News & Updates

  • The Stop Asian Hate movement is at a crossroads

    Posted by · April 11, 2022 10:15 AM

    Vox - Brianna Cea, a 24-year-old voting rights organizer based in Brooklyn, felt a painful sense of recognition after the Atlanta shootings last March.

    These shootings — which occurred at three Atlanta-area spas — took the lives of eight people, including six Asian women. The victims included Daoyou Feng, 44, Hyun Jung Grant, 51, Suncha Kim, 69, Paul Andre Michels, 54, Soon Chung Park, 74, Xiaojie “Emily” Tan, 49, Yong Ae Yue, 63, and Delaina Ashley Yaun, 33.

    “Seeing people who look like me being targeted and people not recognizing that they were clearly targeted because of what they looked like was hard,” Cea, who identifies as Thai, Korean, and Chinese American, told Vox.

    Initially, both police and the media appeared to accept claims that the shootings, carried out by a white man, were not racially motivated, even though the attacks focused on Asian-run businesses, and the rationale he gave was that it was a way to reduce sexual “temptation,” a statement that speaks to the longstanding objectification of Asian women. The fact that people wouldn’t acknowledge the racial aspect of the attacks only added to the trauma of the shootings, Cea emphasizes.

    “To me it was compounding that feeling of constantly feeling invisible, reckoning with that in the media and in the workplace,” says Cea, who serves as the president of the Asian American advocacy group OCA-New York and the executive director of GenVote. “In the face of this tragedy, you still go back to this narrative of erasure.”

    For Cea and a number of other Asian Americans, Atlanta was a breaking point amid two years of growing anti-Asian violence that took the form of brutal attacks on older people, vandalization of businesses, and assaults on the street. Fueled by xenophobic sentiment tied to the coronavirus’s origins in Wuhan, China, and former President Donald Trump’s use of racist terms like “China Virus,” anti-Asian harassment soared in 2020 and 2021. According to Stop AAPI Hate, an organization tracking instances of violence and verbal abuse, there were more than 10,900 incidents reported between March 2020 and December 2021.

    The devastation of the Atlanta shootings compelled many Asian Americans to speak out in a new way. In the weeks that followed, rallies erupted across more than 50 cities, and hundreds of thousands of people participated in trainings, petitions, and crowdfunding efforts to support victims and condemn anti-Asian violence. Cea was among those to host a vigil in New York City, which sought to memorialize the victims. The use of hashtags like #StopAsianHate and #StopAAPIHate took off on Twitter and Instagram as well.

    What began as a tagline on social media ultimately evolved into a national movement, spurring a reckoning across different industries, prompting new policies at the federal and state levels and transforming broader awareness of anti-Asian racism.

    Approaching the one-year anniversary of the Atlanta attacks, the Stop Asian Hate movement is at a crossroads.

    While it’s had significant achievements — including shepherding the passage of a federal hate crimes law, emboldening a new generation of Asian American activists and sparking a dialogue about anti-Asian discrimination — it also faces major questions of where to go next.

    Organizers view the policies that have passed as insufficient — and worry that the focus on policing, which some have taken in response to anti-Asian violence, could harm communities of color. As more horrific attacks make headlines, many are still searching for new ways to address the biases that are tied to such violence as well.

    “It can’t just be about raising awareness and visibility,” says Turner Willman, the social media director for the progressive advocacy group 18MillionRising. “It needs to be coupled with structural change.”

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  • Nearly 240 anti-LGBTQ bills filed in 2022 so far

    Posted by · April 04, 2022 9:31 AM

    NBC - State lawmakers have proposed a record 238 bills that would limit the rights of LGBTQ Americans this year — or more than three per day — with about half of them targeting transgender people specifically. 

    Nearly 670 anti-LGBTQ bills have been filed since 2018, according to an NBC News analysis of data from the American Civil Liberties Union and LGBTQ advocacy group Freedom for All Americans, with nearly all of the country’s 50 state legislatures all having weighed at least one bill. 

    Throughout that time, the annual number of anti-LGBTQ bills filed has skyrocketed from 41 bills in 2018 to 238 bills in less than three months of 2022. And this year’s historic tally quickly follows what some advocates had labeled the “worst year in recent history for LGBTQ state legislative attacks,” when 191 bills were proposed last year.

    The slate of legislation includes measures that would restrict LGBTQ issues in school curriculums, permit religious exemptions to discriminate against LGBTQ people and limit trans people’s ability to play sports, use bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity and receive gender-affirming health care.

    Proponents of these bills say they’re about protecting children, parental rights, religious freedom or a combination of these. Opponents, however, contend they’re discriminatory and are more about scoring political points with conservative voters than protecting constituents. 

    “It’s important for people to pause and think about what is happening — especially in the health care context — because what we’re seeing is that the state should have the authority to declare a population of people so undesirable that their medical care that they need to survive becomes a crime,” Chase Strangio, the deputy director for transgender justice at the ACLU LGBT & HIV Project, said. “What more terrifying intrusion of the state could there be?”

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  • Biden signs bill making former internment camp a national historic site

    Posted by · March 28, 2022 11:00 AM

    The Hill - President Biden on Friday signed a bill that designates an internment camp where Japanese Americans were held during World War II as a national historic site. 

    Biden signed bipartisan legislation adding the ​​Amache site in Colorado to the National Park System on Friday, according to an Interior Department statement. 

    More than 10,000 people, most of whom were U.S. citizens, were detained at the camp from 1942 through 1945. It was also known as the Granada Relocation Center and was one of ten sites where Japanese Americans were held during the war. 

    Today, the site includes a cemetery, a monument and reconstructed and rehabilitated structures from when it was an internment camp. 

    “This moment is a testament to the Amache survivors, descendants, and advocates who never stopped pushing to get this done,” said Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), one of the bill’s sponsors, in a statement. “Thanks to their work, future generations will now have the opportunity to learn about what happened at Amache and the Americans who were interned there.

    The legislation passed unanimously through the Senate last month after it was briefly held up by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah). Lee did not object to the specific site, but rather did not want the federal government to own more land, his office told The Associated Press at the time

    The legislation passed the House last year in a 416-2 vote.

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  • Robinson: Film highlights the fight for LGBTQ+ rights in Silicon Valley

    Posted by · March 24, 2022 8:20 AM

    If you went back to 1978 and said gay people would be able to get married, there would be openly gay elected officials or that gay and transgender people would serve as cabinet members in the United States of America, nobody would have believed it. In fact, many states still outlawed the private lives of individuals in our nation.

    But today, most people rarely arch an eyebrow at the idea of a free and equal LGBTQ+ community. In historical terms, the change has been meteoric.

    Now, a film specifically about the history of the LGBTQ+ community is playing on Comcast and may soon appear elsewhere around the nation.

    “Queer Silicon Valley” premiered on Feb. 25 at the Hammer Theatre Center in downtown San Jose. Produced and directed by former Santa Clara County Supervisor Ken Yeager, the film chronicles the rise of the LGBTQ+ community and its fight for equality in our valley.

    From gay bars to drag queen contests, through the AIDS pandemic to parades and real political and economic power. The fight for equality was never easy.

    There are many heroes in the movie, but the work of the Bay Area Municipal Elections Committee (BAYMEC), the political organization created by Wiggsy Sivertsen and Yeager, takes on tremendous significance. A single politician showed up to the group’s first fundraiser—former Councilmember Iola Williams. Today, an endorsement by BAYMEC is a heavily sought and actively promoted symbol of pride for all those seeking elected office.

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  • Yale sociologist Phil Gorski on the threat of white Christian nationalism

    Posted by · March 21, 2022 8:25 AM

    Yale - The January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol was a hodgepodge of conflicting symbols.

    The protestors erected a large wooden cross and gallows. Some waved Rebel battle flags; others the Stars and Stripes. Some carried signs declaring that “Jesus Saves” while others wore sweatshirts bearing white supremacist slogans. The men who invaded the Senate chamber — some clad in body armor, one wearing a horned headdress — invoked Christ’s name as they bowed heads and prayed.

    To many, the clashing imagery was one of many bewildering and unsettling aspects of that chaotic day. To Yale sociologist Philip Gorski, the scene was instantly recognizable as an extreme form of white Christian nationalism.

    The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy (Oxford University Press),” a new book Gorski coauthored with sociologist Samuel L. Perry of the University of Oklahoma, is a primer that relies on historical sources and survey data to explain the ideology, trace its origins and history, and describe the threat it poses to the United States.

    Gorski, professor of sociology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, recently spoke with Yale News about the roots of today’s white Christian nationalism and the threat it poses to democracy. The interview has been edited and condensed.

    What is white Christian nationalism?

    Philip Gorski: First, it is an ideology based on a story about America that’s developed over three centuries. It reveres the myth that the country was founded as a Christian nation by white Christians and that its laws and institutions are based on Protestant Christianity. White Christian nationalists believe that the country is divinely favored and has been given the mission to spread religion, freedom, and civilization. They see this mission and the values they cherish as under threat from the growing presence of non-whites, non-Christians, and immigrants in the United States. This is one point at which white Christian nationalism overlaps with the Make America Great American narrative. It’s the view that somebody has corrupted the country or is trying to take it away. White Christian nationalists want to take it back.

     Where are the roots of today’s white Christian nationalism?

    Gorski: By digging into the historical source materials, you can see this perspective taking shape in the 1690s, which is the title of one of the book’s chapters. In a way, you can trace it back even further, because this idea of a white Christian nation does have roots in a certain understanding of the Bible that weaves three old stories into a new story.

    One is this idea of a Promised Land. God bestows a Promised Land on the Israelites. They go to that land and find the Amalekites inhabiting it. They conquered the land. This is how a lot of the early settlers of New England, many of them Puritan, understood their situation. Quite literally, they saw themselves, like the Israelites, as a chosen people. North America was the new Promised Land. The Native Americans were the new Amalekites and the Puritans felt entitled to take their land.

    Another strand is the End Times story, which today is viewed as the Second Coming of Jesus in the most literal sense. It’s a belief that Jesus is going to come down to Earth for a final showdown between good and evil. And the Christians in America will be on the side of good.

    These two stories describe the “Christian nationalism” in white Christian nationalism. Whiteness came into play when some white Americans tried to develop a justification for slavery. The traditional justification for slavery, theologically speaking, had been that heathens and captives of war could be enslaved. Initially, this is how slavery in America was justified, but a couple of generations later, the justification didn’t really work. You can’t argue that a young boy of African descent born in the Virginia Colony in 1690 was a captive of war. His mother might have converted to Christianity, in which case he’s not a “heathen.” A new justification had to be embedded in the culture, which gave rise to the notorious idea of the curse of Ham. Because Ham had seen his father Noah drunk and naked, God placed a mark on Ham’s son Canaan and condemned his offspring to slavery. Christians used this to justify enslaving people of African descent.

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  • NYC man charged with hate crimes in attacks on 7 Asian women

    Posted by · March 17, 2022 8:32 AM

    A 28-year-old homeless man has been charged with hate crimes after a string of unprovoked attacks on women of Asian descent in New York City, police said.

    Steven Zajonc was arrested Wednesday in connection with assaults on seven women in different Manhattan neighborhoods over a two-hour period on Sunday.

    The victims were all women of Asian descent ranging in age from 19 to 57, police said. Most were punched in the face; one was shoved to the ground. Two were treated at hospitals.

    Zajonc was arrested on seven counts each of assault as a hate crime, attempted assault as a hate crime, aggravated harassment and harassment. It wasn't clear whether he had an attorney who could comment on the charges.

    Zajonc was apprehended at a midtown Manhattan library after two library guards recognized him from surveillance videos of the crime scenes and alerted police, officials with the New York Public Library said.

    According to an NYPL news release, Roshanta Williams, a guard at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation library branch, alerted senior guard Elmirel Cephas on Wednesday that a regular patron of the library looked like the suspect police were seeking.

    Cephas later spotted Zajonc walking into the library and called 911, the library officials said. Zajonc locked himself in a single-stall bathroom, and the guards monitored the area until police arrived, the officials said.

    Library officials said Zajonc, who used a Manhattan drop-in center as his address, had often locked himself in the bathroom in the past.

    “Our guards have the extremely challenging job, especially under recent circumstances, of keeping our branches safe and welcoming for all New Yorkers,” Iris Weinshall, the NYPL’s chief operating officer, said. “They do this extremely well every day, but today went above and beyond to help the NYPD keep our streets safer.”

    The attacks Sunday were part of an alarming pattern of violence directed at people of Asian descent in New York, including the killings of Christina Yuna Lee, who was stabbed to death in her apartment last month, and Michelle Alyssa Go, who was shoved in front of a subway train in Times Square in January. Neither Lee's nor Go's killing has been ruled a hate crime at this time.

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  • A year after Atlanta spa shootings, misogynistic racism still endangers Asian American women

    Posted by · March 14, 2022 10:25 AM

    by Sung Yeon Choimorrow

    Atlanta - Winter was heaving its last gasps that day. The air in Chicago hovered just above freezing as my family and I finished dinner. We had just put my daughter to bed when I saw a text from a friend with a news headline and a question: “Have you seen this?”

    I read as far as eight shooting victims before my eyes darted to the photo underneath: Sullen police officers and bright yellow tape surrounding the neon lights of Gold Spa. Immediately, I knew: An evening of quiet had turned into a day of infamy.

    A shooter in Atlanta had gone on a rampage at three massage parlors. One year ago this week, he murdered eight people – six of them Asian American women from China and Korea.

    As the head of a national organization for Asian American and Pacific Islander women and girls, I knew my colleagues and I had to act. Immediately, I went back and forth with our staff, especially those in Atlanta, to understand what our members needed. At the same time, we had to speak up for our community, so we released a statement. Before I knew it, I was caught in a whirlwind of media requests and coverage, giving more than 50 interviews in just four days.

    All the while, I dealt with the same conflux of emotions as millions of Asian American women. Rage and guilt. Grief and revulsion. Devastation for our community.

    We have been objectified for centuries

    American culture has hypersexualized and objectified Asian women as long as we’ve lived here.

    Afong Moy, the first recorded Chinese woman brought to the United States, was placed on exotic display. Our nation's first immigration law, the Page Act of 1875, stereotyped East Asian women as prostitutes to bar them from the country. The U.S. military involvement in World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War exacerbated this prejudice, forcing many Asian women into sex work and perpetuating the racist, sexist mythos that Asian women are temptresses or sexual servants in the American consciousness.

    This sordid history has imposed upon Asian American women a dangerous present.

    Our organization just finished a first-of-its-kind survey of Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s safety. The results were damning: 74% of AAPI women say they experienced racism or discrimination in the previous 12 months. More than half identify a stranger as the perpetrator, and 47% report experiencing racism and discrimination in public space.

    We live at the intersection of racism and misogyny

    Asian American women are not just reviled for our race or for our gender. We are vilified for both – for the ways our race and gender intertwine and strengthen us.

    Yet in almost every interview I did after the Atlanta spa shootings, pundits and journalists were shocked when I highlighted the intersection of racism and misogyny. With the exception of Asian American women and some other female journalists, most reporters elided the fact that the intended targets weren’t just Asian people who happened to be women, or women who happened to be Asian: They were both.

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  • U.S. White Supremacist Propaganda Remained at Historic Levels in 2021, With 27 Percent Rise in Antisemitic Messaging

    Posted by · March 07, 2022 8:32 AM

    ADL - White supremacist propaganda, which allows extremist groups to disseminate hateful messages and gain attention with little risk of public exposure, has been on the rise for several years. In 2021, the overall numbers were down slightly, but paired with a 27 percent increase in antisemitic content and messaging.

    Since 2017, the ADL Center on Extremism has closely tracked white supremacist propaganda incidents including the use of racist and antisemitic fliers, stickers, banners and posters, as well as the use of stenciled graffiti.

    Propaganda campaigns let white supremacists maximize media and online attention while limiting the risk of individual exposure, negative media coverage, arrests and public backlash that often accompanies more public activities. By using propaganda to spread hate, a small number of people can have an outsized impact, giving the appearance of larger numbers and affecting entire communities.

    While propaganda numbers remain historically high, the 2021 data shows a five percent drop in incidents from the previous year, with a total of 4,851 cases reported, compared to 5,125 in 2020. Year over year, the number of propaganda incidents on college campuses dropped 23 percent, from 303 to 232, the lowest since ADL began tracking incidents in 2017.

    Despite the drop in overall incidents, 2021 saw a 27 percent increase of antisemitic propaganda distributions, rising from 277 incidents in 2020 to 352 incidents in 2021.

    The high number of antisemitic propaganda incidents have continued in 2022. In January and February, the virulently antisemitic Goyim Defense League dropped antisemitic leaflets on college campuses and across entire neighborhoods, with dozens of incidents reported in at least 15 states.

    In January-December 2021, propaganda was reported  in every state except Hawaii, with the highest levels of activity (from most to least active) in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Texas, Massachusetts, Washington, Maryland and New York. ADL’s H.E.A.T. Map provides a visual representation of the propaganda efforts by geographic location and can be used to track other specific trends.

    In 2021, white supremacists used propaganda to spread hate, promote themselves, attack their perceived enemies and present themselves as victims of an “anti-white” society. In some cases, they used current events to legitimize their hateful views. Shortly after the insurrection against the U.S. Capitol, white supremacists created propaganda pieces presenting January 6 insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt as a martyr for their cause. Similarly, they threw their support behind Kyle Rittenhouse, creating propaganda claiming “Kyle was right.” And, in the wake of the deadly holiday parade attack in Waukesha, Wisconsin, white supremacists leveraged the tragedy by sowing racist and antisemitic conspiracy theories on the ground and online.

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  • Asian woman attacked last year in New York by man with rock has died, family says

    Posted by · March 01, 2022 11:44 AM

    CNN - The Asian woman who was attacked last year in Queens by a man with a rock died Monday, her family announced on a GoFundMe page dedicated to her.

    In November, GuiYing Ma, 61, was sweeping the sidewalk of an empty property in Jackson Heights when a man allegedly struck her in the head repeatedly with a large rock, injuring her face and head, police said at the time.
    A day after the attack, the New York Police Department arrested a 33-year-old man in connection with the crime. That man was later identified as Elisaul Perez.
    Perez faces three felony charges, including a charge of assault with intent to disfigure and dismember and a charge of assault with intent to seriously injure someone with a weapon. He also faces a charge of criminal possession of a weapon.
    Perez is scheduled to appear in court on April 12 for another hearing. Queens Law Associates' Attorney David Strachan, who represents Perez, declined to comment.
    Yihung Hsieh, the owner of the Jackson Heights property, set up a GoFundMe page to help cover Ma's medical expenses from the attack. He told CNN Ma had to have surgery to relieve pressure on her brain.
    Ma died at 9:29 p.m. on February 22 at NYC Health & Hospitals/Elmhurst due to complications from blunt impact head injury, Hsieh said in a post on the GoFundMe.
    "The attack permanently damaged the right side of Mrs. Ma's brain. But the love between Mrs. Ma and her husband Mr. Zhanxin Gao remained," a statement on the GoFundMe page read.
    In early February -- about 10 weeks after the attack -- Ma woke up from her coma, the GoFundMe said. She was "able to raise her hand in response to Mr. Gao even though she could not speak still."
    When she woke up, Ma was able to move her right arm and right leg, CNN affiliate WABC reported.
    The NYPD's Hate Crimes Task Force was investigating the crime in November. CNN has reached out to the NYPD Monday for the latest on that investigation.
    The NYPD created an Asian Hate Crime Task Force after an increase in attacks on Asian Americans during the Covid-19 pandemic.
    Between March 19, 2020, and September 30, 2021, 10,370 hate incidents against Asian American and Pacific Islander people across the nation were reported to Stop Hate AAPI, a center that tracks reports of racism and discrimination against Asian Americans.
  • Anti-Asian hate crimes increased 339 percent nationwide last year

    Posted by · February 22, 2022 7:48 AM

    The report also points out that Black Americans remained the most targeted group in terms of hate crimes.

    NBC - New research finds that hate crimes targeting the Asian American community have reached some unprecedented levels. 

    The compilation of hate crime data, published by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, revealed that anti-Asian hate crime increased by 339 percent last year compared to the year before, with New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and other cities surpassing their record numbers in 2020.

    The significant surge is part of an overall 11 percent increase in suspected hate crimes reported to police across a dozen of America’s largest cities. 

    The report also found that Black Americans remained the most targeted group across most cities. In New York, the Jewish community reported the most hate crimes last year, with researchers, in part, linking increases to the three-week Gaza War in May. In Chicago, gay men were the most targeted. In terms of location, Los Angeles “recorded the most hate crimes of any U.S. city this century” in 2021 alone, with New York coming in just behind it. 

    John C. Yang, the president and executive director of the nonprofit civil rights group Asian Americans Advancing Justice — AAJC, said that as the Asian American community weathers pandemic-fueled racism, the data prove that other groups deal with their own forms of hate, stressing that in times like this, “solidarity benefits us all.” 

    “We must bring attention to the hate that impacts all communities,” Yang said. “The support of our allies representing diverse communities of color and diverse faith communities has meant a great deal as our Asian American communities have been under attack. All of our diverse communities, including LGBTQ+ communities, have experienced hate, and there is a profound but tragic solidarity in that.”

    According to the data, the surge in reported anti-Asian hate crimes is significantly higher than it was in 2020, when they increased by 124 percent compared to the year before. New York City had a particularly drastic rise, from 30 to 133 anti-Asian hate crimes, a 343 percent increase. San Francisco also experienced an alarming jump, from nine to 60 crimes, a 567 percent increase. And Los Angeles had a similarly sizable hike of 173 percent. 

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