Stop Asian hate is one of the trending topics on Twitter, as Americans of Asian descent and other groups in America protests the continued unprovoked hate crimes against Asians in America, over the coronavirus pandemic.
The latest incident which started the trend and sparked outrage across the United States and the world, was the shooting and killing of 8 people, mostly Asian women in Atlanta on Tuesday night.
According to the report by BBC, the Police in a statement said, the shootings took place at a massage parlour in Acworth, a suburb north of Atlanta, and two spas in the city itself.
South Korea later confirmed that four of the victims were of Korean descent.
Officials say a 21-year-old man was arrested and is suspected of involvement in all of the attacks.
No motive has yet been established, but there are fears the crimes may have deliberately targeted people of Asian descent.
The trend Stop Asian hate started trending on Tuesday into Wednesday, after the shooting which clearly targeted Asian-Americans, and such has been the case across cities in the United States, since the COVID-19.
According to the report by VOANews, before yesterday’s shooting and killing, there have been reports of attacks in Brooklyn, New York, Washington DC, and other cities in the United States.
The report said that an unidentified white man catcalled an Asian American woman and aggressively followed her down the block, yelling a racial obscenity and a sexually derogatory term.
In another report, a man was said to have punched an Asian woman in the back in a Metro subway station, repeatedly shouting racial expletives and physically threatening her and her boyfriend.
And in another, a ride-sharing service driver told his Asian passenger, “Damn, another Asian riding with me today. I hope you don’t have any COVID.”
The three incidents are among nearly 3,800 firsthand accounts of anti-Asian hate and abuse an advocacy coalition has recorded since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic a year ago, the report said.
In a new report released Tuesday on the stop Asian hate, the Stop AAPI Hate group said it recorded 3,795 anti-Asian hate incidents between March 19, 2020 – shortly after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic – and February 28, 2021. More than 500 of the incidents were recorded in 2021.
“The number of hate incidents reported to our center represent only a fraction of the number of hate incidents that actually occur, but it does show how vulnerable Asian Americans are to discrimination,” the group said in a statement.
Verbal harassment and shunning made up 68.1% and 20.5% of the incidents, respectively. Physical assaults constituted 11.1% of the total incidents.
Stop AAPI Hate was launched a year ago by a coalition of two Asian American advocacy groups and a university department to help Asian Americans report hate incidents during the pandemic.
Asian Americans started reporting an increase in discrimination as early as January 2020. But the number surged as former President Donald Trump began using xenophobic language such as “kung flu” to refer to the coronavirus and blaming China for the pandemic, Stop AAPI Hate co-founder Cynthia Choi said.
Chinese Americans were the most frequently targeted group, reporting 42.2% of the incidents, followed by Koreans, 14.8%; Vietnamese, 8.5%; and Filipinos, 7.9%, according to the report.
Women were more than twice as likely as men to report incidents.