A suspect was brought into custody and charged with murder a day after the March 16 Atlanta-area shootings that left eight massage parlor/spa workers dead. Six of the dead were Asian American women.
Lipscomb’s Office of Student Life issued a statement via Instagram, offering support to the Asian American community amid an uptick in hate crimes nationally.
“We see you. We hear you. We care for you. You belong,” read the statement that finished with the hashtag #stopasianhate.
Anti-Asian attacks have been on the rise since the beginning of the pandemic, and many of them have resulted in physical violence, particularly against older members of that community in big-city Chinatowns like in New York and San Francisco.
The forum Stop AAPI Hate reports nearly 3,800 reported incidents of discrimination (AAPI stands for Asian American and Pacific Islander).
Racial bias surrounding the origin of the COVID virus has been blamed as the primary reason for the uptick in hate crimes against Asian Americans. n for this uptick, most reported incidents consisted of verbal harassment and name-calling. The motive of the Atlanta shooter is under evaluation by local officials and the FBI.
In the March 19 editions of The Washington Post newspaper, reporter Andrea Salcedo wrote that in February of 2020, just when the pandemic was beginning its still mortal attack on the world, the World Health Organization urged that terms like “Wuhan virus” or the “China virus” be avoided. They said continued use of those terms could spike antagonism and attacks against Asians.