While COVID-19 continues to fester and dominate the news today, another type of epidemic, involving aggressive behavior towards Asian Americans who are being held accountable for its origins, has spread alongside the actual disease. In the year, there has been a surge in harassment toward Asian Americans, as many have been attacked, spit on, and told they don’t belong. During a time when politicians are meant to be responsible for condemning hate and instilling safety and security, even President Donald Trump had continued to stroke xenophobia by associating it with Asian Americans and referring to it as the “Chinese virus” or “Wuhan virus”. According to NBC, the tendency to blame is particularly unfair, since researchers have found that most COVID-19 cases in New York were imported from Europe, not Asia. Furthermore, political pushback toward China’s handling of the virus, conflated with hostility toward Chinese Americans, contributes to creating an environment where blaming Chinese people and their country is acceptable and which thereby fosters more extreme acts against them. The Stop AAPI Hate website has been tracking self-reported incidents, and more than 1,100 wide-ranging physical and verbal attacks against Asian Americans have been documented just in the early months of 2020 when the virus first started spreading. It was also observed that women and children were often targeted in the incidents. Two particularly striking cases included an Asian American woman having acid thrown on her, and a two-year-old baby being stabbed.

In addition to such violent cases, more than 30 percent of Americans have witnessed someone accusing Asians for the coronavirus pandemic, as stated in an Ipsos survey conducted in May for the Center for Public Integrity. Along with the poll, advocacy groups and researchers are noticing an alarming rise in anti-Asian discrimination, with an increase in assaults, refusal of service and vandalism. The high number of reports, which have been submitted over just two weeks, is especially striking since people across the country have predominantly been sheltering in place, and most are occurring only during infrequent, but necessary trips outside. The pattern of harassment and discrimination required The New York City Commission on Human Rights to announce that their response team would handle the growing problems related to the outbreak last year. The team, made up of the agency’s attorneys and members within their law enforcement departments, made this decision primarily because of their concerns towards the heightened levels of stress and the potential deterioration of Asian Americans’ mental health, as many are living in constant fear as a result of the persecution.

Despite action on local spheres, the federal government has done little to combat a rise in hate crimes and messages during the pandemic. CNN brought attention to a study released in April 2020 by the Network Contagion Research Institute, an independent third party that tracks misinformation across social media channels, where researchers found that the COVID-19 pandemic has coincided with a surge in anti-Chinese sentiments on the web. It surveyed discriminatory rhetorics posted in online forums, which serve as sources that spread conspiracies for volatile purposes. 

However, the uptick in racism isn’t only fueled by the pandemic. While the uncertainty of the outbreak has amplified the discrimination, the show of prejudice has revealed long standing biases toward Asian Americans that have persisted since some of the earliest immigrants came to the U.S. generations before. One example is with the enduring trope that has subjugated Asian Americans to being “strange”, based on consumption of “weird” foods, something that has reemerged in relation to bat soup. This persisting connection reflects the idea of being a “forever foreigner”, which both Li Zhou and Jia Lynn Yang referenced in The Vox and The New York Times articles, respectively, when speaking of more personal experiences and instances in regards to previous events of the same context.

The concept that Asian Americans are “forever foreigners”, which argues that Asians who live in the U.S. are fundamentally foreign and can’t be fully American, also proved as a foundation for Japanese internment during World War II and Executive Order 9066. Japanese American citizens were sent to detention camps solely on the basis of suspicion because of their ethnicity. This fact is even more disheartening to comprehend when knowing that many were told the familiar phrase to “go back to where they came from,” when most had only known America as their home. This explicit phrase has also been used in accordance to COVID-19, thereby exemplifying how Anti-Asian biases play into a long history of racism in the U.S., with those that have Asian ancestry perpetually finding their status being questioned despite the loyalty they feel.

Ultimately, the current xenophobia is built on deeply rooted racism toward Asian Americans and the revival of these offensive stereotypes will only add to the harmful effects. These perpetuations reveal the lack of improvement on former trends as well as exhibit historic U.S. tensions with Asian nations that have been projected onto communities of Asian descent. Fortunately, the hardships Asian Americans are going through across the country are also bringing confrontations with prejudices to the forefront, prompting Americans to have more frank conversations about institutional and implicit biases. Asian Americans are forcing a reckoning about the existence of anti-Asian racism in the U.S. and compelling people to talk more openly about their experiences because, for many, the recent harassment has been a shocking reminder that “your face can still mark you as foreign.”

Bibliography

Ellerbeck, Alex. “Over 30 Percent of Americans Have Witnessed COVID-19 Bias against Asians, Poll Says.” NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/over-30-americans-have-witnessed-covid-19-bias-against-asians-n1193901. 

Holcombe, Madeline, and Sonia Moghe. “NYC Launches Team to Combat Coronavirus Discrimination.” CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/22/us/new-york-coronavirus-discrimination-harassment-response-team/index.html. 

Yang, Jia Lynn. “Who Belongs in America?” The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/25/us/coronavirus-immigration-china-book-yang.html. 

Zhou, Li. “How the Coronavirus is Surfacing America’s Deep-seated Anti-Asian Biases.” Vox. https://www.vox.com/identities/2020/4/21/21221007/anti-asian-racism-coronavirus.