Trish Villanueva, center, of Seattle holds a sign with the hashtag "Stop AAPI hate" during the We Are Not Silent rally organized by the Asian American Pacific Islander Coalition Against Hate and Bias in Bellevue, Wash., on March 18.On Feb. 4, 2020, during the earliest days of the novel coronavirus, a middle school student in Los Angeles County was told by a classmate that he was a Covid-19 carrier and should “go back to China.
“It’s not unusual for communities and organizations to see needs, to sound the alarms, and government is often slow to act and respond.” The coalition wrote a letter to then-Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who is now the U.S. secretary of health and human services, to ask if his office would track these growing hate incidents against the community. When Becerra’s office said no and explained that it usually gets its data from local law enforcement per California state policy, the veteran activists decided to do it themselves.
Stop AAPI Hate launched on March 19, 2020, without funding. The co-founders were unsure if anyone would visit their website, but within the first week, there were an average of almost 100 self-reported hate incidents. In less than a year, they would go on to track nearly 4,000 instances and discovered disturbing trends, such as Asian American women reporting 2.3 times more than men.
“I am deeply grateful for the work of Stop AAPI Hate in collecting data about and galvanizing public awareness of anti-Asian racism,” said historian Jane Hong, author of “Opening the Gates to Asia.” “By providing Asian Americans with an accessible way to self-report, Stop AAPI Hate has also given us a community resource, a way to ‘speak back’ and register our outrage.”“For every incident that gets reported, then, there are many more that we don't hear about,” she said.
“I feel really responsible to steward the resources we’ve been given well and to stop anti-Asian hate,” Jeung said. “That’s for me a real heavy burden.” “It was hard to be detached and just purely analytical and intellectual about it,” Choi said. “I felt like they were tiny little cuts that were jabbing at me.”
NBC reporting is mostly about racist issues that break down any chance at unity, boycott NBC.
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