Hate crimes against Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders are underreported and on the rise. A new website hopes to change that.
Anti-foreigner hostilities in the U.S. unquestionably are on the rise since the campaign and election of Donald Trump. That includes Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI), a group that has seen a troubling increase in the number of hate crimes targeting them in the past two years, NPR reported. But statistics about those attacks often are hard to find.
To address the growing problem, human rights group Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAJC) created a website, standagainsthatred.org, where Asian-American and Pacific Islander victims can report attacks and other hostile incidents.
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“We’ve always recognized that hate incidents have been an issue,” AAJC Executive Director John Yang told NPR. “We realized that we really needed a better tracking tool.”
One report that is available on AAPI attacks is from the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations, which noted that crimes targeting Asian-Americans tripled in that county between 2014 and 2015.
According to the NPR report:
Hate crimes targeting AAPI often stem from the fact that they’re seen as the ‘perpetual foreigner,’ said Yang. That anti-foreign sentiment has only increased under the new administration, he said. In one of the stories posted on the new AAJC website, an older white man approached an Asian-American woman in downtown San Francisco and pretended to hit her over the head with a book, yelling, ‘I hate your f****** race. We’re in charge of this country now.’ The anonymous submission added, ‘He was not intoxicated.’ In another entry, a Muslim teacher in Georgia was told to ‘hang herself’ with her headscarf.
This week, 10 of 14 members of the White House’s Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders resigned in protest of Trump’s immigration policies, Fusion’s Nidhi Prakash reported. Six others resigned on the day of Trump’s inauguration.
In a resignation letter sent to the Trump administration on Wednesday, AAPI Initiative members stated, “…We object to your portrayal of immigrants, refugees, people of color and people of various faiths as untrustworthy, threatening and a drain on our nation.”