Racism toward Asian Americans goes back a long time. The current xenophobia is built on deeply rooted racism toward Asian Americans but I don’t think we would have seen the spike in anti-Asian bias without a pretty strong foundation rooted in the ‘forever foreigner’ stereotype,” says University of Maryland Asian American studies professor Janelle Wong. “I think this surge is the rhetoric that political leaders have been using. Although the uncertainty of the outbreak - coupled with the former president’s rhetoric - has amplified it, this prejudice is rooted in longstanding biases toward Asian Americans that have persisted since some of the earliest immigrants came to the US generations ago. The broader uptick in racism, however, isn’t just fueled by the pandemic. This rise in anti-Asian harassment has occurred as the US continues to grapple with Covid-19, and it follows months of xenophobic rhetoric by former President Donald Trump, who frequently used racist names for the virus and associated it with Asian Americans. The FBI predicts attacks on Asian Americans will increase as coronavirus infections grow. “It makes it much harder to go to the grocery store, to take a walk, to be outside our homes.” Kyle Navarro, a school nurse, says he was unlocking his bicycle when an older white man called him a racial slur and spat at him in San Francisco. “So many of us have experienced it, sometimes for the first time in our lives,” says Manjusha Kulkarni, the executive director of the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council, a group that helped set up this tracker. We don’t want you here!’”Īmong these attacks, there are notable patterns: Women were more likely than men to say they were targeted, several assaults involved children, and harassment was more likely to occur at retail stores and pharmacies since people have been limiting their activities during the pandemic. “She was yelling out, ‘You’re the infection. “I was in line at the pharmacy when a woman approached me and sprayed Lysol all over me,” one account reads. The reports to Stop AAPI Hate describe other forms of harassment, too, such as getting spat on at a restaurant, verbally attacked at the park and denied service at different establishments. And this past March, a restaurant in Yakima, Washington, was vandalized with racist language. Last winter, a 16-year-old student in the San Fernando Valley was beaten so badly by his classmates that he had to go to the emergency room. In February, a 27-year-old Korean American man was assaulted in Los Angeles and targeted with racial slurs. These incidents - which include everything from getting shunned at work to physical assaults - have been wide-ranging. And more recently, a wave of violent attacks against elderly people has renewed focus on this issue. “To tell someone, ‘I’m going to blanketly discriminate and not take any pleading from you no matter who’s in the pleading and no matter what party’s in the pleading,’ without looking in the four corners of the petition, you’re going to say, ‘I’m not going to take it.’ That’s blanket discrimination and that’s implicit bias,” Plain explained.Harassment toward Asian Americans has spiked in the last year: According to Stop AAPI Hate, an organization that’s been tracking these reports, over 2,800 incidents were documented in 2020. In an email obtained by the 9News Investigators, the Justice of the Peace said as of April 8, she would recuse her office from any future cases with Plain’s firm. Once he brought the racial slur to the attention of the Justice of the Peace, he said Batieste told him they would no longer work with him. Plain said he’s run into a number of problems with the office, including delays with carrying out those evictions. That process has to be approved through the Justice of the Peace. He has to get someone from the Constable’s Office to come out and oversee those evictions. Plain works with the Ward 2 District 3 Justice of the Peace to carry out evictions in EBR.
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