Anti-Asian hate crimes in our society

Anti-Asian hate crimes in our society.

By Yunuen Espinoza

Recently, our country and our society has been seeing more and more attacks made directly to the Asian community of the United States. These so-called “Anti-Asian hate crimes” have been in the news for quite some time, but at least to me, never as bad as they are right now.

There has been more than 164% increase in anti-Asian hate crime reports and the incidents have increased since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lately, we have seen more and more often how the attacks on Asian-American people have increased dramatically and keep increasing despite the increase in awareness.

On March 2021, a 21 year old man attacked and killed 8 people who were mostly Asian where. Just this May, a man was arrested because he attacked two Asian women and struck one of them in the head with a hammer in San Francisco California.

What are the ideas behind these attacks? Many people believe that Asians are to blame for the pandemic that we are living in right now. Many times we heard our former president calling COVID-19 the “Chinese virus” which gave more and more people enough reason to hate on not only Chinese people but Asians in general.

Many Asian-American people have been under attack recently for numerous reasons, but most of these attacks are tied to racism and people lacking information. First of all, to eradicate these hate crimes, we need to remember each day and recognize each person not by their race, but because they are a person. This will help to stop to a point the racism in society.

We also need to stop calling COVID-19 the Chinese virus, and to stop blaming Asian people for the spread of this virus.

Covid is definitely a hard situation that we all have to deal with, but attacking innocent people that have lived in our society, will not bring this pandemic to an end.

I think it is important to focus on our short term goal which is getting vaccinated and follow regulations so we can go back to normal as soon as possible. What I suggest with this is focusing in the future, instead of looking for someone to blame. As someone who lost both grandmothers to the virus, I cannot do anything else than take care of myself and the people around me so we can all go back to normal and if we all focused on doing our part by taking care of ourselves, this situation would’ve been solved a long time ago.