This is a difficult week for many members of the Asian diaspora, which includes me and 9.9% of EAs (according to the 2019 community survey). Anti-Asian hate crimes may be dwarfed morally by many of the problems the EA movement focuses on, but they have had an emotional impact on many people of Asian descent disproportionate to their humanitarian impact. As a community, we should stand against the intolerance and unnecessary suffering caused by these hate crimes, and support our community members who have been upset by this.
Learn More
- EA and tackling racism (Sanjay, 2020)
- What you can do to fight violence and racism against Asian Americans (Vignesh Ramachandran, PBS Newshour, 2021)
- Anti-Asian Violence Resources compilation (note that I have not vetted and don't necessarily endorse all of these resources, but I recommend checking them out in order to learn about the issue)
Yes - the US is the country whose data I am most familiar with, and the article is written by someone at Cornell (in America) about an event that took place in America and contains a link to a list of resources by Americans providing advice for Americans. The US also has an unusually high asian population for a non asian majority country, which makes this issue more significant than in e.g. Switzerland or Japan.
It's possible that this is also happening in other countries. Certainly Americans often wrongly ignore the rest of the world so I may be guilty of this! If you have data that there has been a similar surge in anti-asian violence in other countries that would be valuable to know and somewhat contradict my hypothesis, as BLM is obviously a primarily US phenomena.