In February of 2020, I wrote my first op-ed for The Chronicle, which urged people to take a look at the biases behind their fear and refrain from blaming any East Asian-looking person for a virus that happened to be discovered in an East Asian country. At the time, I had faith that the panic would fade as the virus spread throughout the country. A little over a year later, the situation has only gotten worse. The increase in societal awareness about what we are facing is nice, but it, like my first op-ed, falls into the trap of individualizing the problem instead of examining how anti-Asian sentiment helps keep this country’s wheels turning.
Some people may approach the issue differently, but I am not here to regurgitate Instagram infographics about unlearning racist behavior or to promote simplistic hashtags. There is plenty of information out there for those who care to look. What we need to be doing is calling out and holding institutions that support the conditions in which hate flourishes accountable.
For example, media coverage, while appreciated, is not being used to see the bigger picture. Much of the rhetoric surrounding this rise in racist attacks against the Asian community has focused on numbers – this many people were perpetrators, and this many people were victims. Talking about specific incidents is a cheap replacement for examining why people are feeling emboldened to do things like that in the first place. It perpetuates the idea that the ones who aren’t being actively hateful are automatically doing something good, so nothing changes in the end.
Also, it’s not like Asians were never targets of anything before the COVID-19 pandemic. We constantly fluctuate between invisibility and hyper-visibility, which are both violent tactics intended to keep us in line just in case we get sick of chasing the carrot of capital-A assimilation. The U.S. treats its Asian population like a pawn in its game of systemic racism, encouraging animosity between minorities and framing tension as either a personality flaw or something racially inherent.
Personally, I’m no longer as concerned with interpersonal racism as I used to be. Calling out microaggressions and harassment is still important, but no one would partake in racist behavior if society didn’t reward it in some way – and that is the root of the issue here. The people who pat themselves on the back for not participating in the hate are the same people who stand by and do nothing when they see an act of hatred right in front of them, and why would they? It’s so much easier to mind your own business so you don’t become the next target.
We all know that anti-Asian incidents and racism in general aren’t going away any time soon. Hoping everything dies down after the COVID-19 virus becomes less of a threat isn’t enough because eventually the Asian community will once again become the unwilling main character of another American crisis. If we as a country truly want the suffering to end, we need to stop pretending that individual people bear the brunt of the responsibility for making that happen. Lighting someone’s backpack on fire is a symptom; the system we live in is the cause.
