Yo is this hate crime?
Hello everyone welcome to the podcast show this is your host Joey Lo. Hope everyone is doing well in this holiday season, and 2021 is almost over! When we review 2020, a lot of my memories are of staying at home and just doing online classes. However, a big event that happened was the pandemic the covid 19 which changed a lot of people’s lives. Their life plan may be different, or they have to delay something they are currently working on. However, when we continue to move on in 2021, there are also a lot of injustice issues that are not fully discussed or given a solution toward Asian Americans. In particular, I want to bring people’s focus to the social injustice that happened within Asian American communities and I want to discuss the murder that happened last year in Atlanta and an attack that happened in Manhattan. So just to give more information about the two events I just said, and the below information was based on the article written by The New York Times.
The first one is a murderous rampage at three spas in the Atlanta area that killed eight people, and surprisingly six of them Asian women. After this murder was unfolded, there has stirred fear and outrage among Asian-Americans who see it as the latest burst of racist violence against them, even as the shooter himself offered a more complicated motive.
Another case that happened even earlier in a 36-year-old man was stabbed near the federal courthouse in the Lower Manhattan area, and he has later taken to the hospital in critical condition. The authorities initially said they would pursue hate crime charges, but on that later Saturday they had settled on several charges, none of them related to hate crimes, according to a law enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation.
So, I want to ask the audience a question: Why this is not charged as a hate crime but instead it is just charged with attempted murder or something else.
So, let’s take a little deeper look at what is a Hate crime or hate speech? First, hate speech: According to the American library association, hate speech was an expression through an intention to humiliate or incite hatred against a group or a class of person based on their race, religion, skin color, sexual and gender identities, or even their disability, or national origin. Additionally, to define hate crime, a criminal offense motivated by the above reason I just stated.
After, we get to know a little more about hate crime and speech. We can have a better understanding that this kind of certainty and specific level of law framework is really hard to define by prosecutors. Because when the case is unfolded, the police cannot find any evidence or language to conclude it as a racially motivated crime or harassment. This investigation gets to the heart of, is it racial or is it not when it comes to Asian-Americans? Like, do we believe that the race of these women had nothing to do with why murder targeted them? It’s just too soon to know right now, and that’s not the answer that many Asian-Americans want to hear. The event created more anxiety in Asian American communities, and they were still seeking validation from the law enforcement that proves that they are not being oversensitive but also can go outside safety without encountering any harassment or crime against them.
Moreover, happened at the same time in 2020, the pandemic has brought an intense relationship between people in the United States and the Asian American in the United States. New York police have reported that a huge jump in verbal and physical harassment toward Asian communities had raised from 3 events in 2019 but in 2020 the reported incident has raised to 28 based on the article written by the New York Times. A lot of these might be related to the political atmosphere between China and United States, for instance, President Trump around calling this the Kung Flu and the China virus, we see this now being parroted on the street level in many of these attacks. And I think it’s bringing into really sharp focus specifically what is happening to Asian-Americans, that this pandemic has now become racialized in a way that we haven’t seen before. And as a result, it’s drawing all this attention to attacks on Asian-Americans, and people are using language that we have not seen in recent history.
All this media and news information creates a “single story” of Asian American folks and tight their image with Covid-19. Just as the Ted talk, we saw at the beginning of the class, the danger of one single story could create prejudice and bias or like based on people’s assumption and dedicated an unfair treatment to that certain person or groups. In this case, we can see because of the news and the against verbal or any other expressions, a lot of American folks blame the origins of covid -19 toward Chinese people. How this single story can harm all these international Chinese folks or American Asians just because they share the same skin color, and the origin of one country was not the cause of the pandemic.
How actually can the United States communities and justice bring comfort to Asian or Asian American communities right now? One thing important was the missing Asian American history in our education and this lack of awareness about the history of Asians contributing to this kind of sentiment, which cause the problem invisible, and the solution must come with an informed way which is the visibility of Asian American history. Ms. Helen Zia is the author of Asian American dreams. She also stated that the forced missing history example causes people to fight against each other but not fight together. One example of Asian American racial history was during the 1800s, a serious riot happened in the Chinatown in LA, and this led to the Chinese exclusion Act that banned Chinese immigration to the U.S., which happened again during World War 2, Japanese Americans became in the eye of the attacker because of the enemy strike on Pearl Harbor.
Last, I want to conclude that how in real life we can support our Asian American folks when they are seeing this kind of challenge, one way to support is to get to know more about Asian American history, or just bring Asian American harassments topic into dialogue that can indirectly raise awareness between people.
Reference: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/nyregion/asian-hate-crimes.html
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/watch-live-how-to-address-the-surge-of-anti-asian-hate-crimes
https://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/hate
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/26/nyregion/asian-hate-crimes-attacks-ny.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/28/us/atlanta-spa-killings-robert-long.html