Reflecting on a Year of Hate
2020 was a challenging year - navigating the covid-unknown amidst BLM protests, an economic recession, and unraveling racist, slimy politicians… yet people of Asian and Asian-American descent were largely left out of the conversation. Trump’s racist remarks regarding the pandemic fueled already existing tensions, but this isn’t only Trump’s doing. As historic as the protests last year were, in my opinion, not enough was said about everyone else also experiencing racism, aggression, violence - including Asian and Asian Americans and many others left out of the conversation, including poor Americans who identify as white. As long as we “the people” continue to follow the status quo, which includes inaction and being pitted against each other, we won’t see that these oppressive constructs function to permeate much more profoundly than our skin. - Thank you to my dear friends who have come forth to share their difficult experiences. - andrea
The following true accounts are not my own.
Reflecting on a Year of Hate
Sydney, 23, WASHINGTON
I remember watching my career disappear overnight and watching with dread as the old stereotypes about Asians – that we’re diseased, that we’re dirty, that despite being born in the US and growing up here we’re still foreigners, that we don’t belong here – were stoked by politicians and the media. I noticed people began crossing the street to avoid me, as if COVID-19 was genetically inherent and had been lying dormant in my veins just waiting for this moment. Until masks were widely adapted, it sometimes felt safer to be in public without one, even though it meant risking my own health. I have had racist things yelled at me a couple of times in the grocery store or muttered when I walked by. After one particularly bad incident, when an elderly man got in my face at the store and screamed at me to get the fuck away from him, I had an anxiety attack for the first time in my life.
Friends’ reactions to these incidents were mostly “What? No way, that’s fucked up. That happened here?”. At times I wanted to yell, of course! Politicians are holding press conferences where they eat Chinese food to show the public that it’s safe, as if somehow the people making it are inherently diseased. Media outlets big and small are plastering mask-wearing Asian-Americans across every COVID-19 article they write. The current president is calling it the China Virus and the Kung Flu. And you think none of that would have an effect on how people who look like me get treated in the street? Yes, this is a liberal city with a large Asian population, but that doesn’t make us immune from being treated like an ‘other’, or negate the long history of anti-Chinese sentiment in these very places. Cities up and down the West Coast violently expelled their Asian populations in the late 1800s, beginning with the Chinese and moving on to other ethnic groups, after deciding that the Exclusion Act wasn’t enough.
As the pandemic carried on, I watched as the increasing hate attacks and violence towards us went ignored, and our experiences were erased yet again. I am glad that now, one year later, these attacks are finally beginning to make headlines, and federal officials are issuing statements against the violence, but I want to ask: what took you so long to pay attention? Why are our claims of racism not taken seriously?
Vanessa, 25, OKLAHOMA
The biggest thing that has changed for me is that I’m afraid to go out in public without my white husband. Even when I am out with him, I feel like an outsider who is only tolerated due to my association with him.
Wesley, 23, NEW YORK/WASHINGTON
After weeks of insisting that masks were ineffective, the CDC had, by late March, reversed their stance entirely. My Filipino-American roommate and I had bunkered down in our tiny apartment in NYC, spending our days in never-ending Zoom classes and completing our last semester of college virtually. We had only gone outside to scour the city for groceries and the ever-elusive toilet paper—but an anxiety set in for simple trips as things were getting worse. New York’s positive test cases were increasing by the thousands every day, and this was when testing was still widely unavailable for the general public (unless you were coughing up a lung and then some).
Even with the danger, and new CDC policy, it wasn’t a hard decision for us to forego the masks.
This wasn’t part of some large anti-masking movement that had yet to become mainstream, and it definitely wasn’t because we didn’t believe in the science — Asian people (our parents, elders) were among the first to adopt and advocate for the practice. But those essential trips for bum-wiping material weren’t just anxiety inducing because of COVID; it was also the looks (and words) that we encountered. Fear, anger, disgust. People yelling intelligible things at you from across the street. And for us, that sentiment was multiplied tenfold when we put on a mask. This decision, believe it or not, was made in mind for our own safety.
Why? The reason was rather familiar for us: to be Asian-American is to always be an outsider, even when born and raised in the States. Every Asian person, at one point or another, has been asked where they are really from. When mask wearing was still a relatively new practice, the novelty of it only served to accentuate that outsider stereotype. When I wore my mask, there was an immediate association with my Asian identity — and naturally, the so-called China flu. People immediately assumed I was sick and contagious. It certainly didn’t help that racially-motivated violence and discrimination was everywhere; in March 2020 alone: an Asian man doused with Febreze on the subway; numerous reports of Asians getting coughed or spit on; a 16-year-old getting attacked by bullies and sent to the hospital—and it has only gotten worse since then. Now, most attacks target the elderly.
As mask wearing became more prevalent (and political), the racial connection slowly faded — I wear a mask now everywhere I go. But it was not the first time that we had tried our best to appear “less Asian”, and it certainly won’t be the last. And unfortunately, the racial connection between Asians and COVID hasn’t gone anywhere.
Resources:
The Making of Asian America, Erika Lee