
In 2020, more Black people were killed by police in any single month than the number of Asian Americans killed by police in the course of a year.While educational disparities exist across different Asian groups in the United States, a significant portion of the Asian-American community is relatively advantaged compared to other groups when it comes to education. In 2019, Black Americans were 10 times more likely to have reported a hate crime to the FBI than Asian Americans they are also far more likely to die at the hands of police than any other group when unarmed. But the language of “invisibility” glosses over what are, at times, racial privileges. Greater visibility might even help Americans distinguish between the many different populations of Asian Americans.

Greater visibility would be beneficial for Asian Americans who have experienced the slights of microaggressions, the routine abuse of anti-Asian jokes, the racial misrepresentations of Hollywood and the marginalization of poorer Asian Americans who do not fit the model-minority stereotype. Many Asian Americans have shared that they feel invisible.

It can be frustrating to feel as if attention to anti-Asian bias is fleeting. After 9/11, heightened American fears about Muslims led to violence that targeted anybody who appeared to be Muslim, including the murder of Sikh American Balbir Singh Sodhi, a gas station owner in Mesa, Ariz., whose killer identified him as a “towel head.” In 2012, a white supremacist killed six Sikh worshipers in Oak Creek, Wis.īecause the paranoia and violence against Americans of Asian origin are cyclical, we are not always part of the national conversation on racial and economic justice. Thirty years later, Vietnamese refugees faced hostility, including racist attacks on Vietnamese fishermen by the Ku Klux Klan in Texas. During World War II, many Americans assumed that Japanese Americans were no different from the Japanese and therefore constituted a subversive threat more than 120,000, many of them citizens, were interned. The laws were the official expression of many years of anti-Chinese violence, including the 1871 massacre of 17 Chinese men in Los Angeles and the 1887 killing of as many as 34 Chinese miners in Deep Creek, Ore. In the late 1800s, the Page Act and the Chinese Exclusion Act effectively ended Chinese immigration, based on fears that these immigrants would pollute the nation with disease, immorality and foreign habits. There is historical reason that Asian Americans feel targeted, scapegoated and vilified.
