{"id":95669,"date":"2021-03-19T14:00:48","date_gmt":"2021-03-19T19:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.medill.northwestern.edu\/chicago\/?p=95669"},"modified":"2021-03-19T14:02:39","modified_gmt":"2021-03-19T19:02:39","slug":"asian-americans-fight-racism-and-struggle-to-redefine-their-identity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.medill.northwestern.edu\/chicago\/asian-americans-fight-racism-and-struggle-to-redefine-their-identity\/","title":{"rendered":"Asian Americans fight racism and struggle to redefine their identity"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Ester Wells
\n<\/strong>Medill Reports<\/em><\/p>\n

View this story as an Adobe Spark multimedia production.<\/a><\/p>\n

Russell Jeung stood in the checkout line at a sporting goods store in Alameda, California, and glanced over at his 16-year-old son Matthew standing beside him. It was mid-March in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, and they were buying a treadmill the day before California\u2019s shelter-in-place order would shut down all nonessential services in the state.<\/span><\/p>\n

The man in line in front of them, 6 feet away, turned around. He looked at Jeung. He looked at Matthew. The man said nothing but took several very deliberate steps away from them.<\/span><\/p>\n

Jeung glanced once more at Matthew. Yes, he had noticed it too.<\/span><\/p>\n

The next line over, a long string of people stood in an hourlong wait to buy ammunition.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI put those two scenes together,\u201d Jeung said. \u201cOne, people see us as a threat. They\u2019re shunning us. Two, people are arming themselves against a threat. And I realized, that\u2019s us. They\u2019re arming themselves against us. They see us as a foreign threat to America.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

One year later, on the opposite coast in New York City, Chris Kwok watched the news in horror as security footage played of a man <\/span>shoving a 52-year-old<\/span><\/a> Asian American woman to the ground outside a bakery in Queens \u2014 shoved her so violently that she was hospitalized and required 10 stitches.<\/span><\/p>\n

Kwok\u2019s elderly parents live one block away from that bakery.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI grew up in Flushing,\u201d said Kwok, a board member for the Asian American Bar Association of New York. \u201cI know that corner intimately well. My mom goes down to that very corner to shop. I\u2019ve walked it a thousand times. So when I was reading the reports of what happened there, it just felt closer and closer.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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Asian Americans have reported acts of discrimination in businesses such as restaurants, bakeries and grocery stores. Jeung said his mother, 94, feels unsafe outside of Chinese enclaves in her neighborhood. Forcing Asians to retreat to areas like Chinatowns to survive, he said, is de facto segregation. (Ester Wells\/Medill)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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For Asian Americans across the country, the uptick in blatant violence and assault \u2014 in spittings, shovings, slashings and killings \u2014 has bred a sense of intense fear and anger. In 2020 alone, more than 3,000 attacks on Asian Americans were reported to the national <\/span>Stop AAPI Hate<\/span><\/a> coalition. Jeung co-founded the organization in March 2020 to track incidents of discrimination and hate.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Stop AAPI Hate received more than 2,500 reports<\/a> of anti-Asian racism in the first five months since its launch in 2020. (Graphic produced by Ester Wells)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Chris Kwok describes the fear he faces for his own safety and the safety of his family. Women are more than twice as likely as men to report having experienced discrimination or acts of hate, according to a <\/span><\/i>2020 Stop AAPI Hate news release<\/span><\/i><\/a>.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nhttps:\/\/s3.amazonaws.com\/medill.wordpress.offload\/wp-media-folder-medill-reports-chicago\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2021\/03\/Chris-Kwok-Audio-Story.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n

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But the vicious racism underlying these hate crimes is nothing new. In fact, the past year has retraumatized some with a renewal of the ethnoviolence they endured in both their homeland and in the U.S.<\/span><\/p>\n

Nolan Zane, a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis, and director of the <\/span>Asian American Center on Disparities Research<\/span><\/a>, recalled the culture shock of moving to San Francisco at age 8. As a fourth-generation Chinese American who grew up in Asian-majority areas of Hawaii, he learned quickly that on the mainland, race relations were different. It was 1959, and anti-Japanese sentiment in the wake of World War II racked Asian American communities.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI can remember my brother and I getting into fights at school, getting taunted, getting chased by bigger kids in the neighborhood,\u201d Zane said. \u201cThere were times when we were essentially running for our lives.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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(Ester Wells\/Medill)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Jeung said he also feels as though he is reliving not just his own experiences with racism, but his parents and great-grandparents\u2019 trauma as well, from his family\u2019s fishing village in Monterey, California, being <\/span>burned down<\/span><\/a> in a devastating act of anti-Chinese hate three generations ago to his parents being forced by discriminatory <\/span>land covenants<\/span><\/a> to solicit the help of white people to buy their home.<\/span><\/p>\n

Both Jeung and Zane said, since then, racism has become more covert, often cloaked in microaggressions and implicit biases. But deep-rooted racist attitudes flared to the surface in 2020, fueled by former President Donald Trump\u2019s incendiary rhetoric around the COVID-19 virus. Zane stressed that Trump\u2019s use of terms like \u201c<\/span>Kung Flu<\/span><\/a>\u201d and \u201cChina virus\u201d effectively gave license to target and discriminate against Asian Americans, exploiting familiar scapegoating tactics that prey upon people\u2019s existing prejudices.<\/span><\/p>\n

The same prejudices that drove people to plainly deny Asians housing or jobs because of their ethnicity a generation ago drive people to make mocking insults and microaggressions now \u2014 and to overlook Asian American racial issues entirely.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Nolan Zane recounts one of many microaggressions he has experienced as an Asian American and says the rise in direct anti-Asian violence during COVID-19 is merely a manifestation of racist attitudes that have always existed.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nhttps:\/\/s3.amazonaws.com\/medill.wordpress.offload\/wp-media-folder-medill-reports-chicago\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2021\/03\/Nolan-Zane-Audio-Story.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n

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The dismissiveness with which Asian experiences are treated speaks to the broader <\/span>invisibility of Asian Americans<\/span><\/a> in the U.S., according to a reflection written by Keun-Joo Christine Pae, a religion\/ethics professor at Denison University. Anti-Asian racism, she argues, a persistent, pernicious force, is inextricably linked to the identity assigned of Asians in this country, which is one of perforated invisibility.<\/span><\/p>\n

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