Understanding anti-Asian hate: You eat dogs, don’t you?

Making a stand: Some 3,800 hate incidents against Asian Americans have been reported in the first full year of the Covid-19 pandemic. — Reuters

READERS of The Straits Times might recall a column by Olivia Ho that appeared a year ago this week in which she took note of rising racism against Asians in the United States.

While holidaying with her family in the city of New Orleans, just as the Covid-19-pandemic-induced lockdowns were kicking in, a man cycled past Ho and her sister with his dog in the basket. “Want to pet him?” he offered, before going on to say: “Bet you’d eat him.”

That column was written just as US cases of Covid-19 had begun to mount under the watch of then President Donald Trump, who, unequal to the task of protecting his population’s health, attempted to shift the blame elsewhere with increasingly bitter references to the “China virus” and “kung flu”.

Photographers with telephoto lenses even captured briefing notes prepared for him with “coronavirus” scratched out and “Chinese virus” pencilled in.

Ho’s piece, the fruit of a much- anticipated visit to the United States, is even more compelling today because it contains no rancour or indignation despite the obvious taunts endured. The complete absence of reverse prejudice is a credit to this young Asian writer.

Since that episode, the discordant notes she recorded in Nola, as music lovers call New Orleans, and New York City, have spread around the United States. According to Stop AAPI Hate, a nonprofit organisation that represents Asian-Ameri-cans and Pacific Islanders, close to 3,800 hate incidents against Asian- Americans were reported in the first full year of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Since the shooting in Atlanta, Georgia, on March 16 – which left eight people dead, six of them Asian women – I have contacted a good many people in the United States and discovered to my dismay that, depressingly for a nation once held up as “that city on the hill”, the reports of rising anti-Asian feelings are not unfounded. What is more, it is even popping up on the two coasts, once regarded as cheerleaders of globalisation.

The Centre for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University counted 122 anti-Asian hate crimes across 16 American cities last year, up from 49 in 2019.

What’s going on?

Not a new phenomenon

First, let it be noted that the United States is not the only nation to witness these incidents. Cities in Australia, Britain and Canada have also reported increases in anti-Asian incidents.

On London’s Oxford Street, a shopping strip that thrives on rich Asian customers, a Singaporean student of Chinese ethnicity was punched in the face last year in a racial attack. In Vancouver, Canada, police records show that anti-Asian hate crimes rose from a dozen in 2019 to 142 incidents last year.

Secondly, racial jibes and attacks on Asians are not a new phenomenon in the United States or elsewhere. “Paki bashing”, for instance, which was a catch-all term for racial violence targeting South Asians and their businesses, was an ugly phenomenon that emerged in Britain during a period of high immigration in the 1970s and 1980s.

Still, such hate does tend to rise at times of social stress – and in the United States, particularly when American vulnerabilities are palpable. For instance, after the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001 – which shook the country to its core and forever changed its approach to public security – there was an increase in hate crimes against the Sikh community, whose men tend to be similarly attired as Saudi terrorist mastermind Osama Bin Laden.

United Sikhs, an organisation for people of the faith resident in the United States, has released a timeline of more than 40 attacks against the community in 18 years dating back to 9/11. In New Jersey, where one in three petrol pumps are owned by Sikhs, some owners have been robbed, some beaten and at least one person gunned down. One of the most terrible attacks took place in Wisconsin on Aug 5,2012, when a mass shooting at a Sikh temple killed seven people. The attacker, a white supremacist with a troubled military record, subsequently killed himself.

Less than a tenth of the United States is of Asian descent and what’s more, this broad group is subdivided into some 40 ethnicities. Income levels vary significantly within the Asian-American community; while many are wildly successful, quite a few are not.

Ignorance and stereotyping

And hatred almost always rides easier on ignorance. Given that only 40% of Americans have passports and one in 10 have not travelled outside their home states, it is not a surprise that knowledge of other cultures is thin among Ameri-cans.

What’s more, when they do travel abroad, most Americans pick Europe and the Caribbean ahead of other destinations. For many of them, Asians are a curiosity, if not a novelty. The white plumber from Boise, Idaho, or the shingles layer from Lincoln, Nebraska, who flies to Thailand for his maiden “discover Asia” trip cannot help noticing that cabin crew on some Asian airlines tend to fawn over him in a way he could never expect in his home country.

Stereotyping does not help either; Asian women sometimes bear the brunt because popular culture for decades tended to portray them as “exotic”. In 1875, the US Page Act was directed at “any Oriental country” and while purporting to prohibit women brought into the United States for “immoral purposes”, was enforced primarily against the Chinese.

Trump unquestionably fuelled racial and communal prejudice with his loose cannon comments. Indeed, his unexpected rise to power in some ways should also be viewed against the backdrop of demographic trends as much as American fatigue with eight years of Democratic rule.

The US census office projects that by 2045, Americans will no longer be a predominantly white nation. This dismays some sections of the majority community and some are provoked to react with violence.

Ali Soufan, the legendary former Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent who led many of the Al-Qaeda investigations, has been consistently sounding warnings about white supremacists. Just as Islamists are not monolithic, he says, neither are fringe white supremacist groups. Some are Islamophobes, others may be racially or economically motivated, and some want a “purer” society that does not include immigrants.

“When an Islamic terrorist does an attack, white supremacists benefit from it, and vice versa. These two dangerous networks feed on each other, ” he told me two years ago. His explanation: Both sets of terrorists seek to take advantage of social divisions and internal chaos to make themselves more relevant to the mainstream.

Technology helps radicals to connect, organise and plan their attacks. Social media amplifies their message disproportionately.

Discriminated as discriminators

Interestingly, some of those who complain loudest against perceived discrimination are champion discriminators themselves.

A little over a decade ago when I was posted to India, which has some of the most complex social stratifications anywhere and often displays multiple prejudices, the media there was ablaze with reports of racist attacks on Indians in Australia.

A closer examination of some of these attacks revealed some nuances. In one instance, the attackers were Lebanese immigrants in Sydney angered at Indians moving into their occupations and undercutting them on the hourly wage. In another instance, Indian students stealing the affections of married Australian women had been confronted by jealous husbands.

Every society without exception struggles with its prejudices. What’s important is how it recognises these frailties and fault lines, and acts upon them.

Significant American companies – including IT multinational HP, global media firm Bloomberg, multinational law firm Baker McKenzie, and global management consultancy Bain & Co – work consciously to promote diversity. Bain is led by a Filipino-American and Baker McKenzie’s global managing partner is Singaporean. In the 1970s and 1980s, many Asians, including Shaukat Aziz of Pakistan who later served as his country’s prime minister, broke many glass ceilings at Citibank.

Incredible as it sounds in the current context, Pew Research reported in October that the proportion of Americans who view the long-term growth of racial and ethnic diversity as good for the United States is higher than it was four years ago, a time when Trump was running for office.

In the July-August period in 2020 when the polling was held, 64% of US adults said the prospect of a nation in the next 25 to 30 years in which black Americans, Latinos and Asian-Americans make up a majority of the population was neither good nor bad for the United States. Nearly a quarter saw this as a good thing, while fewer than half as many (11%) said it was bad, according to the national survey.

A lesson from Muhammad Ali

What’s to be acknowledged about the American people is that they do have the innate capacity to recognise the error of their ways, and even act upon them.

Prejudice against blacks, for instance, is longstanding and still exists to a considerable degree, as the George Floyd killing in May last year showed.

But it used to be much worse. Cassius Clay won the light heavyweight boxing gold at the 1960 Olympics, but weeks later was declined table service at a restaurant in his native city of Louisville, Kentucky, because he was black.

After he changed his name to Muhammad Ali and then rejected the Vietnam War draft citing religious convictions and that he had “no quarrel with the Vietcong”, he was reviled in America and stripped of his heavyweight title.

He kept his faith. In a 1971 television interview with the BBC, Ali said he had often wondered as a child why all the angels in heaven were white, and so too Tarzan in the jungles of Africa.

Eventually, he prevailed and the US Supreme Court decided 8-0 in his favour, ruling that the draft board was wrong in rejecting his application for conscientious objector status.

And in time, the United States accepted him as a favourite son, even inviting him to light the Olympic flame at the 1996 Games in Atlanta – the city where the March 16 outrage took place. – The Straits Times/Asia News Network

Ravi Velloor is an associate editor at The Straits Times, a member of the Asia News Network (ANN) which is an alliance of 24 news media entities. The Asian Editors Circle is a series of commentaries by editors and contributors of ANN.