Although media coverage of anti-Asian attacks in America seems to have slowed over the last few months as the delta variant of the COVID-19 virus has taken over the headlines, that doesn’t mean the violence has gone away. Despite Congress passing legislation to combat anti-Asian hate crimes, it has, unfortunately, only continued to spike.
According to reporting forum Stop AAPI Hate, reports of anti-Asian violence and biased harassment against the AAPI community have continued to surge in recent months alongside cases of the delta variant, with 9,081 anti-Asian hate crimes being reported since the pandemic began in March 2020. Over that 15-month period, Kimmy Yam of NBC News reported that data from Stop AAPI Hate revealed one-fourth of those attacks took place between April to June 2021.
In an interview with Yam, Russell Jeung, co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate and a professor of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University, blamed the continuing increase in attacks on “a combination of both people coming out of a pandemic and interacting more with the public.”
