"After killings that followed a year of escalating hatred, Asian Americans ask why no one heeded the warnings"

“…America’s Asian population of more than 20 million people comes from richly diverse backgrounds, with Chinese Americans; Indian Americans; Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean and many other communities in the mix. Though each has its distinct qualities, they share a unifying bond – their common experience of discrimination and racism in the US stretching back to the Chinese Exclusion Act and Japanese internment.

 

“They also share the common feeling that when they speak out about the harassment they face, so often nobody is listening. There have been plenty of red lights flashing in the past year.

“Last month the group Stop AAPI Hate released a nationwide survey that recorded almost 4,000 incidents of verbal harassment and physical assault against Asian Americans since the pandemic began. That was a tiny fraction of the actual number, the authors said, but it still amounted to a 30-fold increase over the year before.

 

“Another stern warning was provided by Ted Lieu, a Democratic congressman from California, last July. He wrote to the then Trump-appointed attorney general, Bill Barr, pleading with him to ‘forcefully condemn anti-Asian bias.’

 

“The letter stated that ‘the dangers faced by the Asian American community are very real and deserve a strong and specific response by our government.’ It called on the Trump administration to engage in outreach of the sort that had been successfully used to counter rising xenophobic animosity in the wake of previous outbreaks of infectious disease as well as 9/11. Lieu did not receive a reply.

“Similar sentiments were expressed by Au, the state senator who had sounded that chillingly-prescient alarm just the day before the outrages. On Wednesday she spoke out again, mournfully reflecting that when she made her remarks on the senate floor she did not expect the alarm she sounded to materialize in such a horrendous fashion and so soon. But, then, she told the non-profit news outlet The 19th, ‘it has been building over the past year and there’s no reason to think that Georgia would be immune.’

“In Au’s analysis, the shootings mark a critical turning point for America as a whole and for the country’s communities of Asian descent. For the nation, this is the moment where everyone finally gets to see that Asian Americans do not live in a privileged bubble. They are not the ‘lucky ones’ encapsulated in the toxic stereotype of the ‘model minority.’ On the contrary, they are prone to racism and hatred just like any other disadvantaged US population.

“For Americans of Asian descent, Au said, this is the point at which they have to accept that they are on their own, with only the power of their own voices to depend upon. ‘We’re starting to realize that no one’s coming to save us, no one’s going to notice until we start making some noise.’

“That sense of a national and communal reckoning was widely articulated this week. Sung Yeon Choimorrow, the executive director of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, told the Guardian that ‘this is our worse fears realized. Many of us have lived this reality for a very long time.’

“The cry went up in Congress too, where a hearing on anti-Asian American prejudice and violence was held two days after the shooting. In an indication of how invisible Asian Americans and their troubles have been within the national consciousness, this was the first congressional debate on the subject in more than 30 years.

“Several Asian American political leaders seized the opportunity to bring the plight of their communities into the light. ‘We know that this day was coming,’ said Judy Chu, who chairs the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus. ‘The Asian American community has reached a crisis point that cannot be ignored.’

“Even then, 36 hours after a deadly attack on Asian American women, in the midst of a hearing on racism towards Americans of Asian descent, some participants could not restrain themselves from stoking the flames. In his brief contribution to the debate, Chip Roy, a Republican congressman from Texas, managed not only to glorify lynching but also went on a rant about the Chinese Communist party and its ‘Chi-Coms’ whom he blamed for the coronavirus pandemic…” (Ed Pilkington, The Guardian).