Giving Compass' Take:

•  Researchers indicate that this is not the first time in American history that health crises like the COVID-19 pandemic have spurred anti-Asian hate crimes, including harassment and physical violence. 

• How can donors address xenophobia amid a public health crisis? 

• Read about philanthropy's role in responding to xenophobia. 

In the American Journal of Criminal Justice, researchers looked at how anti-Asian hate crimes—
including verbal harassment and physical violence—during the COVID-19 pandemic have furthered the historical “othering” of Asian Americans and reproduced inequalities.

“COVID-19 has allowed for racism and xenophobia to spread because the majority population looks for someone to blame who looks or seems inherently different from themselves, which may be why anti-Asian hate crime appears to have increased during the pandemic,” says study coauthor Shannon Harper, assistant professor of criminal justice at Iowa State University.

Harassment and violence toward Asian Americans have existed since the first large group of Asian immigrants came to America during the Gold Rush in the mid-1800s, say Harper and coauthors Angela Gover, professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Colorado Denver, and Lynn Langton, senior research criminologist at RTI International.

Individual-level racism and xenophobia eventually fueled institutional rhetoric and policies, including the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. In the face of housing segregation policies, many Chinese American communities formed Chinatowns in the late 1800s—which led to violent attacks by whites.

In the United States, newcomers of all ethnicities have historically borne the brunt of discrimination and blame for infectious disease.

The COVID-19 pandemic is not the first public health crisis for which Asian-Americans have been scapegoated. The authors described the bubonic plague in San Francisco in 1900, when public health officials quarantined Chinese residents in Chinatown, and the SARS outbreak of the early 2000s, when East Asians experienced stigmatization worldwide.

Racist policies and political rhetoric toward Asian Americans persisted, including during the current pandemic.

“Unfortunately, eruptions of xenophobia have historically followed close on the heels of pandemics,” the authors write. “Especially when viral outbreaks are deadly, fear often drives those at risk to place blame on some ‘other,’ or some group external to their own national, religious, or ethnic identity.

Read the full article about anti-Asian hate crimes by Chelsea Davis at Futurity.