Recent attacks and killings are on the rise, some seemingly hate crimes, others motivated by divisive political rhetoric. Anti-immigration has become a hot-button issue in the upcoming presidential election as Donald Trump’s campaign attacks Asians with dangerous consequences
By Kenneth Tiven
Random violence against Asian-Americans is not a new phenomenon. The stereotyped perception of Asian-Americans as smaller and less likely to fight back has been noted by activists and researchers. Asian and Pacific Islander women are extra vulnerable to racism, sexism and violence because of race and gender stereotypes.
This explains some of the senseless incidents of the past few years, most recently the murder of a 29-year-old Indian student in Indiana that shocked both nations. Four months ago, Varun Raj Pucha, a Computer Science student at Valparaiso University, was in the gym sitting in a massage chair. For no apparent reason, a 26-year-old man stabbed him in the brain. The suspect is jailed and awaiting trial. Earlier, Vivek Saini, a 25-year-old was killed by Julian Faulkner, a 53-year-old drug addict, who beat him to death at a convenience store in Georgia, where Saini worked.
A majority of Asian-Americans say violence against them is increasing, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. Most Asian-Americans also worry about being threatened or attacked, with a third saying they have changed their daily routine because of these concerns. Overall, about six in ten Asian adults (63%) say violence against Asian-Americans in the US is increasing. In an open-ended question that accompanied the 2021 survey, a majority of those who perceived rising violence against Asian-Americans attributed it to former president Donald Trump, racism, Covid-19 and its impact on the nation, scapegoating and blaming Asian people for the pandemic.
America and the world struggled emotionally with the pandemic and behaviours shifted, visible in statistics related to attacks on Asians in America. In three decades before the pandemic, researchers identified 210 anti-Asian violent attacks in the USA, an average of 8.1% per year. But during 2020 and 2021, there were 163 attacks, averaging 81.5 a year, or more than 11 times the previous average.
Increases in mass shootings are another indicator of societal tension, exaggerated in America because gun ownership is poorly regulated. For many, it is a fetish they can publicly enjoy. To be clear, forms of anti-Asian-American racism include physical harassment, verbal harassment, avoidance, spitting and coughing, business downturn, vandalism and graffiti, online and social media harassment, and barring from business. Researchers found local examples across the USA, England, Australia, Canada, and other countries.
I am the great-grandson of immigrants to America who arrived in the late 19th century, learned English, worked, raised families, sent children to college, and lived long enough to see my generation arrive as World War II ended. My father and his brothers helped America defeat fascism, launch a long period of global growth, and end much of the colonialism that marked history until the mid-20th century. By no measure is the global situation perfect, but is increasingly fragile now in Europe, the Middle East and, yes, right here at home in the United States of America.
“Part of American culture has been minimizing and pretending discrimination against Asian-Americans can’t and does not exist,” says Ayesha Ghazi Edwin, a councilwoman in Ann Arbor, Michigan, involved in immigration issues. “Being a brown person who went through 9/11, I know what it feels like to go outside and have people look at you a little longer, wondering if you’re ‘to blame’ for some international conflict or a pandemic that has nothing to do with you. I mourned for our Asian-American community that day,” and after the shooting at an Indianapolis FedEx facility that killed eight people, including four Sikh Americans, one month later.
Almost everyone in America is descended from immigrants. For example, Donald Trump’s mother was an illegal immigrant from Scotland, his grandfather came from Germany. Yet, today Trump’s clearly racist, dehumanizing speech on immigration is what a demagogue employs in the quest for votes to be president. Again! As if the 2016-2020 Trump experience wasn’t enough to hint at the fragility of democracy.
Speaking to CPAC, a conservative organization that appeals to people with marginal interest in democracy, Donald Trump fed the crowd what it wanted to believe was the “truth,” starting with the immigration issue: As usual, Trump hugged an American flag and painted an impossibly grim picture of an America overrun by bloodshed, chaos, and violent crime. “A vote for Trump is your ticket back to freedom, it’s your passport out of tyranny and it’s your only escape.”
Trump’s signature attitude is malevolence: “First and most urgent action is sealing of the border, stopping the invasion… send Joe Biden’s illegal aliens back home”. Demonizing immigrants (despite employing and marrying them) he said: “They’re coming from Asia, they’re coming from the Middle East, coming from all over the world, coming from Africa, and we’re not going to stand for it … They’re destroying our country.” It’s all about blame not betterment through plans and policy. He promised to organize the biggest deportation in American history. “It’s not a nice thing to say and I hate to say it and those clowns in the media will say: ‘Oh, he’s so mean.’ No, they’re killing our people. They’re killing our country. We have no choice. We have languages coming into our country … they have languages that nobody in this country has ever heard of. It’s a horrible thing.”
This writer hears Trumpian ‘self-projection,’ when he says: “Joe Biden is a threat to democracy,” Adolf Hitler used this language to demonize politicians and various population segments to become Germany’s dictator. Trump, demonstrating extreme audacity, compared himself to Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, an anti-Putin leader killed in an Arctic prison: “I stand before you today not only as your past and hopefully future president, but as a proud political dissident. I am a dissident.” The crowd whooped and applauded everything, some shaking their fists and chanting: “We love Trump! We love Trump!”
Within MAGA Republicans today, subtlety is a vice. They are now saying the quiet parts out loud on multiple issues of freedom, individual rights, and democracy. Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez said: “Not only do they want to go after reproductive freedom, they are going after IVF and contraception. They also want to control what they call recreational sex. This is so clearly a patriarchal theocracy that has embodied itself in the DNA of an entire political party.” More than 40 years ago, white racists in the Republican Party recognized that segregation was a losing issue, but that joining with the Christians opposed to abortion would provide the votes needed to win in many state elections. Anti-abortion legislation —a theocracy issue—is the essential philosophical component of MAGA politicians.
Anti-Asian attitudes played a shameful role in the internment of Japanese American citizens at the start of World War II. Around 1,26,000 people were sent to camps outside California. People unfairly lost homes and businesses. It took until the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 for surviving Japanese-Americans to receive financial reparations and a formal apology by President Reagan for their incarceration during World War II.
Today is another crisis point in American political behaviour. Asian-Americans are not alone in experiencing hate incidents. From January 2021 through early March 2022, the latest survey showed 19% of multiracial adults, 17% of black adults, 16% of Asian-American adults, 15% of Native American adults, 14% of Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander adults, and 13% of Latino American adults reported hate incidents or hate crimes, in comparison to only 6% of white adults. There are no statistics for unreported incidents.
—The writer has worked in senior positions at The Washington Post, NBC, ABC and CNN and also consults for several Indian channels