Eight days was all it took for a new website to uncover a glut of racism being directed at Asian Americans. Just over a week after its launch, the new site Stop AAPI Hate received more than 650 reports of racist acts, most of them targeting the Asian American community.
Russell Jeung, a professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University, launched the new site precisely because he and his colleagues were noticing increases in bullying but they lacked hard data to back it up. So they began combing through news reports about coronavirus that included the words discrimination or xenophobia in them.
"We found hundreds of articles about policies that people thought were xenophobic, economic boycotts of Asian businesses and then later on about interactions that Asian Americans were having where people were bullying, taunting, harassing and now attacking," Jeung told NPR.
Jeung and his colleagues then took that information to California state lawmakers with a request to start tracking the numbers. But since the state lacked the capacity to do so, they created their own site as a hub where people could report incidences.
"It just was launched last week and we've been getting over 100 reports every day," says Jeung, ranging from name-calling and verbal harassment to "maybe three times a day, we have people actually being physically attacked, assaulted, being hit or punched, pushed on subways."
Donald Trump helped foment this toxic environment for Asian Americans by insisting on calling the pathogen ravaging the world the "Chinese virus" and also insisting it wasn't racist to do so. At the White House press conference Thursday, Trump briefly attempted to alleviate some of the tension he has caused. "We have to protect our Asian Americans," he said. But when he was asked how, Trump offered only, "Well, I don't know. All I know is Asian Americans in our country are doing fantastically well. I am very close to them as you know."
How hard would it have been to say something like: We're all in this together and targeting people by race is not only unacceptable, it won't help anything.
Too hard, apparently. Instead, "Well, I don't know" was the best Trump could muster because he's just that useless and inept.
