The calls for investigators to consider hate crime charges as well as the outrage, sadness and fear among Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have only grown amid an uptick in reported incidents against Asian communities in the US since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. But lawmakers and community leaders say racism against Asian Americans is nothing new.
The recent attacks shocked a deeply divided nation that has been continuously pushed to talk about the racism and inequity that plague its increasingly diverse demographic.
Seeing the faces of the victims in the Atlanta-area spa shootings prompted fear beyond the Peach state in Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities.
CNN is only using first names for their safety and to help prevent them from facing retribution in their communities.
“This is a moment that there is no denial that race and gender are factors in this tragedy,” Choi said.
In the past week, many lawmakers, experts and advocates have said there’s a link between the anti-Asian sentiment, the Capitol riots and the ongoing voting right battle.
“In many parts of the country, some people want to have a more narrow definition of who truly belongs, of who truly has rights,” Dhingra said.
Capitol rioters ‘hated our skin color,’ Black officer says
“The Black officer struggle was different as in, like I said, we fought against not just people that were, that hated what we represented, but they hate our skin color also,” Harry Dunn told CNN’s Don Lemon on CNN Tonight last week. “That’s just a fact and they used those words to prove that, they showed that they hated us and they hated our skin color.”
“Once I had time to sit down and put it all together, it was just so overwhelming: that here we are giving so much and putting our lives on the line to protect democracy and keep it and we’re being called racial slurs, traitors, and any just weapon that these people could use because they were upset about something,” he said.
Several lawmakers described the rioters as White supremacists in the days and weeks after the mob.
Wave of voting rights restrictions likened to Jim Crow era
A battle over voting rights has ensued across the country in recent weeks. Republicans are pushing for restrictions that Democrats and advocates argue would substantially impact people of color.
The proposed measures could limit Sunday voting and the number of ballot boxes, eliminate no-excuse absentee voting, ban automatic voter registration and prohibit volunteers from serving free food and drinks to people standing in line at the polls.
In Georgia, lawmakers said in recent days that they plan to preserve Sunday early voting as part of the omnibus voting package that the House committee will take up this week. A previous bill sought to allow only one optional day of Sunday voting.
For Cliff Albright, the co-founder of the Black Voters Matter Fund, the bill “continues to be nothing but voter suppression.”
“The recent changes are nothing more than putting a little makeup and cologne on Jim Crow,” Albright added.
Voting rights activists had criticized that limit as attacking “Souls to the Polls” — programs that help drive turnout among Black churchgoers, a key Democratic constituency. And a CNN analysis of voting patterns in November’s general election found the measure eliminated days when a disproportionate number of Black voters had cast their ballots.
“The only connection that we can find is that more people of color voted, and it changed the outcome of elections in a direction that Republicans do not like,” Abrams told CNN.
The country may have become the epicenter of a racial reckoning last summer but the flurry of recent events reveals those discussions are far from over.
CNN’s Fredreka Schouten and Kelly Mena contributed to this report.
Source : Nbcnewyork