03/25/2021
Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Yong Ae Yue, Delania Ashley Yuan, Paul Andre Michels, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng.
These are the names of the victims of the Atlanta shooting.
Six of those killed by this violent act of white supremacy were Asian women. This tragic loss of life is not an isolated event, but an embodiment of systemic racism, hate, and racialized misogyny faced by the Asian American community. As a political student group, we condemn this violence and the white supremacist motives that have enabled this brutality.
This tragedy highlights an escalating pattern of anti-Asian hate catalyzed by the pandemic, hateful political rhetoric, and racially-charged language, including the referral of COVID19 as the “Kung-Flu” or “Chinese Virus”.
In the last year, 3,795 anti-Asian incidents have been reported to Stop AAPI Hate, yet the estimated number remains much higher. The Pew Research Center reports that 58% of Asian Americans feel they experience racism more commonly now than before the pandemic, and more than 30% have reported experiencing slurs or jokes because of their race or ethnicity.
There is so much pain in this—specifically, the pain of longstanding racism that has been reinvigorated. Asian hate crimes are by no means a new phenomenon, as our collective history, a history largely ignored by mainstream discourse, is tainted with state-sanctioned efforts to mark Asians as “alien” or carriers of a contagion.
At the same time, anti-Asian racism is connected to a broader system of white supremacy that benefits from divisions between communities of color. As a student group, we must work with other marginalized communities to dismantle this to dismantle this oppressive system for the benefit of all oppressed people.
Sources:
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/07/01/many-black-and-asian-americans-say-they-have-experienced-discrimination-amid-the-covid-19-outbreak/
https://ca.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/asian-americans-full-film-video-gallery/asian-americans/
