Anti-Asian Hate Crime During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Exploring the Reproduction of Inequality

Abstract

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is believed to have emerged in Wuhan, China in late December 2019 and began rapidly spreading around the globe throughout the spring months of 2020. As COVID-19 proliferated across the United States, Asian Americans reported a surge in racially motivated hate crimes involving physical violence and harassment. Throughout history, pandemic-related health crises have been associated with the stigmatization and "othering" of people of Asian descent. Asian Americans have experienced verbal and physical violence motivated by individuallevel racism and xenophobia from the time they arrived in America in the late 1700s up until the present day. At the institutional level, the state has often implicitly reinforced, encouraged, and perpetuated this violence through bigoted rhetoric and exclusionary policies. COVID-19 has enabled the spread of racism and created national insecurity, fear of foreigners, and general xenophobia, which may be related to the increase in anti-Asian hate crimes during the pandemic. We examine how these crimessituated in historically entrenched and intersecting individual-level and institutional-level racism and xenophobiahave operated to "other" Asian Americans and reproduce inequality.

Anti-Asian discrimination and the Asian-white mental health gap during COVID-19

“…Factors that lead to the rise of anti-Asian racism include not only fear and uncertainty inherent to novel infectious disease (Noel 2020), the presumptive origin of COVID-19 (Cheng 2020), and misleading media coverage (Darling-Hammond et al 2020;Wen et al 2020) but also, more importantly, the historical antecedents that link Asian Americans to infectious diseases and the long-standing stereotype that characterizes Asian Americans as "perpetual foreigners" (Cheah et al 2020;Litam 2020;Man 2020;Mamuji et al 2020;Tessler, Choi, and Kao 2020). Indeed, people of Asian descent have experienced both verbal and physical violence motivated by racism and xenophobia from the time they arrived in America in the late 1700s up until the present day (Gover et al 2020). Therefore, as Chen, Trinh, and Yang (2020, 556) put it, "In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic we see not only a rise in anti-Asian sentiment, but also a recapitulation of history".…”

Public Concern About Violence, Firearms, and the COVID-19 Pandemic in California

“…[11][12][13][14] Fear and scapegoating associated with COVID-19 may increase biasmotivated unfair treatment. 15,16 During the summer of 2020, largely peaceful 17 protests decrying structural inequities, which contribute to both police violence and the uneven burden of COVID -19, have been met, at times, by law enforcement use of crowd-control weapons 18 and heavily armed white supremacist and far-right vigilantes. 19 While most major news sources reported initial decreases in violent incidents, as measured by local police calls for service, following pandemic-related lockdowns and stay-at-home orders, the latest indications are that more serious acts of violence, particularly those involving firearms, have remained the same or increased.…”

Further Reduction in Help-Seeking Behaviors Amidst Additional Barriers to Mental Health Treatment in Asian Populations: A Contemporary Review

“…Due to the likely Chinese origin of COVID-19 and continuous media coverage of the spread of the disease, sensationalism and discriminatory labeling has resulted in fear toward and violence against Chinese and other Asian persons, creating this additional barrier for HSB: expectation of discrimination because of race or ethnicity [ 10 - 12 ]. A recent study determined various forms of social exclusion and discrimination, including but not limited to, verbal abuse, violent attacks, laid off from employment without proper cause, occurred toward Chinese persons living both in mainland China and overseas during the COVID-19 pandemic [ 39 ].…”

“…For those with mental health illnesses, it is now more challenging than ever to seek and find help. Additionally, due to the geographical origin of COVID-19 and continuous media coverage of the spread of the disease, sensationalism and discriminatory labeling has resulted in fear toward and violence against Chinese and other Asian identifying persons; creating an additional barrier for HSB: expectation of discrimination because of race or ethnicity [ 10 - 12 ].…”