
Since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, our Asian American allies have experienced a spike in hate violence and discrimination. Our AAPI partners, OCA, National Council of Asian Pacific Americans, Chinese for Affirmative Action and Asian Pacific Planning and Policy Council, have links of reporting incidents on their websites, and we encourage folks to find the right space to report their experiences:
- The Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council, A3PCON, has in-language hate incident reporting guides, including ones in Hindi and Punjabi. You can view them here.
- Chinese for Affirmative Action also has in-language hate incident reporting guides, available here in Punjabi, Thai, and more.
If you’d like to report incidents of hate violence or racist political rhetoric, you can detail your experience here in SAALT’s hate violence database. Please note that SAALT’s tracking form focuses on collecting stories from South Asians.
Like many other communities, South Asians have long experienced xenophobic rhetoric, bias, and hate violence in the U.S. and we continue to see Muslim communities around the world targeted and scapegoated for spreading COVID-19.
Many South Asians who first immigrated to the United States were subjected to anti-immigrant rhetoric and driven out of towns where they settled. After 1965, South Asians often experienced bias in the workplace including the glass ceiling and discrimination against those who had accents. South Asian working class immigrants who moved to urban areas also faced targeting and alienation in the 1980s.
Since September 11th, 2001 South Asian, Sikh, Muslim, and Arab Americans have been the targets of numerous hate crimes, as well as employment discrimination, bullying, harassment, and profiling. In addition, places of worship have been vandalized and attacked, including the tragic shooting of the Sikh gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin and countless mosques targeted with violence, bombs, and arson.
SAALT has been systematically tracking hate violence and xenophobic rhetoric targeting Muslims and those racialized as Muslim since November 2015. In March 2020, SAALT expanded its tracking to include COVID-19 related hate violence targeting Asian Americans. To date, SAALT and our partners have tracked 310 incidents of xenophobic or Islamophobic rhetoric, and 612 incidents of hate violence victimizing Muslims and Asian Americans, and those perceived as Muslim or Asian American.
View our monthly summaries here.