By Pranav Iyer
Nov. 22, 2020
This year, Asian American families across the nation celebrated the sixth and final season of the historic sitcom Fresh off the Boat. It was the first ever national television show that was centered around an Asian American family. But more importantly for many, it captured the realities of growing up Asian American, including the day-to-day subtle and overt racism that many youth have to face.
Hudson Yang, who is the actor that played the show’s main character, Eddie Huang, has also experienced his fair share of discrimination and bullying in real life. Now, in the age of COVID-19, he has witnessed and experienced firsthand the increased spikes in hate crimes and racially-motivated attacks towards Asian Americans. And as the fall came around, he saw many of his friends across the country celebrate their return to school as things headed somewhat towards normalcy. But living in the still heavily-restricted Los Angeles County, where school is fully online, Yang actually views Zoom classes as a privilege for himself and many other Asian Americans students while racial tensions are high.
VIDEO: Hudson Yang on fearing in person learning
“The main reason why I am happy to be away from my class is because… the coronavirus is being blamed on Asians, Pacific Islanders and such, especially Chinese people,” Yang said. “I’m not certain how my classmates would react… but I know that some of them are kind of a little bit racist and not very educated, surprisingly. So that’s the biggest fear I had going back to school, was that maybe I or others around me would be targeted because of COVID.”
But unlike Yang, a large majority of the country’s students currently attend at least a partially in-person system, meaning most Asian American kids don’t have that same luxury of not facing the perpetrators head on.
“Much of this happened when we were alone with our families was tough, but now that [many kids are] back in school where bullying is more rampant,… [they’re] facing all sorts of adversities,” Yang said about students having to deal with Anti-Asian sentiment in classrooms.
Russell Jeung, the co-founder of the STOP AAPI Hate initiative, said that even before the pandemic began, AAPI students were statistically the most likely racial group to be bullied in California public high schools. He added that the discrepancy has only furthered since the turn of the year.
VIDEO: Russell Jeung on the COVID-19-based disrimination that Asian American youth can face
STOP AAPI Hate was created early this year to be a central hub to keep track and help contexualize the frequency and types of anti-Asian attacks. According to data Jeung helped compile, there are several clear takeaways. AAPI youth have experienced an increase in cyberbullying, and 90% have experienced racism in various forms. The most common forms of discrimination have been verbal harassment and shunning.
“When you read what happens in these incidents, they're not microaggressions,” Jeung said. “They're actually horrific, traumatizing oftentimes incidents... Oftentimes for youth, it's gang bullying.”
Historically speaking, this isn’t anything new according to De Anza College Asian American studies professor Mae Lee. As early as the 1800s, Chinese immigrants have been blamed for numerous disease outbreaks, including smallpox, syphilis and the bubonic plague. Written and artistic propaganda, seen in newspapers, flyers and on company buildings, were used to foster hatred towards Asian American communities, such as in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
Today, that propaganda can be seen in the form of intentional and divisive rhetoric by government officials and far right media, Lee said. This includes language like ‘Kung Flu’ and ‘Chinese Virus’ as well as deep-fake photos and videos of Asians or Asian Americans eating bats or admitting to planning the virus that have proliferated throughout the internet.
Along with being a student and an actor, Yang is also on the advisory board of Act to Change, a nonprofit dedicated to helping fight discrimination within AAPI communities. On Oct. 24, the organization hosted its second annual Youth Rising Anti-Bullying Conference. Several key themes that were discussed included the implementation of anti-racism curriculum and how Asian American youth can deal with COVID-19-related hate as they return to school.
“Race is a social construct but we live in a very radicalized society,” sixth grader Haddie Watson said during a student panel as part of the event. “So we all have internalized messaging about it. If schools want to reduce bullying, then they should decolonize their curriculums and decenter whiteness so that all students have the opportunity to be valued.”
For decades, Asian American history has been sparsely taught in California schooling despite the fact that the Asian American community has been a part of the state’s history from its beginning.
VIDEO: Helen Hu on the lack of Asian American history teaching in schools
Helen Hu attends Lynbrook High School, an 85% Asian-populated school in the Bay Area, yet still has had hardly any teaching that has anything to do with her community.
“Even my history teacher said, ‘Oh, you know, if you were living in another state, we probably wouldn’t be teaching about the Chinese Exclusion Act,’ which is one of the only things you learn about Asian American history in AP US History,” Hu said. “… Ignorance brews hate, right? Ignorance brews lack of understanding, xenophobia, those types of things.”
That is beginning to change at the college level in California. For the past two years, scholar and activist Melina Abdullah has been working tirelessly to bring into legislation a bill that would make it a requirement for all California State University students to take an ethnic studies class in order to graduate. This August, that bill was signed by Governor Gavin Newsom. Though it is a small step, both Jeung and Lee believe it could go a long way to help educate the next generation.
And in September, the California State Superintendent Tony Thurmond launched the “Education to End Hate” initiative to combat bias, bigotry and racism in schools across the state. This plan consists of three components: educator training grants to equip teachers with adequate training in the areas of anti-racism and bias, virtual classroom series to allow students, faculty and parents to engage in dialogue about how schools can help and a public roundtable with leaders from social and racial justice organizations that was hosted the same month.
“It feels like every day we are seeing heartbreaking examples: more anti-Semitic behavior, bullying of Asian American students because of our President’s rhetoric, Islamophobia, discrimination of our LGBTQ neighbors, and violence directed at people of color,” Thurmond wrote in the news release. “It’s time to double down on our efforts to combat all forms of hate, bias, and bigotry. By digging deeper into the complexities of our diverse and difficult histories—not denying or ignoring them—I believe education can provide the pathway to healing, understanding, and racial and social justice.”
With the increase in activism from Asian American communities and initiatives taken to combat them, such as the aforementioned Education to End Hate plan, Lee has noticed an overall mindset change towards anti-Asian sentiment within her own students. She says that before the pandemic, many of her Asian American students were worried about speaking about their experiences with discrimination and for that reason, perceived them as isolated situations. But now, she says that due to the influx of Asian Americans publically voicing their concerns about the injustices they have faced in light of COVID-19, most of her students see racism towards Asian Americans as a real problem and feel like they have a community they can reach out to for support.
“Probably in my entire professional lifetime, this is the closest I have seen academic conversation, meaning the language and the analysis that is done in Asian Americans studies classes or ethnic studies classes,… to the conversation taking place in the general public.”
— Asian American studies professor Mae Lee
Classroom initiatives specifically catered towards COVID-19-based anti-Asian sentiment have also been built from the ground up. This fall, the organization Beyond Differences, whose mission is to end social isolation and create a culture of belonging in schools, launched The Stand Up for AAPI Youth During COVID campaign. It has gained support from notable Asian American figures, including Kamala Harris and Andrew Yang. The action plan provides teachers and students a comprehensive toolkit consisting of lesson plans and student-led activities that cover topics such as implicit bias, microaggressions and how to recognize privilege and inequalities. And in partnerships with various AAPI civil rights organizations, a set of national calls to action have been made to push schools and district boards towards passing legislation to actively deal with and fight against ‘racist attitudes and behaviors aimed at AAPI youth due to the coronavirus.’
Many of those who have been working to combat these deeply rooted issues have expressed that there is still a long way to go before real change can be seen. But Act to Change founder Maulik Pancholy said that he is grateful to see that there is finally public discussion around it and steps being taken to partake in the battle that he has been fighting for many years now. But more importantly, he has noticed, are the efforts and passion from Asian American youth to help write these wrongs. That is what gives him hope for a better future.
But until then, Asian American youth will still have to face COVID-19-related discrimination. So as a parting message at Act to Change’s Youth Rising event, Joshua dela Cruz, the Filipino American Blue’s Clues host, offered a bit of optimism to those in attendance.
“There is a larger world if you continue to hope for a better world… and if you continue to put out kindness despite everything coming at you, everything negative,” Cruz said during the Youth Rising event. “Because it does get better, but only if we pair the hope with the work.”