After a series of shootings at Asian spas killed eight people in Atlanta – six of them Asian women – the country is undergoing a reckoning with anti-Asian racism.
Asian American faculty and staff say campuses have a role to play in this moment.
“Universities are really critical, because young people are the base of the movement to fight racism,” said Dr. Russel M. Jeung, chair of the Asian American studies department at San Francisco State University.
He finds that college students are using their social media platforms to call attention to the issue and encourage their communities to report bias incidents. Jeung co-founded Stop AAPI Hate in March 2020, an initiative to track the uptick in anti-Asian harassment, discrimination and violence during the COVID-19 pandemic. Victims reported 3,795 incidents between March 19, 2020 and February 28, 2021 – and that only reflects those who chose to report.
People described being coughed and spat upon, kids shunned at school. And the mass shooting was “our greatest fear realized,” Jeung said. “The underlying racism has long been there and has been stoked to be expressed in a range of ways.”
While exacerbated by COVID-19 – nicknamed the “China virus” by former President Donald J. Trump – it’s important to remember that anti-Asian racism is a long-standing trend in America, emphasized Dr. Jonathan Wang, center director for Asian Pacific American Student Services at the University of Southern California.
“This notion that anti-Asian racism might be novel or new or that it started during the pandemic is a false narrative,” he said. “… The United States has shown throughout its history, racism or discrimination or disparate treatment of folks who are Asian or Asian American occurs quite often. What the pandemic has brought [out] is this attention to … how fragile the relationship we have to society [is] and how at any given moment what we might think is progress is taken away from us because of words or violence or acts of discrimination.”
