaggressions while working in retail. It was always subtle, Gillespie said, but she would often sense that customers looking for help in the store avoided her because they assumed she wouldn’t be able to understand them.
“You could tell,” Gillespie said. “I worked in retail, so I know how to handle people.”
Camotes Island Market is located right next to a message business, also owned by an Asian American, and Gillespie said she’s had men come into the store asking if she gives massages as well.
Since the Atlanta shooter target spas — and the recent Colorado shooting at a grocery store — Gillespie said she’s been nervous about her business and the massage business next door, so her husband, who co-owns the grocery store, has been working in the store more lately.
“I enjoy coming to work here, being an owner of a business, but sometimes you just have, at the back of your mind, you just never know about other people,” Gillespie said.
Kiev Bui, 30, the manager of Asian Kitchen in Hammond, was born in Vietnam and came to the United States when she was 5. As a restaurant owner, Bui said she’s experienced some microaggressions, like receiving calls asking if the restaurant serves dog meat.
Since the pandemic started, Bui said she anticipated an increase of reports of violence against Asian Americans, which has made her a little anxious about going out in public.
“It was to be expected, especially with (former) President (Donald) Trump calling it the Chinese virus. If you’re Asian, you’re Chinese in America,” Bui said. “If you’re a rational person, you know better than to blame an entirety of people just for something that happened out of their control.”
All three agreed that the Atlanta shooting was a hate crime, given the businesses and victims. But, the labeling of the Atlanta shooting as a hate crime has become a debate in part because the conversation also centers around guns, Kontney said.
“It’s hard to talk about race when people want to talk about the gun rights first,” Kontney said. “Obviously that’s a huge conversation that I’m not trying to devalue in anyway, but I think the racial conversation needs to come first.”
At the individual level, Lee said, the best way for people to help in this moment is to educate themselves on Asian history and to speak out if someone witnesses microaggressions or violence against an Asian American.
“You don’t have to fix the issues in the entire system,” Lee said. “However, you can do just the smallest action you can do.”