Public Health Policy Reviews 8:
Anti-Asian Violence and the Public Health Impact of “Trumpism” after COVID-19, Part 2.
Olivia Munn at the 2018 San Diego Comic-Con International. Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikipedia Commons.
On January 28th, 2021, Vicha Ratanapakdee died after a Black man in San Francisco, California, slammed him to the ground in an unprovoked attack.
Mr. Ratanapakdee was an eighty-four (84) year-old Thai American man. After Ratanapakdee’s murder, Olivia Munn, an American actress of Western European, Vietnamese, and Chinese ancestry – penned an article in the Huffington Post condemning violence against Asian Americans. In the Huffington Post article, Olivia Munn wrote of feeling at a loss for words over anti-Asian hate crimes.
As the intense violence and racist incidents against East Asians increased with alarming frequency, Munn explicitly asked other celebrities and the public for help to “…feel safe in our communities.”
In September 2020, legendary journalist Bob Woodward revealed that former US President Trump knew how severely the coronavirus would impact the United States and the world. Yet, President Trump engaged in a public media campaign to play down the severity and contagion level of the coronavirus.
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Amanda Nguyen
Amanda Nguyen. Image courtesy: https://www.amanda.website/.
Mr. Trump also disputed the need for a coordinated federal public health response to the virus.
As a result, many poor White, Latino, and African American citizens lost their lives because of Donald Trump’s stubbornness. However, it was Mr. Trump’s media duplicity about China’s role in the spread of COVID-19 that created a dangerous social environment for East Asian American citizens and migrants in 2020.
The dire public health threat to East Asians across the US influenced Olivia Munn to team up with an entrepreneur and social activist named Amanda Nguyen.
Amanda Nguyen is the founder and CEO of RISE, a non-governmental organization (NGO) for sexual assault survivors. Nguyen went viral during the week of February 5th, 2021, after appearing in a series of videos about the attacks on Asians in America.
When asked what led her to make the initial social media post, Nguyen said, “I saw these videos of people being horrifically attacked in my community. I didn’t see the mainstream media covering it, and I didn’t see anyone else talking about it.”
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“I thought to myself, if no one’s going to talk about it, I’m going to use my voice, and I’m going to use my platform and ask people to help me get the word out. And overnight, millions of people responded to it,” Nguyen continued.
A tough question that we must ask is why? Why did so many people start committing arbitrary acts of violence and murders against East Asian American citizens? Tough questions demand clear and concise answers.
Janelle Wong, a professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, investigated and published a June 2021 analysis on the demographics of who attacked East Asians in America.
While local and national news and social media reports highlighted African American violence against Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) people, Professor Wong’s analysis revealed most attackers were White.
“The way that the media is covering and the way that people are understanding anti-Asian hate at this moment, in some ways, draws attention to these long-standing anti-Asian biases in US society,” said Professor Wong.
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Michelle Alyssa Go and Christina Yuna Lee
Christina Yuna Lee. Photo courtesy: Twitter.
“But the racist kind of tropes that come along with it — especially that it’s predominantly Black people attacking Asian Americans who are elderly — there’s not really an empirical basis in that,” Professor Wong continued.
Yet, it is impossible to ignore that African Americans perpetrated many of the attacks on members of the AAIP community. A mentally ill Black man pushed Michelle Alyssa Go, 40, in front of an oncoming New York City subway train on January 15th, 2022. A homeless Black man stalked and brutally stabbed Christina Yuna Lee, 35, to death after following her home on February 13th, 2022.
Karthick Ramakrishnan, the founder of AAPI Data, a data and civic engagement nonprofit group, said that images widely circulated by the popular media could form the public’s perception of perpetrators and victims—but they are not representative of most anti-Asian bias incidents.
“There’s just something so powerful about these visual images that no matter what the social science might say, people believe their eyes, especially the images that get played on repeat now,” said Ramakrishnan.
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Despite the research and statistics cited by Professor Wong and Karthick Ramakrishnan, the fact that African Americans perpetrated so many violent attacks on East Asians during the coronavirus pandemic is noteworthy.
Only 12% of Black voters supported Donald Trump in 2020. So, Mr. Trump has extraordinarily little support from the African American community. However, the ease with which Trump shifted blame for his poor management of the COVID-19 pandemic away from himself onto East Asians - and the receptiveness of poor Americans to this demagoguery - reveals Trump’s mastery of media narratives.
After his 2015 Presidential campaign announcement, Donald Trump began aggressively attacking news organizations and individual journalists in response to negative news or press reports about him or his policy proposals. Since then, Trump has engaged in an escalating public “war” with segments of the mainstream media that refuse to provide overtly positive news and information about him.
After Donald Trump won the 2016 Presidential election, attacks on the free and independent press from him and members of his executive administration intensified to a fever pitch.
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Stop Asian Hate
Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash.
Donald Trump lost the 2020 Presidential election to former US Vice President Joe Biden.
But his incompetence regarding the coronavirus and race-baiting against China damaged East Asian American communities and degraded public health for a long time.
As a result, 2020 through 2023 were brutal years for Asian American citizens and Asian immigrants in the United States (US). Stop AAPI Hate, an Asian American civil rights advocacy group, says that East Asians reported more than 11,467 anti-Asian hate incidents from March 2020 to March 2022. Social science researchers admit that crimes against the (AAPI) community after COVID-19 are likely vastly underreported.
Such research gaps can hinder individuals from developing a broad understanding of the violence and racism affecting not only the Asian American community – but other minority communities across the US.