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People rally against hate crimes. | Photo: Reuters
The number of hate crimes against Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States has escalated dramatically in recent years, prompting civil rights group, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, to launch the first-ever hate-crimes tracker against this group of people.
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The new website, standagainsthatred.org, tracks hate incidents submitted from around the country, which are posted anonymously.
“We’ve always recognized that hate incidents have been an issue,” said AAJC Executive Director John Yang, as reported by NPR. “We realized that we really needed a better tracking tool.”
Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders, or AAPI, are targeted, according to Yang, because they are perceived as the “perpetual foreigner.” That anti-foreign sentiment has only increased under the new administration of President Donald Trump, he said.
One of the earliest recorded incidents of hate crimes against this group took place in the 1800s when the white supremacist group Arsonists of the Order of Caucasians murdered four Chinese men who they blamed for taking jobs from white workers. The victims were set on fire.
More recently, in 2006, in a headline-grabbing case, two men in New York were charged with a hate crime for attacking four Asian men, including one left with a possible fractured skull in a predominantly white neighborhood.
Yang explained that as disturbing as these stories are, they often don’t show up in national data, with AAPI often underreporting incidents for fear of being intimidated by law enforcement.
“We need to raise public awareness that hate incidents against AAPI are not one-off incidents. They happen in much greater numbers than we’d like to admit,” said Yang.
AAJC plans to share data with the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate crimes throughout the country.
