As racism towards Asians grow worse, Carver weighs in

By: Jennifer Kaing

November 2, 2022

Senior Dremere Reyes at Carver

On November 17, 2021, 4 teenage girls were attending the North Bound Philadelphia train. While being on the train each of them got attacked while being called many different racial slurs, but thankfully 3 teenage boys stepped in to break them up from the attack. There have been many protests in Philly even at schools to stop these terrible Asian hate crimes but ever since Covid, racism has been getting worse and worse. Each of these crimes have affected Asians in many different ways. They feel as though they can’t do simple things without having the fear of getting attacked or harassed.


The Asian Student Alliance hosted a Panel discussion on thoughts of how people feel about racism towards Asians being normalized. Senior Dremere Reyes was talking about the struggles and issues his own friends have to face everyday just because they are Asian. He goes more into detail about how he tries to make an understanding of the fear they have to go through everyday while living in Philadelphia. He quotes, "So like my part of town by herself, if I'm not there she will not go to that part of town. And that's just North Philly. That's like 80% of Philadelphia. Like why what's the problem? Why won’t you go past East South because she doesn't feel safe going past that part. And I thought about it and I'm thinking you know what, she has a point because there has been a lot of, you know, reports and I can't blame her. Not one bit. If I'm not there, she doesn't feel safe. So that really says something”.

Growing up many Asians faced all sorts of racism at a young age so it feels so weird how now in this generation our culture and religion has become a trend to many young audiences through social media.

African American History teacher/seventh grade Social Studies teacher Elaine Kuoch, has seen the evolution of how racism and love/hatred towards asians has evolved as the years has moved past. Based off of her experiences of racism growing up she finds it strange how now in this generation many people are starting to appreciate our culture. But feels as though some people are only appreciating it now because of the trends through the eyes of Gen-Z. She says, “More recently in the US, different Asian cultures, particularly Korean and Japanese cultures have become more mainstream with Kpop and different types of Asian food like bubble tea. And growing up it wasn't like that for me. There were very, very few if any Asian people on TV and it's not until more recently that those aspects of Asian cultures have become popular".

The “typical asian” is expected to be having features such as slanted eyes, small eyes, pale/yellow skin, cultured, fluent in their ethnicity’s language, straight A student, all asians are expected to be from China, Japan or Korea, has an accent, all asians has troubles to speak english or can’t speak it at all. So many people assume otherwise if you don’t follow those categories of the expectations of being asian.

Growing up as an Asian American eighth grader Ram Par has faced many of the stereotypes of how supposedly a "normal asian" is supposed to act. She feels very disrespected by their actions because instead of assuming you should educate yourself beforehand. She says, “I remember once like I was really young at this time. We were at the beach and like these random white kids, I was just talking to my parents. They were like, 'Oh, do you speak English? Where are you from? I get it was kind of out of curiosity. But it kind of felt offensive because I was speaking English too.'

8th Grader Ram Par at Carver

Senior Yanhui Wu at Carver

In many shows/movies, Asian characters usually are portrayed to be a doctor, nerd, or computer technician. This causes people to build up stereotypes on Asian people which if they don’t follow these stereotypes that have been built up in their heads they’re supposedly not considered as Asian and questioned.


As stereotypes grow to build worse and worse, Senior Yanhui Wu struggled with having to fit into everyone's expectations. She quotes, “I felt as if I had to fit to the like signal or stereotype that was being shown in the media or in like Asian characters in the media and I had to fit to that. Standard, like I would have to be this kind of nerdy character, I didn't have any room for like failure as like a normal human being should have."

Based on past generations people used to look back at Asian culture and look down upon. Many young Asian girls and even women are often getting fetishized by young and older men. Though these men know that it makes these women uncomfortable, they still find ways to make it okay. Which reflects back on why there hasn’t been a decrease towards these hate crimes.


Throughout many years of teaching Elaine Kuoch has witnessed many incidents that have encountered in her classroom that have dealt with racism. Kuoch tries to make sure that these incidents get handled rather than ignored. She explains, “Unfortunately, I have encountered some students being made fun of because of their culture or because of their background, where insensitive comments are made to them, or their cultures are fetishized in a way all as well. And I've also experienced this with Asian girls, Asian young women who are students who become fetishized by young men at the school because of the ways that sometimes Asian females are over sexualized. And that has been an unfortunate experience for a lot of students. One major way that I tried to support fighting against racism towards Asians is through clubs. We established a client club and now the Asian Student Alliance where any students have a place where they can learn about what it means to be Asian in a positive way and have a space to share about their own experiences with race and culture and ethnicity. And in terms of more major instances, as a teacher I tried to do. I tried to make sure that all of these major incidents are handled by the administration so that they don't go ignored and unnoticed."

African American History/ 7th Grade Social Studies teacher Elaine Kuoch at Carver

Everyday anybody can face racism but these recent incidents have been mostly occurring in SEPTA train stations. Lots of people in Philadelphia take SEPTA to get home or work. So these hate crimes make it extremely dangerous to do the simplest things.


As these incidents have been getting worse and worse NHS Advisor/Chinese Language teacher Yun Zeng tries to spread awareness to her students to keep them aware and safe. She says, “I can advise the students to be more careful and be more alert about the things around them. But to stop this, like the kind of like violence I think the whole community have to come together, especially the policeman and also like a SEPTA and they should do something and also, even the people around I think we should all bring the awareness of the other people as well if they saw this, they also need to help and stands up as well,”

Racism is something people often like to use to categorize people into groups to make them feel different from one another but in reality we are all the same. Therefore, just because someone practices a religion and another culture you don’t follow doesn’t mean they're much different than you; we're all human.


“Racism in general, is something that people just created to be powerful and to think that they're better than other groups, which shows that really, you know, we're all equal in reality,” said Elaine Kuoch.