The Drivers of Anti-Asian Hate

13 Fund’s Investment Thesis on the Four Key Drivers of Anti-Asian Harassment and Violence

An Asian man is collecting cans along the sidewalk on a Friday night in Harlem when a man attacks him from behind and stomps him repeatedly, leaving him in a coma.

Two Asian women walking together on a Sunday night in Hell’s Kitchen are attacked by a woman with a hammer after being told “take off your fucking mask”, with one victim suffering deep, bloody gashes that later requires 7 stitches.

These are just a few of the many disturbing incidents involving harassment and violence against the Asian and Pacific Islanders community (API hate) that have occurred in the first five months of 2021. (1)

For 13 Fund’s second grant, we are focusing on understanding and addressing the drivers of racially motivated harassment and violence against Asians & Pacific Islanders.

(Nominate an NYC-affiliated nonprofit for grant consideration here)

This is a deeply personal issue as we are part of this community: Jason was born in China, Bilal’s parents were born and raised in Pakistan. Our current residences, New York City and San Francisco, are home to two of the largest Asian American communities in the United States. We represent the fastest growing racial group in America (reaching over 23 million in 2019), and the growing violence against our community undermines social cohesion across all racial and ethnic groups.

Note: it’s important to recognize that the Asian and Pacific Islander population is incredibly diverse, hailing from 20 different nations, each with their own culture and historical background in the United States. There is no single Asian American experience and many of the hate incidents we focus on are more targeted towards East and Southeast Asians, and less so for South Asians. Yet as the New Yorker put it, “it’s possible that being scapegoated might constitute one of the community’s few shared experiences”.

To better understand the root cause and respective solutions, we mined data and interviewed practitioners in this field (full list at the end). In this report, we identify several critical factors that we believe contribute to the rise in anti-Asian harassment and violence, and offer a set of interventions that could stem and reverse this upswing. The four drivers are:

1. Pre-existing Bias: Model Minority + Yellow Peril
2. Proximate Cause: COVID-19 + US-China Tension
3. Lack of Protection: Law Enforcement & Judicial Process
4. Lack of Representation: Politics + Media

The Impact of API Hate

Before we dive into each of these key drivers, we will briefly analyze statistics assessing the magnitude of the problem, and review patterns that will help us better understand possible causes.

Rising Hate Crimes

Chart via NYTimes

One direct measure of the problem is reported hate crimes to the FBI.

Hate crimes against API against Asian Americans in New York City rose 833% from 2019 to 2020. In the same period San Francisco saw hate crime reports rise 50% from 2019. This growth took place during a time where overall hate crime numbers in NYC and SF actually fell by 38% and 19% respectively. (2)

The threat has shown no signs of ending. In the first three months of 2021, anti-Asian hate crimes are up 250% in New York City and 140% in San Francisco over the same period in 2020 and 164% across the 16 largest American cities. Within NY reports, it was also found that older (45+) Asians were more likely to be targeted since the pandemic began.

Rising Harassment

In May 2021, Stop AAPI Hate released statistics on the number of harassment and violence incidents it had received for the 12 month period from March 19, 2020 to March 31, 2021. They revealed that the total figure grew from 3,795 to 6,603 incident reports during the final month of March 2021.

That period coincided with the tragic shooting in Atlanta that left six women of Korean and Chinese heritage dead. Yet despite the widespread media coverage of the shooting and its aftermath, substantial numbers of Americans are still unaware of this incident. An April 2021 report found that 37% of White Americans were unaware of the recent rise in racism against API communities and 24% of Americans overall felt anti-Asian racism isn’t a problem that needs to be addressed.

Rising Stress

In April 2021, 13 Fund commissioned survey data through Centiment of 516 Asian Americans 16 years and older (Summary + Full Results). found that one in three API women and men had experienced verbal harassment in the past 12 months. The same data found that 8% of women and 10% of men reported a physical assault in the last 12 months.

Chart via original 13 Fund survey from April 2021

Our research found a direct connection between feeling threatened or being harassed and having poorer mental health. APIs who reported being harassed several times were 3.4x more likely to report “poor” or “somewhat poor” mental health.

Therapists and mental health experts recognize the impact that racial trauma can have on a person, whether they are directly a victim or experiencing it secondhand. Even those who overhear a racist conversation see their levels of cortisol grow to double their normal levels, in turn leading to anxiety and depression. This is why hate crimes have a

The bottom line is anti-Asian harassment and violence is a real, pervasive, and growing problem. With that established, we can move onto assess the causes for this rise in hate.

Pre-existing Bias: Yellow Peril & Model Minority

Just as wildfires emerge out of long periods of heat and drought, racial harassment and violence are enabled by pre-existing bias. Without their kindling, it becomes much harder for flames to spread. In the case of API hate, this means two distorted views that simultaneously frame people of Asian descent as dangerous threats to society, and harmless success stories to be celebrated.

George Frederick Keller, “What shall we do with our boys?” in The Wasp, March 3, 1882

Yellow Peril — stoking fears of Asia as an existential threat to the West

For well over a century, Western civilizations have feared the people and nations of Asia, particularly the Chinese, might overtake them. This concept is known as “Yellow Peril” or “Asian menace”. In particular, this bias centers around the idea of a primitive, exotic, godless, and immoral civilization conquering the West, either literally or culturally.

In his book War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, historian John Dower writes “the vision of the menace from the East was always more racial rather than national. It derived not from concern with any one country or people in particular, but from a vague and ominous sense of the vast, faceless, nameless yellow horde: the rising tide, indeed, of color.”

We can see how Yellow Peril has manifested itself in many ways over the centuries, from the anti-Chinese sentiments during the Gold Rush, which led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and later the Asian Exclusion Act of 1924, as well as the internment of Japanese-Americans in WWII. Asian people were prevented from entering the United States, becoming citizens, testifying in court, or marrying White people.

Yellow Peril can be seen in (and was reinforced by) fictional characters like Fu Manchu, a Chinese criminal mastermind and mad scientist invented by British author Sax Rolmer. (3) Marvel actually licensed the rights to bring Fu Manchu into their comic books and invented a similar character named the Mandarin, a supervillain who appears in the 2021 Marvel film Shang Chi and the Ten Rings.

The Model Minority Myth — an oversimplified story of success that breeds contempt

The other preexisting bias that lays the foundation for anti-Asian hate is the model minority myth, which says that Asian people are hard-working, respectful, law-abiding “model citizens” that other minorities should emulate and strive to be like.

This might seem like a positive attribute and indeed it was initially promoted by leaders in Chinatown in an attempt to protect and win acceptance for Chinese in America. But the ideas were co-opted by political leaders seeking to score geopolitical points with China and Japan overseas, and to point a finger at other, less “successful” minority groups back home.

The infamous 1966 NYTimes piece that coined the term “model minority” explicitly stated that Japanese Americans have faced as much or more discrimination than Blacks, Jews, and yet have faced none of the ill effects of what it termed “problem minorities”.

The model minority myth does three harmful things:

1. It leads people to ignore struggles that API face. For instance, while Asian Americans indeed enjoy, on average, high earnings and levels of education, API have greater income inequality compared to any other racial group and have the highest poverty rates of any racial group in New York City.
2. It turns Asian Americans into a racial wedge between White Americans and Black and Latin Americans, creating resentment and tension. The term “racial triangulation” was coined by Claire Jean Kim to describe the relative valorization of Asians ahead of Blacks, while maintaining Asians occupy an “outsider” status that keeps them from being fully accepted into society.
3. It creates resentment among White Americans when Asian Americans are seen as succeeding “beyond their station”. Ultimately the model minority stereotype is meant to uplift API only up to the point they can roughly match White Americans. Once they surpass Whites in measurable way (education, income, etc), the Yellow Peril stereotype is activated, breeding resentment and envy. This can be seen in the data of the “bamboo ceiling” which shows that Asian Americans are the least likely to be promoted to management and executive positions across industries such as tech, banking, legal and accounting.

Despite seeming like a positive attribute, the model minority myth has been distorted and manipulated to serve political interests and does not accurately represent the experience of or describe the truth of who Asian Americans are and what we face. Meanwhile, it covers up and hides any hardship we might face, making it more difficult to call out problems or seek aid.

Possible Interventions to Pre-Existing Bias

• Improve Asian American history in K-12 and University level. Work with educators, schools, local committees, state and federal departments of education, and textbook publishers to ensure the full Asian American story is told in history, social studies, and English classes. Start, fund, and expand Asian American studies programs at universities. Bring cultural literacy of Asian tropes into art and media programs to ensure stereotypes are not perpetuated.
• Measure and improve executive promotion of APIs. While many API’s are well-educated and gain employment in entry and middle management positions in tech, law, and finance firms, they rarely enter the executive suite. Diversity and inclusion initiatives should include goals around reaching representative targets for Asian Americans in leadership positions, not just as an overall percent of staff.

Proximate Cause: COVID-19, Trump, and the US-China Rivalry

If the pre-existing biases of Yellow Peril and Model Minority were the kindling, then the proximate cause is the spark. In this case, COVID-19 barreled into an already contentious and rocky relationship between the US and China, which had been devolving for over a decade and worsening under the Trump administration.

US-China Rivalry

For a number of years, the United States and China have become economic and military rivals. In the last decade, Americans’ positive sentiment of China has more than halved, from 51% favorable in 2011 to 37% in 2016 to only 22% by 2020. Around nine out of ten Americans see China’s power and influence as a threat — including 62% who say it is a “major threat”.

During the Trump administration, the US and China engaged in a nearly two-year trade war, with each side escalating larger and larger tariffs on the other country worth tens and later hundreds of billions of dollars. The trade war was called to a close on January 15th, 2020, a small respite for both nations just as the COVID-19 pandemic began.

Racist Rhetoric & Media Coverage during the COVID-19 Pandemic

On the back of this already contentious dynamic, the COVID-19 pandemic put China in a negative light for many Americans.

The novel coronavirus, first identified in Wuhan China, began spreading throughout the world in the early months of 2020. By early March, the terms “China virus”, “Wuhan Virus”, “Kung Flu” had already entered the lexicon and were being used by Americans, from federal officials to social media posters. President Trump had no qualms about blaming the Chinese government for failing to contain the virus and referred to COVID-19 as “Kung Flu” in rallies, while Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) blamed Chinese people for being “the source of a lot of these viruses” because “they’re the culture where people bats and snakes and dogs”.

Asian Americans ultimately had the lowest rate of infection of any racial group (though they were still 53% more likely to die than a White person. Yet a great deal of media coverage which often featured images of Asian people wearing masks, even when the content had no connection, reinforcing the false notion that Asians were the cause of the pandemic.

On March 20, 2020, the bipartisan federal agency United States Commission on Civil Rights published an open memo expressing “grave concern over recent demonstrations of violence and hate toward people of Asian descent provoked by misplaced fear over the COVID-19 pandemic.” The letter also explicitly called on public officials to avoid stoking “xenophobic animosity toward Asian Americans” by avoiding usage of the locale based naming of COVID-19”.

To be clear, while the virus was first identified in Wuhan, China, there’s zero legitimate reason to blame the vast majority of people in China, other Asian nations, or Americans of Asian descent — people who were themselves at risk and played no active role in its spread. Stop AAPI Hate found that about 30% of reported incidents contained references to “China Virus” and other racist & xenophobic language. The US Commission on Civil Rights noted that hate crimes “are fueled by racial anxieties or social changes that are perceived as threatening” and many people sought to blame Asian Americans as scapegoats for the pandemic’s devastating economic and social damage.

Interventions

• Support API activists, artists, and community leaders. Governments, schools, businesses, and nonprofits can create space for API communities to hold rallies and vigils, provide them with protection and funding, and amplify the voices and creations of activists and artists. These activities demonstrate to Asian Americans and non-Asians alike that API’s are valued, heard, and supported.
• Educate journalists who cover race, political, and social issues. Support programs that educate print, radio, and television journalists about the truth behind harmful stereotypes and ensure they are aware of and avoid reinforcing them.
• Invest in API-focused journalism. Specialized media outlets and news programs that focus on Asian American issues can provide expertise and nuance that general news and media outlets may miss. Supporting and investing in these programs can help educate the public in important ways.

Lack of Protection: Law Enforcement & Judicial Process

Sparked by COVID-19 and the rising US-China tension, Asian Americans began to face harassment, bullying, and attacks by those who most intensely harbored preexisting bias. The magnitude and sustained nature of Asian hate revealed just how little protection the API community truly had. This lack appears most readily in terms of support from law enforcement and the judicial process.

Law Enforcement

It’s often difficult to even track when harassment and assault of Asian Americans occur. To be designated a hate crime, which can lead to harsher penalties, there must be evidence of racial or ethnic animosity. While many Asians may have felt the sting of “ching chong” slurs or “slanty eye” gestures, they are not as well-established symbols as say a noose or a swastika in proving racial animosity.

Even as Biden signs the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act into law, making reporting of hate crimes more accessible at local and state levels and expediting the review of pandemic-related hate crimes, some question whether the focus on hate crimes meaningfully deters or prevents incidents.

Image via Axios

Asian Americans represent a small percentage of the police force, making up 2% of officers (versus the 7% of the total population). Even in cities with large Asian populations, like Seattle or New York City, API representation still lags within the police department. This may be in part due to racism within the police department.

Not all APIs see more policing as part of the answer. Asian people are less likely to report incidents to the police because they may face language barriers, do not trust the police to treat them fairly, or simply feel nothing will come of it. For example, in Hawaii, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders are much more likely to be incarcerated than White people. Additionally, Southeast Asian Americans, many of whom are refugees, are 3–5 times more likely to be deported over an old criminal offense than other immigrant groups.

Arrests and Prosecution

Police have not been effective in prosecuting hate crime cases against Asian Americans so far. The Marshall Project found that the NYPD failed to arrest a single person across 17 harassment complaints filed in Queens in 2020, even in multiple incidents when the victim wished to prosecute and a suspect had been identified. As of March 2021, only one person had been prosecuted for a hate crime against an Asian American in New York City, and it was a Taiwanese man who had written graffiti against a Chinese man. (4)

Many of the hate incidents that APIs have reported are considered second-degree harassment charges. That is to say, yelling, spitting, even shoving or kicking that does not cause injury is considered a violation and not a crime. When these cases make it to court, judges have been known to dismiss them without requiring defendants to admit guilt. To rise to the level of first-degree harassment, the offender must “intentionally and repeatedly” harass another person.

When someone is a victim of a hate incident, there are many steps that can prevent the offender from facing justice. Victims need to report incidents, provide evidence, identify a suspect who needs to be arrested, and then agree to proceed with prosecution. Criminal cases can take months and sometimes years to fully process through the courts and the experience is often a lonely and confusing one for victims.

Interventions

• Provide multilingual and culturally sensitive government services. Key information like incident reporting should be simplified and translated into as many languages as possible. Police departments need to hire and train officers who can speak multiple languages and can build trust within ethnically diverse communities.
• Offer hate crime training to officers, judges, and prosecutors. Sharing the complexity and nuance of hate against Asian Americans can help the legal system better identity and act to respond to hate crimes when they do happen.
• Offer API-sensitive victim advocates. Provide API hate crime victims with free legal advocates who can help them navigate the complexity of pressing charges and be a familiar, comforting face to a lengthy, confusing, and taxing process.
• Provide protection and patrol support. Provide transportation services, particularly to vulnerable Asian Americans such as the disabled and elderly individuals who need help getting safely to appointments or to see family. Train and organize volunteers to patrol API communities and observe and record, deter offenders, and rebuild a sense of security.
• Train the public on bystander intervention. Bring a broader awareness of the micro and macro aggressions faced by Asian Americans. Provide more members of the public with tools to distract, deflect, and support APIs before, during, and after harassment.

Lack of Representation: Political and Media

As we have seen, distorted facts and understanding underlie many of the drivers for anti-Asian hate and a lack of leaders who appreciate the realities of Asian Americans. This skewed reality about Asian Americans is due in part to a lack of representation in politics and the media, which prevents the system from correcting itself.

Chart via Reflective Democracy Campaign

Political Representation

Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are more underrepresented in elected office and particularly in the criminal justice sector, than any other racial group. While making up nearly 7% of the population, only 0.9% of elected officials are Asian, including only 6 prosecutors and 2 county sheriffs (out of 2,400 and 3,000 respectively).

This is in part because many APIs are often immigrants born outside the US, which means they need to gain citizenship in order to vote. Pew Research found that 11 million Asian Americans were eligible to vote in 2020 (representing 5% of eligible voters). But their turnout rates are lower than average: one government survey in New York found that only 41% of Asian New Yorkers eligible to vote were registered and only 31% of registered Asian voters showed up at the ballot box in 2016.

Things appear to be changing though: an estimated 4 million API voters cast a ballot in the 2020 presidential election. And while voter turnout overall was about 32% higher in 2020 over 2016, the API vote grew even more, reaching nearly 50% according to an AAPI Victory Fund report. While most Asian Americans still live in cities and states that tend to be Democratic strongholds, some of the biggest increases came in critical swing states like Arizona and Michigan, which rose 80% and 58% respectively. In the face of rising anti-Asian violence, it appears many API communities are mobilizing to gain more political representation and power.

Chart via Nielsen

Media Representation

Asian and Pacific Islanders are poorly represented in the media. An analysis of 1,300 top-grossing Hollywood films from 2007–2019, found that only 3.4% featured an Asian American or Pacific Islander in a lead role. API characters tend to have less backstory and fewer lines of dialogue compared to non-Asian characters. Of the 44 films that did star an API character as a lead, one third of them were of a single person: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Things aren’t much better on television: a recent Nielsen study found that while Asians were well represented in Broadcast TV, they still lagged behind on Cable and Streaming Video on Demand.

This lack of visibility impacts how society sees Asian Americans. In a recent survey, 42% of Americans couldn’t name a single prominent Asian person. Notably, the next two most popular choices were both movie stars: Jackie Chan, who’s from Hong Kong, and Bruce Lee, who died nearly five decades ago. The same study found that more Americans get information about Asian Americans through movies, TV, and music than friends or colleagues. This lack of representation in the media is partly what led 54% of Asian Americans to say they felt society was paying too little attention to API issues (only 22% felt it was too much) in 13 Fund’s April 2021 API survey.

The importance of media attention and celebrities in driving cultural acceptance is made even more clear when we examine the advancement of the LGBTQ community. In 2013, the vast majority (92%) of LGBTQ Americans felt that society was more accepting than it was a decade prior and a similar number thought that that progress would continue. When asked what “helped a lot” in making society more accepting, respondents cited well-known public figures who identify as LGBT (67%) and LGBT characters in TVs and movies (49%).

Interventions

• Encourage Civic engagement with API communities. Fund efforts to register voters, educate communities on relevant issues, connect with candidates and officials, and help drive voter turnout.
• Help new API candidates run for office. Provide promising community leaders with the training, connections, and support they need to make their first run for elected office.
• Expand voter access and fight voter suppression. Push back against policies and politicians who are working to make it harder to vote and work to expand ease of voter registration, mail in / absentee ballots, translation of voter materials, and paid time off to vote.
• Support Asian Americans getting into the performing arts. Help build the talent pool of API actors, actresses through training, mentorship, and guidance in navigating show business.
• Support APIs behind the camera. Advocate for Asian directors, producers, and writers to help tell the next generation of stories that are inclusive of the API experience.
• Drive turnout to Asian-inclusive media. Organize so-called “Gold Opens” for films, television shows, theater, and video games that authentically present the Asian American experience and bring API stories to life.

Summary

As the United States Civil Rights Commission acknowledged, “Anti-Asian violence has a bitter legacy in the recent history of our country”, from Vincent Chin’s violent murder in 1982 in which both perpetrators walked free, to the present-day.

COVID-19 and the aggressive anti-China rhetoric led by Donald Trump activated and reinforced pre-existing biases against Asian Americans that drove both White Americans and non-Asian minorities to view API with suspicion and hostility. Harassment and violence against Asians has not been prioritized by law enforcement and attempting to prosecute offenders is difficult and can often go nowhere. Without adequate representation in media or politics, it is challenging for APIs to generate and sustain concern for their community’s issues and needs.

By recognizing these drivers of anti-Asian hate, we can start to identify possible interventions that can turn the tide for Asian Americans. From mobilizing API voters to educating journalists to building stronger relationships between law enforcement and API communities, we see many potential interventions to reduce the prevalence of API hate. Given the ongoing economic and social impact of the pandemic, one of the key triggers for this hate, we see this as a high priority issue that needs to be addressed.

Jason Shen & Bilal Mahmood
Partners at 13 Fund

13 Fund is would like to recognize and thank the following individuals for their expertise, feedback, and insights on this report:

Chris Angelis, Dan Hunt, Diana Klatt, Emily May (Hollaback), Hali Lee (Asian Women’s Giving Circle), Jiny Kim (Asian Americans Advancing Justice), Joel Engardio (Stop Crime SF), Laura Huang (Harvard Business School), Leon Sykes (Oakland Unified School District), Linda Chaverts, Nancy Tung (Former Deputy DA, SF), Pei Pei Yu, and Sarah Wan (Community Youth Center of SF)

Footnotes

1. In this piece we will use API, Asian, Asian American interchangeably to refer to anyone residing in the United States of Asian descent — immigrant or citizen.
2. Note however that overall hate crimes across the 20 largest US cities did rise, drive largely by non-Asian hate crimes — hate crimes against Black people rose significantly in California in 2020.
3. I was personally shocked to learn that Fu Manchu was a cultural phenomenon rather than an obscure relic. He is the central character in 18 novels and 16 films from 1913 to 2012. From his description in the first novel, The Insidious Dr Fu-Manchu: “Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, …one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present …Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the Yellow Peril incarnate in one man.”
4. Taiwan and China have had a contentious relationship since 1949, when the Nationalist Party retreated to Taiwan after being defeated by the Communist Party.