Recently there has been a lot of news coverage on assaults and even murders of Asian people in America. For this diary entry, I wanted to mention a few cases that I came across that were considered hate crimes. The first news that I heard about was about a Thai man who died after an attack in San Fransisco. “Mr. Vicha, an 84-year-old retired auditor from Thailand, was violently slammed to the ground by a man who charged into him at full speed” (Fuller). Another incident that I came across on Instagram was also in San Francisco, which involved an elderly woman, an elderly man, and a white man who appears to be in his 30s. Both of the Asian elderlies were struck in the face causing an injury to one of their necks, and wounds on their eye and cheeks. The most recent case is about a mass shooting in Atlanta’s Asian massage parlors that killed 8 people, 6 were Asian women. Systemic injustice and racism go hand in hand. These hate crimes are just two examples of racists people being fueled and acting on ignorance and anger. “‘Like African Americans and American Indians, Asian Americans were considered racially inferior and unfit for U.S. citizenship for most of our country’s history,’ and the pandemic capitalized on that history, Lee said. ‘As the virus has spread across the country, so has anti-Asian racism,’ Lee said, partly because ‘some members of the media and some of our highest elected officials have deliberately and consistently used racist language tying Covid-19 to Asians. This has included phrases like the ‘Chinese virus’ and ‘Wuhan virus’ and telling Americans to ‘blame China’ for the pandemic.’” (Gregorian, 2021) To some, this may not view this as systemic but I think that the reactions from some people show how it is. A law enforcement officer said that Robert Long’s decision to kill 8 people strangely was because he had a “really bad day,” and he cannot yet say if spa shootings were hate crimes. It was later discovered that this specific officer purchased and publicly praised a shirt saying, “COVID-19 imported from chy-na.” There are people in the justice system that empathize more with suspects than the victims. This system isn’t gonna change if people in authority are on the same side of the oppressors or even sometimes are the oppressors.
In our discussions from week 5, we talked about implicit bias and subalterns. “Implicit bias refers to the attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner” (Kirwan Institute). Implicit bias has to do with the actions behind systemic injustices because systemic is defined as something that is fixed, and structured. In order for someone to commit a hate crime, they would already have to have an understanding about a certain group, that caused them to act out. The term subaltern refers to those who are lacking in the eyes of the beholder, whether that may be socioeconomic, race, and etc. In the times that we are living in, it seems like it is gradually becoming worse and people are bold about expressing their racist/prejudiced way of thinking. So much so that, having the saying “go back to your own country” became a common thing to say for people who aren’t white in appearance.
Gregorian, D. (2021, March 18). ‘There is a systemic problem HERE’: Asian American LAWMAKERS testify about surge in violence. Retrieved March 20, 2021, from https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/there-systemic-problem-here-asian-american-lawmakers-testify-about-surge-n1261436
Fuller, T. (2021, February 27). He came from Thailand to care for Family. then came a brutal attack. Retrieved March 20, 2021, from https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/27/us/asian-american-hate-crimes.html
(Video) https://cbsloc.al/3rZFIIJ