The AAPI (Asian American Pacific Islander) hate crimes which spiked at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic continue to occur all over the country. The victims are usually the most vulnerable – the elderly or women. When racial hate crimes escalated all over the US, some talents like Sandra Oh took to the streets to denounce the incidents while actress Kelly Tran and singer H.E.R. spoke up and made their voices heard.

“Most hate incidents don’t rise to the level of criminality but can be similarly traumatic,” pointed out Cynthia Choi, co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate and co-executive director of the Chinese for Affirmative Action.

In the spring of 2021, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association donated $75,000 to the Stop AAPI Hate organization which was created in response to the escalation of xenophobia and bigotry.

“At the start of the pandemic, other Asian American advocates and I became deeply concerned there would be a new wave of anti-Asian hate,” Choi said, recounting how she got involved in the cause in our email interview.

“Our former president was using terms like ‘Kung Flu’ and ‘China Virus,’ and our community was being scapegoated, harassed, discriminated against, and attacked. Of course, I know that Anti-Asian racism is a long-standing issue, and the intensity of racism we saw beginning with COVID-19 was a tipping point for me to act.”

The Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council (A3PCON), Chinese for Affirmative Action (CAA), and the Asian American Studies Department of San Francisco State University launched the Stop AAPI Hate coalition. The coalition tracks and responds to incidents of hate, violence, harassment, discrimination, shunning, and child bullying against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States.

According to a 2020 survey,76% of Asian Americans polled expressed worry about experiencing hate crimes, harassment, and discrimination because of COVID-19. Since March 2020, Stop AAPI Hate has received more than 3,800 reports of incidents of hate.

As xenophobia rose in the wake of COVID-19, and despite AAPI groups and individuals sounding the alarm over the rise in hate and harassment, these dangers were largely ignored by society. Then, in Atlanta, the lives of eight people, which included six women of Asian descent, were violently ended.

Choi, the daughter of immigrants and a mother of three, has over 30 years of experience working in the nonprofit sector and over 20 years serving in leadership positions. She has led local, state, and national community-based organizations and initiatives working on a range of issues from reproductive justice, gender violence, violence prevention, immigrant/refugee rights, and environmental justice issues. She is deeply committed to creating a world that is socially just.

Along with Stop AAPI Hate co-founders, Choi has been recognized and commended for her work to advance racial equity. Most recently, Politico recognized Choi as one of 2021’s top 40 influencers on race and politics. She was profiled in the New York Times “10 Women Leaving Their Mark on the World.” She was also named one of the Time 100 List of Most Influential People in 2021, Bloomberg 50: The People and Ideas That Defined Global Business in 2021, and a Webby Social Justice Movement of the Year recipient.

Below are excerpts from our interview.

What are your responsibilities at Stop AAPI Hate and how did you get involved?

I am one of the co-founders of Stop AAPI Hate, alongside my colleagues Manjusha Kulkarni and Dr. Russell Jeung. At the start of the pandemic, most Americans were laser-focused on protecting themselves and their family from the virus. But Asian Americans were concerned with protecting themselves from something even more widespread – hate and discrimination towards our community spurred by pandemic-blaming scapegoating.

Our neighbors, colleagues, friends, and family members became the victims of hate incidents. I remember hearing from a colleague that her co-worker was verbally harassed on the street by a person who blamed her for COVID-19, spat on her, and then threatened to push her in front of a moving bus. To this day, she continues to experience anxiety when she’s alone and out in public. This was happening around us but these incidents weren’t being broadly reported.

We created Stop AAPI Hate to document and respond to racism against our community – which is continuing to happen more than two years after the start of the pandemic. Our experiences are so often invisibilized and we don’t want that to continue to happen.

Have you personally experienced racial harassment?

One evening while I was sitting on an uncrowded BART train, I noticed a man staring at me. I avoided his gaze and scanned the train for other passengers. He began making vulgar gestures so I quickly got off the train well before my actual stop. But he then followed me and yelled, “I know you want some of this, you China bitch!”

This experience, which only lasted a few minutes, felt like an eternity and left me shaken and terrified. And it’s just one of many harassment incidents I’ve experienced over the years.

In this incident, and in the incidents that many other women have reported to Stop AAPI Hate, we’re not just experiencing racism but also sexual harassment.

This connection between racism, misogyny, and the highly violent and public attacks against Asian American women — including the Atlanta Spa Shootings in which six Asian American women were murdered — is resonating with AAPI women across the country right now and is bringing up painful experiences.

Any proposed solutions to combat the rise in hate that our community is facing must address the intersectional hate Asian American women are experiencing.

In your report, most of the hate incidents are directed toward the Chinese, Koreans, and Filipinos.

The sad truth is that the number of hate incidents that we receive at any point is actually a huge undercount of what is taking place. These numbers are just the tip of the iceberg – they are based on what people proactively report.

After COVID-19, there was a focus on experiences faced by Chinese in our country and that motivated a number of them to report. But we also know, through our other data projects, that a huge number of incidents take place against Sikh and South Asian community members and we are working on outreach to increase reporting.

We know historically that Asian American communities across the board are subject to hate incidents when one community is scapegoated. Vincent Chin, who was Chinese, was murdered in the 1980s during the rise of resentment directed toward Japanese Americans.

We encourage all members of the AAPI community to report to our site. These hate incident reports allow us to raise awareness about the racism and discrimination our community is facing and help us better understand how to protect our community so we can push legislators to take concrete action. If you have experienced a hate incident, please report it to our site.

The report also shows that most incidents of hate crimes against Asians occurred in California and New York, two of the most densely populated states in the country where you can see various ethnicities.

We believe that we have the most hate incidents reported from California and New York because the states are densely populated and have large AAPI communities. We also have larger media markets and attention to this issue which is the main way people hear about our reporting center.

What are your suggestions on how to avoid and/or lessen these hate incidents? And what organizations are you reaching out to help you?

The vast majority of harmful hate incidents that AAPI community members experience on a daily basis are non-criminal. And hate incidents require a different set of solutions than hate crimes.

Our reporting shows that the most effective solutions to fighting racism are education equity, which includes adding Asian American Studies to K-12 curriculums, investing in community-driven safety solutions, and expanding civil rights by protecting the AAPI community from harassment in public spaces.

There’s also a major role that media and entertainment companies and leaders can play as well. We’ve had the opportunity to partner with a few organizations – but we’d welcome the chance to work more deeply with entertainment industry leaders to discuss the power of representation – to prevent AAPIs from being invisibilized and othered and also to share our stories. We hope to continue this work with other industry organizations in the future.

Overall, we are working to build a multi-racial and multi-ethnic movement. And we’ve been extremely thankful for the support of non-AAPI activists and citizens who attended rallies, donated to AAPI organizations, and helped spread awareness about the hate the AAPI community is facing.

The report also shows that the 25-35 age group is reporting most of the incidents and not the most targeted ones which are 60 years old and older. What steps are you taking to encourage the older groups to report hate incidents happening to them or their neighbors?

We know that Asian American elders have been highly impacted by anti-Asian hate. In May, we published a deep-dive report in partnership with AARP that analyzed the 824 hate incidents elders reported to our site. While we know this number is an undercount, likely due to technological limitations, we learned a lot from this report.

We found that community-based organizations are best positioned to support Asian American elders in the short term and that elders need culturally and linguistically responsive programming from local, state, and federal government agencies to address the structural roots that cause fear, isolation, and mental health challenges they are facing.

Community-led organizations like The San Francisco Self Help for the Elderly, the Center for Pan Asian Community Services (CPACS) in the greater Atlanta area, the Chinese Information, and Service Center (CISC) in Seattle and the Korean Community Services of Metropolitan New York are working hard to support Asian American elders. Learn more about their work here.

In terms of hands-on work, what are you teaching victims on how to protect themselves, respond, report, and avoid being victims of hate?

Our website provides AAPI communities and allies, community-based organizations, educators, and more with resources designed to help them navigate anti-AAPI hate and advocate for their rights, including safety tips for those experiencing or witnessing hate and our reporting resource center.

We use our platform to engage with AAPI communities and allies to collectively advocate for our rights through sustainable policy solutions led by the needs and voices of AAPI communities, including education, community investment, and civil rights.

Together, our goal is to ensure that our elected officials are held accountable so that we can focus on preventing incidents from occurring in the first place and create safer communities.

And while providing our community supporters with resources is important, we are doubling down on our legislative advocacy efforts to shift the burden of stopping anti-AAPI hate and protecting our community from individuals to our government. Anti-AAPI hate is a systemic issue that requires systemic solutions.

After two years, there is still much to be done as we still see an increase in Asian hate incidents and crimes. What do you think should be done?

Most news coverage is focused on hate crimes but our latest report finds that AAPIs are much more likely to be the targets of a non-criminal incident like harassment. This is a problem because, in many cases, it’s driving legislators to look to the police to help address anti-AAPI hate when the most effective solutions to fighting racism and discrimination are investing in the AAPI community and educating people about the AAPI community.

Our task now is to advocate for solutions to stop anti-AAPI hate that really work and prevent these from happening in the first place: increased protections from public harassment, investments in community-based safety solutions, and the adoption of Asian American Studies in K-12 curriculums, to help protect our community from racism and discrimination.

And as for crimes, we need to invest in holistic, community-based approaches to support victims and survivors.

How can Hollywood and the media help in preventing Asian hate crimes and racist incidents?

All stories we tell have an impact – television shows and movies shape how people see the world. And they can help a person understand experiences and perspectives they’ve never experienced themselves. AAPI characters in the past have been caricatures, leading to prejudice against our community and inspiring hate.

Well-rounded, holistic stories about AAPI people and the issues our community is facing, including experiences with anti-AAPI hate, and about community-centered solutions to hate like victim services, preventative measures, and cross-racial solidarity efforts will be important in stemming the racism and discrimination we face.

 

If you were given a chance to change laws, what would it be to help prevent Asian hate incidents?

We’ve been proud to work with legislators to introduce No Place for Hate California, which if passed, would help stop the harassment of AAPIs and protect our civil rights in the places where it happens: in spaces open and accessible to the public.

We’re continuing to advocate for the passage of No Place for Hate California and encourage other state legislators to introduce similar legislation. For more information about the No Place for Hate Campaign, visit our website.

We are also working with San Francisco State University’s Asian American Research Initiative (AARI), and other community partners to advocate for the passage of Asian American Studies legislation at the state level.

And we’re continuing to push for increased investments in community-based organizations to prevent hate incidents from happening and to provide support to victims and survivors when it does.