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.