News & Updates

  • White Supremacist Propaganda Spikes in 2020

    Posted by · August 17, 2021 9:13 AM

    Propaganda from groups such as Patriot Front, New Jersey European Heritage Association, Folks Front, and the Nationalist Social Club

     

    ADL’s Center on Extremism (COE) tracked a near-doubling of white supremacist propaganda efforts in 2020, which included the distribution of racist, antisemitic and anti-LGBTQ fliers, stickers, banners and posters. The 2020 data shows a huge increase of incidents from the previous year, with a total of 5,125 cases reported (averaging more than 14 incidents per day), compared to 2,724 in 2019. This is the highest number of white supremacist propaganda incidents ADL has ever recorded. The number of propaganda incidents on college campuses dropped by more than half, perhaps due to COVID restrictions.

    Propaganda gives white supremacists the ability to maximize media and online attention, while limiting the risk of individual exposure, negative media coverage, arrests and public backlash that often accompanies more public events. The barrage of propaganda, which overwhelmingly features veiled white supremacist language with a patriotic slant, is an effort to normalize white supremacists’ message and bolster recruitment efforts while targeting minority groups including Jews, Blacks, Muslims, non-white immigrants, and the LGBTQ community.

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  • Hate crime laws won’t actually prevent anti-Asian hate crimes

    Posted by · July 15, 2021 4:22 PM

    By centering policing, they do little to address the root cause.

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    The largest federal response to a surge in attacks against Asian Americans since the start of the pandemic has been Congress’s Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act. The law, passed last month, designates a specific Justice Department official to focus on reviewing such incidents and provides grants to police departments so they can establish hotlines for hate crime reporting.

    According to multiple experts, however, hate crime laws, like the one Congress just passed, serve a symbolic purpose but don’t really do much to deter people from committing hate crimes.

    In fact, much of the conversation around hate crimes has centered on what happens after an attack has already taken place. There’s been a focus on the collection of hate crime data, calls for more policing or security in various communities, and an examination of the types of penalties that perpetrators should face.

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  • ‘No Vaccine for Racism’: Asian New Yorkers Still Live in Fear of Attacks

    Posted by · July 14, 2021 5:52 PM

    New York Police Department patrols aimed at stopping anti-Asian violence have been cut back even as anxiety lingers.

    A protest in April against anti-Asian attacks. The violence has continued in New York as the city reopens and more visitors roam the streets.

    The surveillance video captures a brutal scene: A woman is thrown down a flight of stairs and smacks into the subway platform violently enough to fracture a bone in her face. It was May 28, and the woman, in her 60s, was among dozens of people attacked during a spate of anti-Asian violence this year.

    It may not even have been the first such attack by the suspect, John Chappell, a law enforcement official said. Two months earlier, Mr. Chappell, who had dozens of prior arrests, had been suspected of lighting an Asian woman’s backpack on fire, the official said. He was released just days after his arrest in May.

    Six months into a series of brutal attacks on people of Asian descent across the city, Mr. Chappell’s case underscores the challenges the police and prosecutors have faced in both preventing the violence and punishing those responsible.

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  • California saw staggering rise in hate crimes against Asians in 2020

    Posted by · July 01, 2021 6:07 PM

    People take part in a Stop Asian Hate rally in San Jose, California.

    Anti-Asian crimes more than doubled while hate crimes against Black people increased by 87%, state reports reveal

    Hate crimes against Asians in California more than doubled in 2020, as part of an overall 31% surge in hate-based crimes, according to a pair of new reports by California’s attorney general.

    The increase in anti-Asian crimes was fueled by rhetoric, including that of Donald Trump, blaming Asian communities for the spread of Covid-19 in the United States, the reports said.

    “For too many, 2020 wasn’t just about a deadly virus, it was about an epidemic of hate,” said the attorney general, Rob Bonta. “The facts here are clear: there was a surge in anti-Asian violence correlated with the words of leaders who sought to divide us when we were at our most vulnerable.”

    While the reports highlighted the stunning increase in often-overlooked violence against Asians, hate crimes against Black people in California increased by 87% as well, and made up the largest number of events counted in the report – 456 of the total 1,330 hate crimes reported in 2020. The number of anti-Asian crimes jumped from 43 in 2019 to 89 in 2020 – a total increase of 107%.

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  • Covid 'hate crimes' against Asian Americans on rise

    Posted by · May 21, 2021 6:04 PM

    Two people holding stop Asian hate signs

    US President Joe Biden has signed a law that aims to address a rising number of anti-Asian attacks. What's behind the hatred?

    An elderly Thai immigrant dies after being shoved to the ground. A Filipino-American is slashed in the face with a box cutter. A Chinese woman is slapped and then set on fire. Eight people are killed in a shooting rampage across three Asian spas in one night.

    These are just examples of recent violent attacks on Asian Americans, part of a surge in abuse since the start of the pandemic a year ago.

    From being spat on and verbally harassed to incidents of physical assault, there have been thousands of reported cases in recent months.

    Advocates and activists say these are hate crimes, and often linked to rhetoric that blames Asian people for the spread of Covid-19.

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  • Virulent Hate + Reports: Anti-Asian Racism in 2020

    Posted by · May 17, 2021 7:40 PM

    To understand trends in coronavirus-related, anti-Asian racism, the Virulent Hate Project at the University of Michigan reviewed 4,337 news articles published between January 1 and December 31, 2020. We identified 1,023 incidents of anti-Asian racism, which included 679 incidents of anti-Asian harassment and vandalism and 344 incidents of stigmatizing and discriminatory statements, images, policies, and proposals. Asian and Asian American people of all ages, ethnicities, and genders experienced racist harassment, but women and people of Chinese descent experienced most of the attacks.

    Anti-Asian incidents peaked in March and April 2020, and harassment occurred across the United States, with incidents happening most frequently in businesses, on public transit, and on streets. In the incidents for which there were reported details about the individuals who were the source of anti-Asian harassment, discrimination, and stigmatization, the majority of the offenders were identified as male, white, and, in the case of politicians, affiliated with the Republican Party.

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  • Stop AAPI Hate National Report

    Posted by · March 31, 2021 6:15 PM

    This report covers the 6,603 incident reports to Stop AAPI Hate from March 19, 2020 to March 31, 2021.1 The number of hate incidents reported to our center increased significantly from 3,795 to 6,603 during March 2021. These new reports include incidents that took place in both 2020 and 2021.

    Types of Discrimination

    •  Verbal harassment (65.2%) and shunning (18.1%) — i.e., the deliberate avoidance of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders — continue to make up the two largest proportions of the total incidents reported.
    • Physical assault (12.6%) comprises the third largest category of total reported incidents.
    • Civil rights violations — e.g., workplace discrimination, refusal of service and being barred from transportation — account for 10.3% of t
    • Online harassment makes up 7.3% of total incidents.

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