As awareness of anti-Asian hate is on the rise, members of Asian communities in North Carolina are looking to gain visibility for their voices and needs.
Mario Benevente, a member of the Korean community in Fayetteville, said there were inaccurate perceptions of Asian Americans before the pandemic. One such myth portrays the group as a model minority that doesn t complain about prejudices because its members are successful, he said. I think more and more with what we saw over the time that COVID really started coming in and the name that they were kind of calling it, and then certainly, with the most recent hyper-violent stuff that happened in Atlanta, and elsewhere in California, it s all part of the same sort of ugliness, it s all come from the same place,