Anti-Asian Sentiment and the Soul of America

When President Biden and Vice President Harris were still campaigning for the offices they now hold, they often referred to the 2020 election as a “battle for the soul of the nation.” Their view, I suppose, was that the election was more or less a battle between the forces of good and evil, of equality and prejudice, of love and hate. The Trump administration had apparently steered the national ship toward violence and racism. With Biden and Harris, it would get back on course. Our “soul,” which I can only assume they believe is a soul that champions justice and goodwill, would finally be restored after an arduous four years.

Never mind that Dylann Roof murdered nine African Americans in Charleston, South Carolina’s Emanuel AME Church seven years into the Obama/Biden administration. That Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, and Laquan McDonald were all killed by racist violence rather deep in the Obama era. I do not deny that the brand of racism spawned from an open white supremacist’s presence in the White House is a uniquely heinous one. How could I when all of us are witnesses? But if eight years of liberal rule did not stop wanton racial violence, what exactly is the nature of this soul that is being battled for? Americans have proven for centuries that they will continue to perpetrate such violence regardless of who the sitting president is, and the people that committed and supported hate crimes during the Trump administration will not simply pack up and leave. This leads me to believe that our soul is not one of basic good, but rather of constant conflict between good and otherwise, and, quite often, historically habitual prejudice that the good never seems to be able to defeat.

The surge in hate crimes against Asian Americans since last year is a recent example of this truly American strain of prejudice. The former President’s incendiary and hopelessly misinformed rhetoric concerning the “China virus” has been widely agreed upon as the primary cause. He consistently used the Chinese government as a scapegoat for his own negligence, and in doing so became directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans. His loyal cultists studied his scapegoating closely and similarly denounced the “fake news” that told them Asian Americans had nothing to do with the pandemic and that not every Asian person was Chinese. As a result, anti-Asian hate crimes spiked by 1,900% in New York City last year. In California’s Bay Area, the hotbed for this vicious trend, an 84-year-old Thai man was slammed to the ground, and his injuries sustained from the attack killed him two days later. A 91-year-old Asian man of an unconfirmed nationality was shoved to the ground in Oakland, and the assailant went on to do the same to a 60-year-old Asian man and a 55-year-old Asian woman.

Here, I believe, we have a timeless American tradition in miniature. A great deal of prejudice in this country has been sourced from a combination of fear and ignorance. Jim Crow-era propaganda and folklore was rife with harmful lies about the nature of African Americans, for example. They were thieves and sexual deviants. They were shiftless, yet still found the energy to murder and rape and ruin the nation’s integrity.

The modern example in the context of anti-Asian prejudice would be the bigot’s belief that all Asians, Chinese or not, are directly responsible for the outbreak of COVID-19, and that it is any self-respecting American’s duty to defend their God-fearing, freedom-loving homeland from them. Needless to say, this is patently ridiculous and ignorant to the highest degree. Every part of these beliefs, from their tragic initiations to their abhorrent conclusions is steeped in ignorance. And the Donald, the glorified puppet-master running the show from behind his gilded curtain, made it a staple of his administration to instill as much baseless, antagonistic fear into his subjects as their gullible minds could take. So, freshly terrified of the pandemic they refuse to thwart by wearing masks, they take out their confused frustration on unsuspecting Asian American elders. Thank you, Donald.

I regret to say that this is the kind of activity that comes to mind when I consider the “soul of America,” because few things have stood the test of time the way our prejudices have. One cannot say the country has always championed freedom—African Americans began in chains. One cannot say it is concerned with liberty and justice for all when state-sponsored murderers continue to evade justice to this day. But the soul is contested, and that is reason enough to remain hopeful. Multiple volunteer groups in the Bay Area have initiated programs to assist elderly Asian Americans while shopping or walking in the area. As I wrote previously, the President recently signed an executive order dissuading further anti-Asian hate crimes. We may have a long way to go, but at least we are going.