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You Hye-young

By You Hye-young, assistant professor of politics at New York University

Hate crimes targeting Asians are occurring in the US with disturbing frequency. There were more than 3,800 incidents of hate in 2020 alone. Women were the victims in 68% of those incidents. Adding online racial discrimination, we reach a number that’s almost too great to count.

On Twitter and other corners of the Internet, there’s frequent racial discrimination against Asians, and East Asians in particular. There’s also been a surge of hate speech against China and Chinese people.

Former US President Donald Trump repeatedly labeled the COVID-19 virus as the “China virus.” Each time he did so, hatred of Asian spread online.

There are numerous signs that hatred against Asians, even if not overt, pervades American society or that internalized hatred has finally ripped off its mask and revealed itself.

According to a recently published study, people in a given region that has seen its first confirmed case of COVID-19 look up derogatory expressions against Asians on Google much more than before.

Even in European countries like Italy that faced a dire crisis in the early stages of the pandemic, the COVID-19 outbreak has been accompanied by a steep increase in hate crimes against Asians. Such discrimination and hatred have been actively encouraged by politicians on the far right whose platform is based on attacks on immigrants and refugees.

There are around 22 million people of Asian descent in the US, slightly under 6% of the total population. That’s not a huge number, but Asians represent the fastest-growing slice of the US population. As the number of immigrants from Asia steadily increases, Asians are expected to make up 9% of the US population in 2050.

Though the Asian population is growing, US society’s attitude toward Asian Americans doesn’t seem to have changed very much. Both those born in the US and those who came as immigrants are treated as eternal strangers and outsiders. The hateful phrase habitually flung at Asians is “go back to your own country.”

Even Asians who have spent their entire lives in the US have to deal with perplexing questions from other Americans about where they learned English and where they came from. And when Asians say they were born in the US, there’s often a follow-up question: “Not that —where are you really from?”

Such Americans have a hard time believing that these “strange Asians” — who are neither white nor black — could speak English as their mother tongue or be born in a small town in the American Midwest, for example.

When personal prejudice builds up, it tends to be reflected in social norms. Andy Kim, US Representative for New Jersey’s 3rd congressional district, wrote on Twitter last month that he’d been excluded from Korea-related responsibilities while working at the State Department because his family name is “Kim.” Kim said that Asians are commonly the target of such practices.

Various efforts are underway to stop hatred of Asians. The hashtag #StopAsianHate is a slogan that we frequently encounter in our daily lives. There’s also a campaign to encourage Asians to gain more of a political voice.

In past elections, Asian Americans have been less likely to vote than the members of other races. While Asian Americans, on average, have the highest levels of education and income, their voting rate is more than 10% lower than whites or blacks.

But in 2020, the turnout of Asian American voters in Georgia, a major battleground state, was 91% higher than four years earlier. That jump had a decisive impact on the outcome of the election. Two out of three Asian Americans support the Democratic Party.

Votes cast by large numbers of Asian Americans enabled Biden to claim Georgia, and its electors, by a tiny margin. The Democratic Party also picked up Georgia’s two senate seats in a runoff election.

Even so, Asian Americans still aren’t getting much attention from the political world. Biden promised to create the most diverse cabinet in American history but only appointed one Asian American to lead the Office of the US Trade Representative. There’s not a single Asian American among his nominees and appointees for secretarial positions.

It was only after an official complaint from Asian American senators that the Biden administration announced it would appoint an Asian American to serve as a senior presidential advisor.

To prevent hatred of Asians from becoming the “new normal” after the pandemic, we need to work so that Asian American voices can be heard loud and clear at all levels of American society. We’ll also have to keep on the Biden administration to see how it deals with this issue.

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