Why You Can't Be Anti-Racist Without Supporting #EndAsianHate
When we talk about intersectional feminism, it’s made abundantly clear that there’s no room for exclusions – intersectional feminism is for all women. So why does it seem like such a wild idea that perhaps when it comes to being anti-racist, it means being anti all racism?
Last summer highlighted police brutality and systemic racism on a global scale, in an unprecedented way thanks to the world being forcibly slowed down by the coronavirus. The fight for justice for the likes of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, urging everyone from brands to government bodies to address the issue of white supremacy and take action against it. Black Lives Matter – they will always matter – and the fight to protect Black communities should be something that we collectively work towards until the current system is dismantled and real change takes place. But we must not be ignorant to the fact that the Black community are not the only ones in need of our support.
Since the start of the pandemic, hate crimes against Asian communities have gone through the roof, with the likes of Donald Trump’s dangerous COVID blame game emboldening racists and encouraging their disgusting behaviours. American nonprofit, Stop AAPI Hate, says that there have been more than 3,000 hate crimes against Asian Americans since the beginning of the pandemic. But the US are not the only ones, despite us considering it as an issue for the Americans to deal with (much like the initial attitudes towards anti-Blackness). I understand it can be tempting to pass blame and have somewhere else to point the finger, especially following the tragic events in Atlanta, where a white supremacist murdered eight people, six of whom were women of Asian descent. Of course, this horrific terrorist attack filled with hate towards the Asian community, deserves to be condemned, and the victims deserve to be mourned, but we must not let this divert us away from the goings on in the UK and everywhere else outside of the US.
According to End the Virus of Racism, an advocacy group, hate crimes towards East and South East Asian (ESEA) people have tripled in the UK since the beginning of the pandemic. University lecturer Peng Wang recently went viral online after a picture of his bloodied face circulated after he was attacked in Southampton. At the beginning of the pandemic, 23 year-old Singaporean student Jonathan Mok required facial reconstructive surgery after he was assaulted. The list goes on.
Abuse against these communities is nothing new, stemming back generations, with prejudice against them only being exacerbated by the pandemic’s seeming Chinese origin and the horrendous conspiracy theories that followed. This was of course spurred on by the UK’s media (which has hellishly problematic in a multitude of ways); a petition was started by Viv Yau, Mai-anh Peterson, Amy Phung, Charley Wong and Karlie Wu (now founders of grassroots movement besea.n), calling for outlets to stop using ESEA-related imagery when reporting COVID-19. (It’s been revealed that a third of images used in the British media have opted to use them – despite the fact that COVID-19 can impact absolutely anyone from any ethnic background.)
The government are yet to actively support the ESEA community, with anti-Asian sentiment and memes previously being shared by Members of Parliament, and racist comments being shared in the same room as Labor MP Sarah Owen, who is British Chinese. With such little parliamentary interest, systemic racism is reinforced and very little reassurance is given to the communities affected.
The ESEA community should not have to wait for those in charge to properly condemn prejudice and racism. The ESEA community should not have to simply grin and bear it whilst they remain under constant threat for no reason. The ESEA community should not be expected to remain silent whilst the rest of the world is allowed to forget about them and act like nothing’s happened. So if your anti-racism work doesn’t fight for Asian communities, is it really anti-racist? #EndAsianHate
Image credit: Dia Dipasupil / Getty Images
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