racism|Stigmatizing and scapegoating: how Asian human rights sacrificed in a COVID-wreaked America America|of|rights|Asian|human|Act|an

The Asian community in the US has been in collective trauma following an alarming increase in racial discrimination and hate crimes against them. While the slaying of six Asian women in Atlanta in March was the most tragic of those, racially motivated violence has been happening all the time, taking place in multiple forms and jeopardizing every age group of this community.
A 2019 Pew report showed that about 76% of Asian Americans have personally experienced discrimination or been treated unfairly because of their race or ethnicity. According to statistics from Stop AAPI Hate, nearly 3,000 hate incidents against Asian Americans were reported in March alone, almost doubling that over the previous 11 months. Spiking racism, said respondents, has become their primary stressor during the pandemic rather than the pandemic itself.
However, the current wave of hatred and violence against Asian Americans is far from exceptional. Both the country’s long history of racial oppression and its anti-China propaganda have carried a foreshadowing of the current spike of racism.
Written history of anti-Asian racism
Bigotry against Asian immigrants began as soon as the first generation of Chinese workers set foot on American soil during the California gold rush in the 1850s. In the face of the rising anger among white laborers for the salary competition created by Chinese laborers, the “Anti-Coolie Act” was passed by the California legislature to impose taxes on Chinese miners in 1862. It was the first law in California to specifically target Chinese people.

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Screenshot of the PBS documentary "The Chinese Exclusion Act"
In the following years, hostility and attacks from white settlers mounted continuously until the murdering of 19 Chinese residents by a mob in Los Angeles' Chinatown marked a climax of the anti-Asian fervor in 1871. The massacre was followed by the Page Act of 1875 and the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 to successively prohibit the entry of Chinese women and ban the immigration of Chinese laborers. Those restrictions persisted for more than six decades until the Magnuson Act repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943.

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Screenshot of the PBS documentary "Silent Sacrifice"
Racial violence and oppression also victimized other Asian immigrants in the same period. In 1905, the Japanese-Korean Exclusion League was formed in San Francisco to exclude Japanese and Korean immigrants. World War II saw the forced internment of around 120,000 Japanese Americans in concentration camps in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1908 further prohibited the entery of Japanese laborers. Similarly, the Tydings-McDuffie Act in 1934 reduced the quota of Filipino immigration to only 50 people per year.
Increasing political invective
While grounded in the long racist history and coupled with multiple social factors, the alarming increase in anti-Asian violence and hate crimes during the pandemic turned out to be more politically driven. In 2020, former US president Donald Trump and several members of his administration repeatedly used racist terms and referred to COVID-19 as “China Virus” and “Kung Flu virus”. Similar labels and language were also used by some other American politicians and celebrities to stigmatize China as the culprit of the outbreak.

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Screenshot from Donald Trump's address in which he called COVID-19 "the Chinese virus."

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Screenshot of former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s claiming there is evidence the coronavirus came from Chinese lab

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