Why anti-Asian violence spiked during the pandemic
It’s widely known that Asian Americans felt – and were – persecuted during the pandemic. But the extent of this violence, and its uneven geographic distribution across the U.S., is now much clearer, thanks to research I conducted with collaborators at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and the independent research firm Development Services Group.
The Asian American-Pacific Islander Equity Alliance, a nonprofit based in California, has collected reports of 10,370 “hate incidents” from March 2020 through September 2021. The categories of those incidents include verbal harassment, refusal of service at a business and online abuse, as well as assaults and property damage.
My collaborators and I looked more specifically at violent attacks against Asian Americans or their property from 1990 to 2021. In the 30 years before the pandemic, we identified public reports of 210 anti-Asian violent attacks in total, an average of 8.1 per year. But during 2020 and 2021, there were 163 attacks, averaging out to 81.5 a year – or more than 11 times the previous average.