Lin Min

linmin67@126.com

EIGHT people, including six women of Asian descent, were killed in the shootings last week at three spas in the U.S. city of Atlanta. The suspect’s motives are under investigation, but questions arise about the role of race and whether the shootings are further proof of a rising tide of violence against Asian Americans.

Authorities said the 21-year-old suspect, Robert Aaron Long, told police that he targeted the spas because of a “sex addiction.” With six of the victims being Asian women, the Asian communities in America are not convinced that Long’s attacks were not racially motivated.

What a police officer said about Long during a press briefing laid bare the systemic racial bias in American society. On Wednesday, one day after the bloody shootings, Georgia Sheriff’s Captain Jay Baker described Long as “kind of at the end of his rope, and yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did.” Baker’s remarks immediately triggered an outpouring of outrage.

Netizens soon discovered that Baker last year shared an image of a T-shirt on Facebook, which contained a racial slur associating the coronavirus with China: “Covid 19: imported virus from Chy-na.”

A new study based on police statistics across major American cities found a nearly 150 percent surge in anti-Asian hate crimes last year. The numbers reflect a growing trend of discrimination against Asian Americans during the pandemic. The report, released early this month by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, found the first spikes rose alongside COVID-19 cases in March and April.

The spike in anti-Asian American violence in the past year included people being slashed with a box cutter and set on fire, as well as verbal harassment. On Tuesday, Xie Xiaozhen, a 76-year-old Asian woman, was waiting at a traffic light in downtown San Francisco when a man in his 30s punched her, totally unprovoked.

The surge of hate crimes and incidents first emerged after a rise in anti-Asian misinformation last spring after the virus began to spread around the world. Anti-China hashtags on Facebook and Twitter spiked when then-U.S. President Donald Trump called COVID-19 the “Chinese virus” and “Kung Flu” despite the fact that the origin of the virus remains unknown. Trump scapegoated China in an apparent attempt to deflect attention from his administration’s horrendous mishandling of the response to the coronavirus.

The Trump administration’s disinformation campaign against China was joined by some U.S. media outlets. A Fox News article in April that went viral baselessly said that the coronavirus was created in a lab in Wuhan and intentionally released. The article was liked and shared more than 1 million times on Facebook and retweeted 78,800 times on Twitter, The New York Times reported.

In recent months, racist memes and posts about Asian Americans have been flooding on platforms such as Telegram and 4chan. The surge of hate speeches in cyberspace has accompanied rising attacks against Asian Americans. On messaging apps, anti-Asian groups and discussion threads have been increasingly active since November, researchers told The New York Times.

Social media networks have fueled bias and bigotry. Algorithms that recommend contents and groups according to a user’s preference tend to create an “echo chamber” effect, an environment where a person only encounters information or opinions that reflect and reinforce their own. This has made things worse for people who display higher level of “confirmation bias,” which is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one’s prior beliefs or values. Biases were strengthened as America was further torn apart by Trump’s divisive rhetoric and policies.

Anti-intellectualism prospered during Trump’s presidency, fueling conspiracy theories and fake news. The “know-all” ex-president, who bragged about his vast knowledge on just about every subject, publicly displayed his disdain for science and rationality, and indoctrinated his huge numbers of followers with falsehoods and lies. They believed everything Trump said and tweeted without even giving a thought. When he shouted “Chinese virus,” a huge number of Americans took his baseless claim as fact and believed China was to blame for the pandemic. They lost their reasoning capacity, and vented their anger at anyone who appears to be Chinese. Such bias, hatred and stupidity continue to haunt America even after Trump left the White House.

After the Atlanta shootings, U.S. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris condemned anti-Asian violence Friday, warning against silence and complicity. However, condemnation is far from enough. In addition to tougher law enforcement response to racist attacks, the U.S. Government, news media outlets and social media networks have to take actions against misinformation and disinformation that have victimized Asian Americans and other groups.

(The author is a deputy editor-in-chief of Shenzhen Daily.)