Recap: Columbia’s conversation on violence against Asian Americans
Recap: Columbia’s conversation on violence against Asian Americans Emma Cho / Zoom Screenshot
“It has caught a lot of people by surprise.”
The surge in anti-Asian hate crimes in major U.S. cities has started an important and long-awaited conversation for this country. In an event hosted by the Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights on April 14, Ellen Wu, associate professor of history and director of Asian American studies at Indiana University Bloomington, and Jiayang Fan, a staff writer for The New Yorker, examined the United States’ long-standing history of violence and discrimination against Asians.
For decades, the model minority myth has kept Asian Americans out of important equity conversations and held individuals back in school, at work and in life.
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It has been over a month since 21-year-old white American Robert Aaron Long shot dead eight people at three massage parlours in Cherokee County and Atlanta city on March 16, 2021. Six of them were women of Asian descent but despite Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms stating that the mass shooting should be seen as a hate crime, Long has not been charged with this yet.
The Atlanta incident brought world attention to the xenophobic attacks Asians in America have been facing, both verbal and physical, ever since the coronavirus pandemic started. Studies have indicated that attacks on Asians were significantly higher in 2020 than in 2019, aggravated by the repeated use of “China virus” and “Kung Flu” by former US President Donald Trump and his right-wing supporters.