Between March and August of 2020, Stop AAPI Hate received more than 2,583 reports of anti-Asian hate crimes nationwide, and these incidents go grossly underreported. The alarming jobless rate of Asian Americans and the high COVID-19 mortality rate among Pacific Islanders, which is double that of White and other Asian people, continue to be left out of mainstream narratives when discussing the disproportionate economic and health impacts of the pandemic on people of color.
The Model Minority Myth running deep in the American psyche is the problematic portrayal of Asians as a monolithic group of quiet, hard-working, politically silent, and therefore “well-behaved” immigrants, which was created in the ’60s to position Asians in opposition to the Black community, whose social justice activism was seen as a national threat to the status quo of White supremacy. Over the years, this politically motivated and fundamentally anti-Black myth has successfully achieved its purpose of driving a wedge between Asians and other people of color groups in America, while simultaneously erasing, making invisible, and even delegitimizing Asian communities’ real-life struggles by using the economic success of the few to defend the centuries-old unjust systems rooted in White supremacy, anti-Blackness, capitalism, and colonialism.
Today, White supremacy is acting again, pitting our communities against each other and banking on our collective amnesia about the conditions that have birthed the violence—the government’s utter failure to create any semblance of financial safety for the most marginalized in the midst of a pandemic; systemic racism permeating every nook and cranny of our medical system that bar access to adequate care for the most vulnerable front-line workers, most of whom are Black and Brown (don’t forget, Brown includes some AAPI folks, too); and the institutional robbery committed against the public while corporate billionaires became multibillionaires off a game only they are allowed to play. All of these unjust and exploitative conditions have led to such scarcity among the already marginalized, and our two traumatized communities, once again, find ourselves with our fists up ready to battle for survival, this time in Chinatown.
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