NEWS
‘An Environment of Hate’?
FOR MANY IN MILWAUKEE, THE LAST 4 YEARS SAW A RISE IN HATE CRIMES BY DAVID LUHRSSEN
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n March 16, a young white gunman went on a killing spree in suburban Atlanta. Six of his eight victims were Asian American women. Police were hesitant to declare it a hate crime; the gunman denied racial motivation and claimed sexual obsession as his reason, yet he chose Asian women. The Atlanta murders are among the latest in a sequence of deadly, highly publicized crimes that targeted specific groups. On October 27, 2018, a young white gunman slipped into a synagogue during morning services and killed 11 worshippers. On June 12, 2016, a young Muslim inspired by ISIS entered a gay nightclub in Orland, Florida and killed 49 clubgoers. On June 17, 2015, a young white gunman entered a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina and killed nine congregants. And on August 5, 2012, a white gunman killed six Sikhs worshipping at their Oak Creek, Wisconsin temple. Although hate crimes have always occurred and few become headlines or are even reported, the verbal and physical abuse of groups targeted by white supremacist and other violent movements rose disturbingly after 2016. Official hate crime tallies are slow in coming and never record the full extent of the problem, yet they provide a useful measure. According to the FBI, although the total number of hate crimes dipped slightly to 7,120, violent hate incidents reached a 16 year high in 2018 with 4,571 assaults. In 2019 numbers for violent and other hate crimes climbed again, totaling 7,314, including 51 murders. Many hate crimes are never reported to the FBI. Most don’t end in homicide, and many acts of hate against targeted groups aren’t crimes at all. “Often to the victim, it is difficult to distinguish between hate crimes, bias and prejudice while it is
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happening to you—I would use the example of a Native woman being called in public a ‘Pocahontas,’” said Marin Webster Denning, a member of the Oneida Nation and lecturer at UW-Milwaukee’s School of Continuing Education. “We use the language of hate violence rather than hate crimes because not all hate is prosecutable and we do not want the focus to be on law enforcement,” explained Kathy Flores, anti-violence program director for Diverse & Resilient, a nonprofit dedicated to the health, safety and wellbeing of Wisconsin’s LGBTQ population. But the headline-grabbing hate violence seen on television news is usually criminal, and over the past year, much of it has been directed against at people whose heritage is identified or misidentified as of Chinese.
ASIAN AMERICANS In 1889 Chinese immigrants in Milwaukee were targeted by a race riot spurred by a Milwaukee Sentinel report of white girls lured into sex trafficking by Asian entrepreneurs. It was one of many anti-Chinese riots that occurred in cities such as Seattle, Los Angeles and across the U.S. during that period. The Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism recently compared anti-Asian hate crimes (as reported to the police) in America’s largest cites. According to the report, hate crimes fell in some cities from 2019 to 2020 but soared in others. San Jose, Dallas and Houston saw numbers rise dramatically since the arrival of COVID. “There is a long history of anti-Asian racism in the United States,” said Alexa Alfaro, spokesperson for the AAPI Coalition of Wisconsin. “It is not new, and this is not the first time Asian Americans have been used as scapegoats during medical, political, and economic crises… We saw similar attacks on the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) community in 2003 during
the SARS outbreaks. The previous administration’s rhetoric only amplified longstanding biases towards Asian Americans.” Did the election of Trump result in the immediate rise of prejudice against Asian Americans—or did the rise in hate crimes begin in 2020 in response to the idea that COVID “came from China”? “The number of recorded incidents has increased significantly since the beginning of the pandemic, but prejudice against Asian Americans has long persisted,” Alfaro continued. “Part of the problem is that racism against Asian Americans goes largely unacknowledged and widely tolerated. It is rarely explicitly confronted. The diversity within the Asian American community can make it hard to capture the nuanced racism. However, with the pandemic paired with the politician’s rhetoric, we saw an unprecedented scenario where all the different Asian communities were equally affected by the racism… Words matter, especially those of the president. Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric helped fuel racist attitudes toward Asian Americans and created an environment of hate.” Alfaro cites growing reports of harassment since the beginning of the pandemic. “Lucky Liu’s, a local restaurant, shut down temporarily due to growing xenophobia and verbal attacks toward their staff members,” she said. “We also know that harassment and hate incidents in the AAPI community go underreported. Several factors have contributed to underreporting. One of the most significant issues is the lack of adequate and accessible reporting and tracking systems. Communities don’t always know where to report and language barriers can make reporting inaccessible. Some communities do not have trust in the authorities and don’t see reporting as particularly useful.”
