Forty years after Vincent Chin, a Chinese American man, was scapegoated and beaten to death by two white men in Detroit who were angered over the loss of American jobs to Japanese companies during an economic downturn, hate incidents against Asian Americans continue to surge, a new study released Wednesday found.
Between March 2020 and March 2022, more than 11,400 hate incidents against Asian Americans have been reported across the United States, according to a report by Stop AAPI Hate, a national coalition that tracks such incidents and advocates for combatting hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.
The findings signaled a persistent rise in harassment, verbal abuse and hate speech that have plagued Asian communities since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2o21, the group identified more than 9,000 hate incidents in the pandemic’s first year. A separate study by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism found that hate crimes against Asian Americans rose 339% nationally between 2020 and 2021.
Two-thirds of the incidents reported to Stop AAPI Hate between March 2020 and 2022 involved some form of verbal or written harassment, and two in five incidents occurred in public spaces. Women were twice as likely to report hate incidents as men. Physical assaults accounted for 17% of incidents, and nearly one in 10 occurred on public transit.
A national survey conducted by Stop AAPI Hate and Edelman Data & Intelligence found that one in five Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders experienced a hate incident in the past two years. It also showed that those experiences led to a rise in fear around those incidents: nearly half of respondents reported feeling depression and anxiety.
California, which has the largest population of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the country, accounted for the highest number of reported incidents, with more than 4,000, followed by New York and Washington state.
In response to the escalating reports of anti-Asian violence and anti-Asian rhetoric, Joe Biden signed the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act in March 2021, which incentivizes police departments to improve data collection on hate incidents and develop better practices to prevent and respond to hate crimes. But critics told the Guardian that the law fails to get to the root cause of the violence and that it could lead to over-policing in communities.
The report’s authors called on public officials to extend civil rights protections to cover incidents that occur on public transit and businesses, expand ethnic studies courses on Asian American history, and “invest in community-based programs to support the healing of victims and survivors, and to prevent violence before it starts”.
“Even as people move on past the Covid-19 pandemic, AAPIs continue to be harassed because of their race,” Manjusha Kulkarni, co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate and executive director of AAPI Equity Alliance, said in a statement. “The AAPI community is tired of being afraid. We want solutions that actually make a difference and focus on prevention.”