AAPI Hate Crimes Data: Issues and Trends

Essential Readings:

"[T]he narratives of anti-Asian violence in the media and community commentary continue to privilege East Asians, toggling between Vincent Chin and Atlanta as key archetypal moments and skipping over other critical moments in between. Notably, however, the Atlanta killings bear much greater resemblance to the Oak Creek murders than the Vincent Chin murder in terms of proximity in time and method. And both Oak Creek and Atlanta bear a significant resemblance to the mass killing of four Sikhs in Indianapolis in April 2021. Why, then, do our media and community narratives fail to make these connections? Our research indicates that much of the answer stems from the American public’s understanding of who counts as Asian. For the majority of Americans, the default for Asian is East Asian."

"Asian respondents who say violence against their group in the U.S. is increasing give many reasons for the rise, according to an open-ended question in which people responded in their own words. Some 20% directly cited former President Donald Trump and his rhetoric about China as the source of the pandemic, his racist comments or his labeling the coronavirus as the “kung flu” or “Chinese flu” as one of the reasons for the rise in violence. Some 16% cited racism in the United States against Asian people as the source of violence, and another 15% said the rise in violence is due to COVID-19 and its impacts on the nation. An additional 12% said scapegoating and blaming Asian people for the pandemic has been responsible for the rise in violence against the U.S. Asian population."

"Ten percent of Asian Americans and Pacific Islander adults have experienced hate crimes and hate incidents in 2021, according to a March 2021 study by SurveyMonkey and AAPI Data. These rates were higher than the national average of 6 percent. Similarly, 12 percent of Asian Americans and 10 percent of Pacific Islanders experienced hate incidents in 2020, compared to a national average of 8 percent. With about 18 million AAPI adult residents in the United States, these survey findings suggest that millions of AAPIs have experienced hate incidents since the onset of COVID-19."

  • (RECOMMENDED) March 30, 2021: Anti-Asian Hate Incidents and the Broader Landscape of Racial Bias, Janelle Wong, Senior Researcher at AAPI Data and Professor of Asian American Studies and Political Science, University of Maryland, College Park, and Karthick Ramakrishnan, Director of AAPI Data and Professor of Public Policy, University of California, Riverside.

"The survey results show similar rates of reported experience with hate incidents among different communities of color in 2021. The factors driving these incidents and wider range of experiences with racial discrimination captured by the survey, however, are likely distinct. Asian American exclusion from American life is often built on the perception that they are “perpetual foreigners,” representing Asian countries no matter how many generations they have lived in the United States. Latinos have also faced similar acts of othering and exclusion, with the presumption that they are undocumented immigrants even though a majority are born in the United States. By contrast, anti-Black prejudice is built on extremely pernicious stereotypes about violence and criminality, used to justify centuries of violent subjugation of Black lives from slavery, to Jim Crow, to modern-day segregation and incarceration."

"Since the very beginning of the pandemic, hate crimes toward Asians and Asian Americans have gotten increased media attention. Our data, from the Understanding Coronavirus in America Study, confirms that these events are happening more often – and are not just appearing more common because of press coverage or public awareness. Asian Americans experienced more threats and harassment than any other racial or ethnic group in the U.S. during the coronavirus pandemic."

"In the week after former President Donald J. Trump tweeted about “the Chinese virus,” the number of coronavirus-related tweets with anti-Asian hashtags rose precipitously, a new study from UC San Francisco has found. The study examined nearly 700,000 tweets containing nearly 1.3 million hashtags, the week before and after the president’s tweet on March 16, 2020, to see whether his use of the term “Chinese virus” – an expression that public health experts warned against using – may have led others to use anti-Asian language on Twitter."