In honor of Asian-American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we have joined forces with the NBA G League and former NBA superstar Jeremy Lin to shed light on the immense challenges facing the Asian and Pacific Islander community. We want to use our collective platforms to spread love and end discrimination based on skin color, religion, sexual orientation, or any other variable that unjustly leads to division.

The Asian-American community has dealt with spiking levels of hate and discrimination over the last year throughout the pandemic, with reports of hate crimes all over the country. It’s reprehensible and it must stop, and all of us have a responsibility to call it out when we see or hear it. We need to lift up our fellow Americans, not put them down.

We connected with Dr. Russell Jeung, a professor of Asian-American Studies at San Francisco State University and co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate, to listen, learn, and amplify. Read on to do the same.

For those unaware of what has been going on or those who haven’t seen the hashtag, can you shed some light on the issues facing the AAPI community right now?
We launched Stop AAPI Hate last March and we were immediately flooded with hundreds of incidents of firsthand racism. We now have 6,600 incidents, ranging from civil rights violations and online bullying to school place bullying and physical assault. They are just traumatizing if you’ve read the incidents we’ve heard about with gang bullying and racial epithets and slurs used. In fact, one out of five of our respondents show racial trauma symptoms, that’s long-term anxiety, depression, and hypervigilance. Beyond these traumatizing incidents, we see the hate crimes where people get attacked or killed, sadly. We weren’t surprised to see elderly people killed this year in incidents like the Atlanta shooting because we saw how much hate and anger was directed toward Asians last year.

Is there a true uptick in these incidents right now or are an increasing number of people feeling more empowered to report incidents that were already happening?
There’s a clear surge, and I had wondered about the same question. Why is there so much hate? Because it’s just a biological virus, right? We really attribute the surge to the political rhetoric of last year. The term “Chinese virus” and the insistence of that wording really was deadly because it racialized the virus. It made the virus Chinese and then it stigmatized the people so that the Chinese were the carriers. People made that association, and when they hear it again on social media or see representations of the virus being Chinese, it became part of their implicit bias. It became peoples’ way to perceive Asians. Even I had that implicit bias. If I saw someone wearing a mask and they’re Asian, I thought they were more likely to be infected than a non-Asian, early on in the pandemic. That term was deadly and it went viral, and then viral hate speech led to hate violence.

How does social media help and hurt the situation?
Social media has been a double-edged sword for us. When that hate speech went viral, and as people see racist posts like a Chinese person eating a bat, that chemically hardwires that association into your brain that the virus is Chinese and Chinese people have the virus. It affects us on a subconscious and unconscious level, seeing all of these social media representations, especially our young people who are on their screens all of the time. They see it and get impacted by it without even knowing. But on the other hand, I think Asian-Americans have really used social media to sound the alarm to others about what has been happening and to call for change. We’re not well represented in mainstream news or media, so we use alternative media to address the issues. I think the broader community has created such a buzz that eventually, government and mainstream media had to pay attention. We created enough traffic and noise that people realized this is a national issue, not just for Asian-Americans. It’s a national issue of violence and a national issue of racism.

Why is there so much hate harbored against Asian-Americans right now?
History is repeating itself for Asian-Americans right now. We faced surges in racism during war, like the Japanese incarceration or after 9/11 with Islamaphobia. We’ve faced discrimination and racism during times of economic downturn as well. Vincent Chin was killed by white autoworkers because they thought he was Japanese and they blamed japan for their layoffs. But we also face it during times of pandemic, and last year, we had all three conditions present. With China as the enemy, then the Chinese people in the United States become the enemy. It’s the whole Yellow Peril stereotype reinvoked, where Asians are perceived as dangerous and they’re coming from the outside to invade, especially with their disease-ridden bodies and their hordes of people. People see us, are triggered by those fears, and attack us. Fight or flight mode.

If people want to do more beyond posting on social media, what are some good ways to help out and spread the word?
They need to be upstanders, people who stop racism whenever they see it happening. When someone says something, stop it. When you see racism online, report it. If we didn’t have all of the data and documentation of racism, the media and government wouldn’t pay attention. The more we know about the issue, we can create specific policies to deal with it. We know it’s happening in the schools, so we’re working with school districts to address racial bullying. We know it’s happening on public transit, so we’re calling not for more patrolling but more citizens to monitor and help deescalate issues. People have to intervene, report, and keep amplifying the message. Get official statements from your workplaces, churches, your schools, because we saw how hate was normalized last year so now we need to normalize love and respect.

What are some resources people can use to better educate themselves on the issues facing the AAPI community?
Our website, stopaapihate.org, has plenty of resources. If you’re experiencing racism, if you don’t know how to talk to your kids about racism, if you need legal resources, it’s all there. There are also a lot of history books, I like Erica Li’s. There are also Jose Antonio Vargas’ books about their experiences as Asian-Americans because they interweave history and the current context.

What is the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act and how will it help?
We’re really grateful for Congresswoman Meng and Senator Hirono’s leadership. What it does is expedite hate crime reporting and investigations. If someone gets arrested and the crime is racially motivated, law enforcement will take it a little more seriously and address it more quickly. What it also does, that we really appreciate, is it provides support for community-funded solutions and addresses demeaning language. Again, we saw how racist language led to racist acts of violence. But this is just the first step. We have a range of incidents, and we know racism occurs in schools, online, in stores, and not everything is a crime you can be arrested for. So, we need other policies to address racism before it gets to the level of a crime. We need to support ethnic studies, for example, so that schoolchildren learn empathy and how not to bully. We need expanded civil rights protections so that people can’t harass us while we’re shopping. We want to push for restorative justice, and we want to heal. We want long-term solutions, not Band-Aid solutions.

How did your organization connect with Jeremy Lin and the NBA G League?
Jeremy Lin has been at the forefront of this issue since very early on, even when he was playing in China. He knew right away that it was happening globally, this xenophobia. He’s always been supportive of low-income communities and wanting to work for racial justice, so for him, Stop AAPI Hate shares a lot of his values. It was a natural fit, and we’re really grateful for his support and leadership. He really demonstrates restorative justice. He was racially insulted on the court but he doesn’t want to punish the perpetrator, he just wants to hold them accountable and then figure out how we can both learn from it. That’s the model we want to show others. We just want to educate and teach empathy for everyone.

Is unity achievable and how do we get there?
I don’t know if it’s achievable but for me, it’s the goal. Otherwise, it’s a fractured society at war and conflict. Whether unity is achievable or not, unity is what we’re aiming for. Unity guides us, unity is how we’re going to get to unity. We have to act in solidarity. Again, this isn’t an Asian-American issue. It’s other peoples’ issue with us, so we have to work with others to address it. We need to address anti-Asian racism, we need to address our own anti-Blackness so that we can work better with the African-American community. We need to deal with our own implicit bias. So, unity is the way, and it is also the end goal.

How did you get into this work?
I was always a teacher in Asian-American studies, so I knew the history of how we’ve faced racism. I’ve done a lot of social justice work, and I live in a low-income community with a lot of refugees and undocumented people, so I bring those experiences to the classroom. I’ve also worked on environmental justice issues. I never wanted to work on hate, I just kind of fell into it. It’s really hard to have to read about hate incidents day after day–and feel it.

How much does a person’s documentation or immigration status affect the level of reporting of hate crimes and discrimination?
That’s a great question. That’s why we tell people not to report to law enforcement. People are reporting a lot more to us than they would a government or law enforcement agency. Our numbers are pretty high considering that Asians normally wouldn’t report these types of incidents. One out of seven Asian-Americans are undocumented, so that’s a very high proportion. We want to assure them that we will not report to law enforcement. It’s significant and necessary that we keep their stories confidential.