and a 2016 report from NYC Mayor’s Office of Operations found that Asian immigrants have the highest poverty rates in the city. In reality, the community is America’s most economically divided: a 2018 study by the Pew Research Center found that Asian Americans experience the largest income inequality gap as an ethnic and racial group in the U.S. Read More: Asian Americans Are Still Caught in the Trap of the ‘Model Minority’ Stereotypeīecause the model minority myth suggests upward mobility, it creates a fallacy that Asian Americans don’t experience struggle or racial discrimination, a stereotype that’s been bolstered by limited (and in some cases, flawed) media representation like the film Crazy Rich Asians and more recently, Netflix’s Bling Empire. “This contributes to erasing the very real interpersonal violence that we see happening in these videos, and that Asian Americans experience from the day-to-day, things that don’t get reported and the things that don’t get filmed.” That false idea, constructed during the Civil Rights era to stymie racial justice movements, suggests that Asian Americans are more successful than other ethnic minorities because of hard work, education and inherently law-abiding natures. Mabute-Louie cites the pervasiveness of the model minority myth as a large contributing factor to the current climate. “There are these assumptions about ways that Asian Americans have ‘succeeded’ in this country.” “There is a stereotype and an assumption that Asian Americans have class privilege, that they have high socioeconomic status and education, and that any discrimination doesn’t really happen or feel legitimate,” says Bianca Mabute-Louie, a racial justice educator.
Many have pointed out that racial violence against Asian Americans often goes overlooked because of persistent stereotypes about the community. The current spate of attacks on our elderly is part of how that rhetoric has impacted the broader population.” Why the ‘model minority’ myth is harmful “There’s a clear correlation between President Trump’s incendiary comments, his insistence on using the term ‘Chinese virus’ and the subsequent hate speech spread on social media and the hate violence directed towards us,” says Russell Jeung, a co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate and a professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University. In doing so, Trump followed in a long American history of using diseases to justify anti-Asian xenophobia, one that dates back to the 19th and 20th centuries and has helped to shape perception of Asian Americans as “perpetual foreigners.”
Many attribute the 2020 uptick to the xenophobic rhetoric of Biden’s predecessor former President Trump repeatedly referred to COVID-19 as “the China virus,” blaming the country for the pandemic. Read More: 10 Asian Americans Reflect on Racism During the Pandemic and the Need for Equality While anti-Asian violence has taken place nationwide and particularly in major cities, the uptick in attacks in 2021 has been particularly focused in the Bay Area, especially in San Francisco and Oakland’s Chinatowns. The violence has continued into 2021, and President Joe Biden signed an executive order denouncing anti-Asian discrimination shortly after taking office in January. Stop AAPI Hate, a reporting database created at the beginning of the pandemic as a response to the increase in racial violence, received 2,808 reports of anti-Asian discrimination between March 19 and December 31, 2020. The NYPD reported that hate crimes motivated by anti-Asian sentiment jumped 1,900% in New York City in 2020.
Since the start of the pandemic last spring, Asian Americans have faced racist violence at a much higher rate than previous years.