The #StopAsianHate Movement and the Reproduction of Inequality

Trish Villanueva, of Seattle, at a We Are Not Silent rally organized by the Asian American Pacific Islander Coalition Against Hate and Bias in Bellevue, Wash., on March 18.Jason Redmond / AFP - Getty Images file

In the wake of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, which is believed to have originated from Wuhan, China, many Asian Americans reported an increase in racially motivated harassment and violence. In 2020, Stop AAPI Hate – a U.S.-based AAPI coalition – was founded to track incidents of hate crimes against and demand justice  for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI). Research specifically looking at the races of anti-Asian perpetrators found that most tend to be by white men and women. Data also shows that more than half of these reported incidents have taken place in public spaces, with a majority of these occurrences including explicit and interpersonal-level anti-Asian slurs, symbols, and actions. Additionally, reports suggest that the movement especially soared on social media after hashtags like “#stopAsianHate” and “#stopAAPIHate” were used to pushback against hate crimes and online anti-Asian rhetoric popularized by Donald Trump.

Recurring Dynamics of Othering

One cannot divorce present-day anti-Asian attitudes from a long and racist history of anti-Asian stereotypes perpetuated in US society and not consider how this contributes to a recurring dynamic of othering for many Asian Americans despite being one of the fastest-growing racial and immigrant groups and having increased political and economic influence. By exploring the most recent dynamic of othering through stigmatization, scholars have theorized that COVID-19 presented an avenue for individual-level and institutional-level racism and xenophobia to perpetuate, resulting in anti-Asian hate crimes during the pandemic. Here we can better understand how a racial and ethnic inequality is reproduced through an us vs them ideology and can also (and often does) lead to real-world consequences – such as being perceived as a threat or inherently foreign to the dominant society. It has been suggested that as a result the relationship between police and Asian Americans communities has been negatively impacted, with the primary factors being disappointment in police inaction to anti-Asian hate crimes and fear over increased police aggression towards Asian-Americans – especially those who are elderly and mentally-ill.

Growing AAPI Movement to End Police Brutality

Much like black and brown communities, AAPI’s are consciously aware of the harsh reality that the criminal legal system in US society is inherently racist and that police control over marginalized communities impacts them directly, however unlike black and brown communities, calls for police reform within AAPI communities regarding issues of police brutality and the criminal legal system are newly salient. This broken system of policing often enables police brutality by rationalizing and justifying violence and misconduct and as a result police officers (who mostly comprise of white men) become immune to accountability. There is no doubt that there is a growing AAPI movement to address and end police brutality but to date, large-scale data on police violence against AAPIs is largely unavailable and understudied. Despite this, we can conclude that social movements often serve as a site for cross-racial and cross-ethnic solidarity among minority groups. Similar to the impact of #BlackLivesMatter, the #StopAsianHate movement also works to bring attention to racism and inequalities faced by marginalized communities at the hands of police.