By Rich McKay
ATLANTA (Reuters) -Americans protesting anti-Asian violence will gather in at least a dozen U.S. cities on Wednesday to mark one year since a mass shooting of women of Asian heritage in Atlanta-area spas awoke the nation to the spike in hate incidents against the community.
A coalition of advocacy groups has planned events for cities including Houston, Atlanta, and San Francisco to raise awareness over the growing risk of violence, accentuated in recent days by the brutal beating of a woman of Asian descent in New York.
On March 16, 2021, police say Robert Aaron Long killed eight people at three spas in and around Atlanta, including six women of Asian heritage. While Long, a white man, claimed to have been driven to violence by his addiction to sex, many saw misogyny and racial bias as likely triggers in the shooting spree.
The massacre came as anti-Asian hate crimes were on the rise in the United States. Experts have said the coronavirus pandemic, which is believed to have originated in China, prompted some people to lash out against Asian-Americans.
President Joe Biden issued a statement on Wednesday saying the shooting had forced Americans to “reckon with our nation’s long legacy of anti-Asian sentiment and gender-based violence” while highlighting the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act he signed last year aimed at combating violence targeting people of Asian descent.
The “Break The Silence – Justice for Asian Women” rallies on Wednesday will commemorate the lives taken in the Long shootings: Paul Andre Michels, 54; Delaina Ashley Yaun, 33; Daoyou Feng, 44; Yong Ae Yue, 63; Xiaojie Tan, 49; Hyun Jung Grant, 51; Suncha Kim, 69; and Soon Chung Park, 74.
“As I grieve on the anniversary of my mother’s murder, I want her death not to be in vain,” Robert Peterson, the son of Yong Ae Yue, said in a statement to the event’s organizers.
A total of 10,905 hate incidents targeting Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders were reported between March 19, 2020, and Dec. 31, 2021, according to research released this month by the nonprofit group Stop AAPI Hate. The majority of incidents concerned women and 16% involved physical assault, the group found.
A separate report by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, showed that hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders rose 164% in the first quarter of 2021 compared with the same period in 2020.
The problem was highlighted by a brutal assault in Yonkers, New York, where police said a woman of Asian descent on Friday was punched more than 125 times by a man who called her an anti-Asian slur before launching the unprovoked attack.
National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum Executive Director Sung Yeon Choimorrow said that the scapegoating of Chinese people for the pandemic, especially by former President Donald Trump, is partly to blame for the rise in violence.
Choimorrow said that while Asian Americans were targets of racial violence well before the pandemic, now they are more willing to speak up about their experiences, with the Atlanta shootings serving as a catalyst for people to listen.
“Nothing had galvanized the country like the Atlanta spa shootings did. It was a whole different scale. It opened this space up for us to step in and be able to explain why this happened,” she said.
(reporting by Rich McKay in Atlanta, Brendan O’Brien in Chicago and Nathan Layne in Wilton, Connecticut; editing by Jonathan Oatis)
