photo by Jay Manning for Public Source.Alexis Lai in PublicSource shares perspectives on anti-Asianism in Pittsburgh: "As a Han Chinese woman in Pittsburgh, I see the Atlanta massacre exposing how media, government and academia fail Asian women."
The massacre has been infuriating on many levels, but not at all surprising to anyone who has been genuinely listening to Asians in America. In fact, a year ago, when the first case of COVID-19 was reported in Pittsburgh, I wrote that it wasn’t paranoid to wonder if there would be another Vincent Chin. An American of Chinese ancestry, he was beaten brain dead in Detroit in 1982 by two white men furious about the growing Japanese dominance of the auto industry. His murder, for which his attackers were merely fined $3,000, galvanized the Asian American civil rights movement.More at PublicSource.org.
What is perhaps even more outrageous than the Atlanta attack itself is the tepid overall response from the federal government, local law enforcement, the mainstream news media and the general public – all who still refuse to acknowledge the violence for what it is. Asian Americans are having to continually justify why the killing spree was unambiguously a hate crime against working-class Asian women – enraging, exhausting emotional labor that only compounds the indignity and injustice they are facing in a time of exquisite crisis.
As a Han Chinese woman of Hong Kong ancestry, as a journalist with a decade of professional experience, as an international graduate student in America, and as a journalism and creative nonfiction instructor at the University of Pittsburgh, I have been numb with fury by the culture of complicit complacence toward anti-Asianism.