There have been over 9,000 anti-Asian attacks since the start of the pandemic.
Stop AAPI Hate has received 9,081 incident reports since 19 March 2020 and June 2021.
4,548 occurred last year and 4,533 were reported this year.
“When you encourage hate, it’s not like a genie in a bottle where you can pull it out and push it back in whenever you want,” said Manjusha Kulkarni, co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate and executive director of the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council.
“There’s too much perpetuating these belief systems to make them go away.”
Kulkarni said there was a surge in reports as America opened up from its Coronavirus lockdown restrictions.
One of the most shocking incidents involved a Thai grandfather being senselessly pushed over and killed at the start of this year.
The Atlanta shootings, which left six Asian women dead, also triggered a rise in attacks.
“There, too, is where we saw some that were incidents that had taken place weeks or months before, but they just were either not aware of our reporting center or didn’t take the time to report,” Kulkarni said.
Verbal harassments and shunning, neither of which qualify legally as hate crimes, account for the largest number of incidents. Their figures rose from 10.8% last year to 16.6% this year.
More than 63% of the incidents were submitted by women. Roughly 31% took place on public streets, and 30% at businesses.
“We understand that other nation-states are competitors to the United States, and a number of them do have authoritarian regimes,” Kulkarni said. ”
But the ways in which we talk about the people and the ways in which blame is assigned somehow looks different for communities of color than it does for, say, the Russian government or the German government.”
In other news, Asian American COVID-19 vaccination rates are over 70% in major US cities.
