Anti-Asian Racism and COVID-19


This morning I read this article titled "Anti-Asian Harassment Is Surging. Can Ads and Hashtags Help? With more than 2,000 incidents and little action from the federal government, efforts to curtail pandemic-related racism have fallen to P.S.A.s and social media campaigns."

I am livid.

I am afraid.

When this began back in March (and still in a recent tweet) with the words of the current US president calling COVID-19 the "China Virus," I was more worried about being harassed and possibly harmed due to my being AAPI than I was contracting the virus. When I brought this up during an on-line gathering at my current workplace, not one person offered a word of comfort and not one person followed up with an email saying, "Hey, I heard what you said and I'm so sorry..."

When colleges and universities like to tout that they are a "family" and a "community," they forget that there are those of us that have not been welcomed into the family, and if we are, we're more like the scapegoat. We don't really belong and it's on us to make it different rather than the family system.

I'm not sure what the coming weeks will hold as I ready myself to return to campus. What I am doing is the self-care necessary to mitigate the racism, the hatred, and the micro- and macro-aggressions of being a BIPOC born and raised in this country.

Popular posts from this blog

Institutional Racism and Higher Education

Image
There's so much happening that it's hard to start, as it has been two years since I've written. From March 2020 to June 2020, much of the US (and the world) was shut down to the COVID-19 pandemic. It's strange to read my past postings and to find myself here - isolated most of the time and hesitant to leave the confines of my home due to this highly contagious virus which to date has killed over 500,000 and has infected over 14 million , and disproportionately impacted BIPOC . Then in May, our nation was roiled once again in racial violence with the murder of George Floyd by police officers in Minnesota. As a result, many companies, organizations, and institutions published statements of support and a commitment to change. What's disheartening is that the murders of Black men, women, boys and girls have been happening for time out of mind, and in recent memory have been viewed and heard in social media for at least a decade. Four years ago I walked i...
Read more

Not What I Expected

The other day I went to my niece's cello recital.  I'm guessing that your mental image may be much like mine in that the students who were performing that day will be mostly Asian American and perhaps mostly female.  It's not that I want it to be that way but media in the US has propagated the image of cute Asian kids who were prodigies playing violins like Antonio Vivaldi . The funny thing is that though I tried to learn the violin at the age of eight, I lasted about a week to the consternation of my mom. It was more about the expense of buying the violin than the disappointment of a supposed " Tiger Mom ." So, imagine my surprise when I walked into the room and saw only three Asian kids out of a dozen and mostly boys who were poised and ready to play their cellos.  It was a good reminder that stereotypes don't really hold up as much as our society likes to believe that they do.  Next time when someone says that stereotypes have a "grain of truth"...
Read more

Lost & Found

This morning I had an argument with my BF and it did not go well. No surprise. Also no surprise that the argument started at point A and ended up at point Z or what I'd call "planet mars." My poor BF, he had no idea what hit him (metaphorically of course) but neither did I. By the end of the argument, I found myself standing alone in the middle of the living room with tears threatening to stream from my eyes, and eventually they did. The feelings that arose were a powerful potion of regret, anger, sadness and perplexity as to my teaching experience in China in 92-93. As some people know, I was interrogated in China in 1993 and my visa was unexpectedly cancelled because I allegedly broke the law. Later, Chinese officials admitted that they "may have made a mistake" which is pretty much an outright confession for having done something wrong and being sorry for it. For years I always believed that what I set out to do in China came out of a sincere desire to...
Read more