Melissa Harris-Perry: This is The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. One year ago today, a gunman killed eight people at multiple spas in Atlanta. Six of the victims were women of Asian descent: Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Yong Ae Yue, Xiaojie Tan, and Daoyou Feng. Delaina Ashley Yaun and Paul Andre Michels were also killed in the shootings. In the aftermath of the violence, many media outlets and members of law enforcement repeated the killers claims that these murders were not motivated by racism, but for members of the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, this was false and hollow as an analysis, given the facts of the case.

Judy Chu: It's clear that the individuals were targeted because they are amongst the most vulnerable in our country, immigrant Asian women. The AAPI community has been living in fear of verbal and physical attacks and now we're experiencing increasingly deadly tragedies of racism and violence.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Douglas, California representative Judy Chu speaking at a press conference following the shooting.

Senator Cammy Duckworth: Asian women, in particular, have this stereotype against them that they're weak and submissive and they've been oversexualized.

Melissa Harris-Perry: In the interview with CBS News, Senator Cammy Duckworth also highlighted the role that the intersection of race and gender played in these murders.

Senator Cammy Duckworth: They become the victims of crimes far more often. These increases in hate crimes against Asian Americans in the last year, two-thirds of them were against Asian women.

Melissa Harris-Perry: In the wake of the shootings communities organized vigils, protests, and rallies rejecting anti-Asian hate.

Protester: I want to say this: I'm pround to be Asian. [applause] I belong there.

Protesters: Stop Asian hate. [chants]

Melissa Harris-Perry: For the Asian American communities in Georgia, last year's shootings were a reminder of the dangers they continue to face even as their political voice grows in the state. Phi Nguyen is the executive director of Asian Americans advancing justice, Atlanta. Her organization helped to organize a day of remembrance that took place this past weekend.

Phi Nguyen: We wanted to place healing, care, and peace at the heart of our remembrance. We wanted to bring the community together to collectively grieve and heal and to make space for the family members to also reflect on their loved ones and the loss that they experienced.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Winds organization works to mobilize Georgia's growing AAPI communities. The plural is key here because under the AAPI umbrella are people from different national and ethnic backgrounds who speak many languages.

Phi Nguyen: That's a very big way that we're unfortunately separated. It requires us to do our work and our outreach in multiple languages. We have differing histories of how we migrated to the US, which impact our values and our policies and our struggles. Some people came here as refugees. I'm Vietnamese Americans. My parents came here as refugees from war in 1979 and that's very different from some people migrated here to go to school. Those are very different histories of how we come to this country.

Some of us have been here for generations. Others of us have not been here as long. I think the history of migration to the country and the circumstances under which we came, obviously, also influence our access to, I think, education and to resources. There's a lot of divergence between how much money different communities make, for example, or how educated communities are. Those differences play out in an everyday way for our communities.

Melissa Harris-Perry: For people and maybe most, especially for media, who are not part of AAPI communities, particularly AAPI communities in the south, what do you think we're getting wrong?

[laughter]

Oh, I love that laugh. That's a good one.

Phi Nguyen: I think when we are talking specifically about the recent wave of interpersonal violence against Asian Americans, both in Georgia and across the country, what is sometimes left out is the systemic racism and gender-based violence and classism that has contributed and the conditions that create some of the interpersonal violence that we see. We are not necessarily early talking about structural and state violence that has been committed against Asian American communities for centuries.

That is ongoing today. When I think about March 16th, 2021, I'm struck by the memory of the day before the shootings. Our organization and several advocates around the country were grappling with the Biden administration had just deported 33 Vietnamese refugees back to a country that they fled years ago. We were still reeling with that when the shootings happened. Our communities quickly had to pivot to rapidly respond to the next crisis and the next tragedy. While that was ongoing, our legislature was in session and a huge voter suppression bill got passed days after the shooting and we ended up filing a lawsuit challenging that bill and the way that it suppressed the votes of Asian Americans, 10 days after the shootings.

Those are the things that I think about, and those are the things that are still happening. When we talk about anti-Asian violence, I think we really need to be expansive about what we mean, and we cannot leave out the structural violence and the state violence that occurs independently of these incidents of interpersonal violence, but that also contribute to and create the conditions for continuing interpersonal violence against our community.

Melissa Harris-Perry: There have been a meaningful and I would say impactful increase in political participation voter turnout among AAPI communities in Georgia in recent years. What's the root of that?

Phi Nguyen: I think that the increase in political participation and political power of Asian Americans in Georgia is a result of years of on the ground organizing with our communities from groups like Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta and other voting rights and civic engagement organizations who have been investing in the community and doing our work in multiple languages, trying to meet our community members where they are. Doing that work in not just a linguistically competent way but in a culturally competent way, we're seeing the fruits of those years of efforts.

I think the other thing that is unique about Georgia, and that is part of the story is that a lot of that work, that grassroots work is done intersectionally. We do have a multiracial multiethnic coalition of advocates here who have been building political power, not just for Asian Americans, but for the Black community and the Latinx community as well. I think for a long time, we have seen that power grow, and year after we say we can be the margin of victory. I think we finally have seen on a national level how we were the margin of victory in Georgia in 2020 and in 2021.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Making that linkage about being the margin of victory about the critical importance of increased participation, have there been tangible policy changes in the wake of last year's shootings?

Phi Nguyen: Unfortunately, at least in Georgia, we haven't really seen tangible changes. I think that part of the reason why is because we still don't have enough leaders in office who reflects our communities and the needs of our communities. I think that that's why it's important for us to continue to engage our communities to vote and at the same time, to continue to fight against all of these efforts to suppress the right to vote. That's an ongoing battle here and one of the reasons why it's so critically important. It's critically important for a number of reasons, but if we want to think about why it's important in this moment we need elected officials who are going to be responsive to the needs of our community and who are invested in creating safety for our community and safety for all communities of color who suffer from racialized violence.

Melissa Harris-Perry: It's a difficult time marking this moment. What gives you hope?

Phi Nguyen: Seeing our communities come together on Saturday to collectively grieve and heal gave me hope. There were about 150 people there. Looking out at the crowd, I saw people from all different ages and backgrounds and walks of life, and that was heartening. It was heartening to hear a resounding message of solidarity and commitment to fight racialized violence against, not just AAPI communities, but against all communities who are targeted by violence.

That gives me hope and it gives me hope that last year in the aftermath of the Atlanta shootings, and I felt our community really came together, and I specifically remember my Black friends and colleagues standing up and reaching out both privately and publicly. I had a friend who reached out and she said, "I know how you feel. I know what it feels like to have a member of your community killed because of the way they look." Then I saw our Black advocates and friends take a public stance as well.

On Saturday, there was a call both from Asian Americans and Black community members to continue to build that bridge and to deepen our connection with each other and really recognize the way that our struggles are interconnected and our fight for liberation is also interconnected. If we can continue to use this moment to remember how interconnected we are and to really think about our future as being interdependent, then we can collectively build power and work on building a world that is safe for all of us.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: Phi Nguyen is Executive Director for Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta. Thank you so much for joining us.

Phi Nguyen: Thank you so much for having me.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: Throughout the pandemic, hate crimes targeting the Asian and Pacific Island community have risen across the country. Congress passed the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act in May of 2021 intended to expand the monitoring of hate crimes at the federal and local level. Let's talk this over with Sonal Shah, who is Interim Executive Vice President of the Worldwide Network Advancement and board member of The Asian American Foundation. Thanks for talking with me.

Sonal Shah: Melissa, it's so great to be here and to talk to you. Again, really love everything you're doing with the takeaway.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Thank you so much. All right. First, can we talk about Congress passing the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act? This has always rubbed me in a funny way but I want you to talk me through this a little bit. We're talking about an act meant and initiated largely around the question of anti-Asian hate, but it is described as a COVID-19 Hate Crime tag. Talk to me about that for a bit.

Sonal Shah: Yes. Melissa, I think this was largely because so much of the anti-Asian hate, the escalation of the anti-Asian hate came out of COVID-19. We saw a dramatic increase of hate incidents against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in 2020 and 2021, largely because our past president kept talking about it as the China flu, Kong flu, and it really affected AAPI communities, and not just Chinese Americans, but Filipino Americans, and other Asian Americans. It's really part of the reason I think it was called that, was largely because it was COVID-19 that exacerbated this.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I think it's really helpful for me to understand that. Help us to understand some of the statistics around anti-Asian hate crimes. We know, as you've just pointed out, that it rises during the pandemic and is connected to this discourse happening at the highest levels of leadership in the country. It's not as though it just appears in 2020, is that right?

Sonal Shah: That is absolutely correct. It's been consistent for a long time. I don't know if you remember, in 1982, Vincent Chin was murdered. He was a young man that was coming out of a bachelor party. He was a Chinese American, and he was murdered because we didn't like the Japanese oil car companies taking up more of the market share. He was murdered, and he was very young. That was the moment at which the community itself came together and activated and realized that we needed to stand up together as a community.

AAPI community broadly came together for this, with the Black community, with Latino communities, to say, "No, that is not okay to others," as what we see in this country a lot, and that it's important. This has been consistent. When you look at the statistics, 25% of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders feel like there have been hate incidents against them compared to 10% in 2016, but right now 25%. Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders just over 11,000 hate incidents from 2020 to 2021.

It continues to make up the largest share of incidents that are reported. Physical assault is about 16% of that. This is probably the most interesting thing here: women are by far the highest recipients of hate incidents. Most recently, the National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum revealed that 74% of the more than 2,400 AAPI women surveyed experienced racism or discrimination within the past 12 months.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What seems to be behind that gendering of these hate crimes?

Sonal Shah: I think there's two parts, one part of gender and the other is just fallacies against Asian Americans, like we are the model minority. That model minority myth has been a huge problem for Asian Americans, we're successful, more successful than others. By the way, public policy and reports continue to push these stories, even though amongst Asian Americans, the highest disparity and income is amongst the AAPI communities. Women, again, get a bunch a lot more of it because I think people think that Asian Americans will not speak up, especially women.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I want to dig in on that because I think those data are so underreported. Even, there's a lot of misunderstanding around that particular data point about internal community disparity. Walk us through that a bit because it is connected to the fact that the AAPI community is so diverse, so that you have parts of the community, perhaps newer arrivals in the US, folks from some parts of the world, who are language speakers of some languages, but are within AAPI, where you see high rates of poverty, unemployment, and then other communities within AAPI communities where you have folks who have arrived far earlier in the US and who have much higher income educational attainment. I think it can be hard for folks to wrap their heads around that a bit.

Sonal Shah: Absolutely, Melissa. First of all, the Asian American Pacific Island communities, it's 40 different ethnicities, and it's over 20 different languages. There's no one AAPI community, there's no one AAPI person, and the disparities are huge. What I mean by that is, if you look at the various communities that are here, the largest by far are Chinese American and Indian American, but there's a large Southeast Asian community, there's a large Hmong community.

There's a large Vietnamese American community. There's large disparities amongst the communities, even within the communities, between the Indian communities, there's a large disparities between the Chinese American communities, there's large disparities between the Vietnamese American communities, there are large disparities between the Pacific Islander communities, there are large disparities.

I think we sometimes just see the names at the top and we don't think about all of those communities, whether you look in lower-income areas across the country, that there are communities that are work-- they're are also your restaurant workers, they're are also your essential workers, they are also working in different places that we don't always see them. That's one of the biggest issues I will say about the AAPI communities. Many times we're not even seen, it's not so much that we exist, it's like we're almost overlooked as a community.

Melissa Harris-Perry: It seems to me that pushing back against hate is a particularly challenging task. When as you point out, there can also be this invisibility, or simply all these wrong stereotypes, even if they're presumably good stereotypes with these model minority stereotypes. Talk to me a little bit about the legislation piece, the public policy piece, but also a bit about increasing visibility and accuracy in how we are seeing AAPI communities.

Sonal Shah: Let me start with three pieces of this.Part one, I think recognizing that the AAPI community is a diverse community is actually very important. It's not just your colleagues that you see, but it's your colleagues sometimes that you don't see and the work that they're doing, and that's important. In many cases, a lot of companies, for example, didn't even have an AAPI group and many of the colleagues felt like they were being left out. I think recognizing together that all of us as minorities need to work together.

The second piece, which is also hard on hate crimes, is we don't actually report because when we collect information, we don't always understand the communitie, we don't understand why they're not reporting or the languages in which they are reporting, so that's important, too. Recognizing language barriers is a critical part of that. Then the third piece is the bills that are being passed. I think many times the reason they haven't been past California has just done two intent them to stop AAPI hate, to combat harassment and violence against women.

We don't even recognize those attacks because we don't hear about them enough or we don't recognize them because we don't talk about them enough. If you remember last year, there were lots of highly reported incidents of attacks. Most recently, there have been three major attacks in New York City, which we don't even talk about publicly that much. There was a young woman that was murdered in her apartment, there was another young woman that was pushed off the train tracks.

Most recently, the New York city department, a 67-year-old woman was punched 124 times in her face. These are things that are not small, but sometimes when they're reported, it's just amongst the community. We need collaboration, we need community engagement, not just within the community, but we need community engagement across communities.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Tell us about The Asian American Foundation?

Sonal Shah: The Asian American Foundation was started in 2021 because of these attacks because we wanted to make sure that there was an organization that was standing up for AAPIs. There are many of them actually already are standing up for AAPIs, but we needed to make sure we could support these organizations. We started in 2021, we were able to raise a billion dollars in over four months in order to address and help the gap amongst Asian American communities. Asian American communities get only 0.5%, just less than 1% of resources from foundations and corporations across the country.

Melissa Harris-Perry: That point around philanthropic giving keeps coming back. This idea of what communities are seen and where can we even begin to identify the needs. Sonal Shah is Interim Executive Vice President of the Worldwide Network Advancement and board member of The Asian American Foundation. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Sonal Shah: Melissa, thank you so much for having me.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: It's the Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry and we continue now with representative Grace Meng, who represents the 6th congressional district in New York city. Congresswoman, welcome to the show.

Grace Meng: Thank you for having me.

Melissa Harris-Perry: There have been four deaths after anti-Asian attacks here in New York City just in the last two months. Can you tell me a bit about what you're hearing in AAPI communities about how people are feeling?

Grace Meng: Sure. We are now hearing about incidents and tragedies that are happening every few days. People are really traumatized, they are terrified. Many I talk to don't even try to leave their homes, they don't let their children or their parents take public transportation. They offer to buy groceries for their parents and neighbors because they don't want them to go out and risk their safety at all.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Your point about the elders in community, about the sense of vulnerability of one's grandparents, and then, of course, we have just been talking about the fact that much of this violence is also gendered; that women are most likely to be targeted. Can you say a bit more about what you think maybe going on there?

Grace Meng: I think any society, any community feels terribly worried when we are seeing elders get attacked. Elders, especially in so many immigrant communities, these are the folks that first came to this country and sacrificed so much and people really feel helpless not being able to protect them and to keep them safe and alive. In the situation of women as we are remembering the lives of eight people lost in Atlanta, most of whom were Asian American women, we are forced to remember so many of the stereotypes that Asian women have endured throughout the history of this country. There's just a perception oftentimes that Asian Americans, people who look Asian are weak, are submissive, or they're not truly American that we're foreigners.

Melissa Harris-Perry: One year ago after the violence in Atlanta, it felt like at least for a moment there was a broader public recognition of bias and violence against Asians and Asian Americans. Even when we're talking about these continuing acts of violence that we're seeing now, it does seem that there is so much less broad public attention. I'm wondering if it is proven surprisingly hard to continue to focus on and create that visibility for what's happening?

Grace Meng: I am really grateful because I feel like we in some ways have come a long way. The tragedies that happened in Atlanta were not the first incidents or tragedies but it really, as you were saying, kind of galvanized the community, not just the Asian community but beyond, the whole country. As Asian Americans, we are incredibly grateful for that. We have come a long way, but there is a long way to go as well.

Words like Kung Flu and Chinese virus used by certain leaders in our country for about three years really exacerbated the situation. We saw statistics about these incidents and crimes skyrocket every time those words were used. I think that I'm comforted by the attention and I hope that we understand that attention alone isn't enough, we need to work collaboratively to achieve results.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Let's talk about that. You introduced the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act. Talk to me first about the decision, that name, so identifying it as the moment that we're in, rather than those who are being affected, but also where that process is in terms of the full implementation.

Grace Meng: Sure. While this legislation was born out of conversations with community groups and not just Asian American groups, but groups from the Black community, LGBTQ community, Muslim community, so many people were incredibly helpful in getting this passed. We recognized that the number of cases had skyrocketed when certain terms were being used, derogatory terms.

We put forth this legislation, we're grateful to the Biden administration for working on it so quickly in terms of helping us get it passed in Congress. There are pieces of the bill that we are working with both the Health and Human Services department and the Department of Justice to get them fully implemented. We want to get the resources to trickle down quickly to our local communities.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What are the kinds of community-based resources that are part of this legislative package?

Grace Meng: When we first started working on this, we noticed that many communities and law enforcement entities weren't even keeping track of anything from bias incidents to hate crimes. As with any public health crisis or disease, we need to know the extent of the before we can even start to come up with solutions. A big part of the bill goes towards data collections and making it easier for people to report these incidents and in multiple languages too.

People are scared to report them. It also provides local resources for our grassroots community, organizations who are working on anything from bystander training to mental health support and we want to make sure that our communities are feeling the impact of this law as soon as possible. Last week, some of us went to the White House and we expressed this to president Biden as well.

Melissa Harris-Perry: In this moment where there has been an attack in so many state legislatures against what is being called critical race theory, but really is about teaching aspects of American history that include people who are non-white and about many of those stories that can be quite difficult, you've actually introduced legislation to mandate Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies in schools, which, oh, as a teacher, I just love this: to expand what we know rather than reducing what we know. Can you talk to me a bit about why this educational intervention can have long-term positive effects?

Grace Meng: Yes. I strongly believe that the solution to all this while complicated is a multi-prong approach. There are pieces that are necessary: increasing measures for public safety, increasing resources for mental health support for both victims and for perpetrators. An important long-term solution is education.

Ever since introducing this piece of legislation, I've had people, not just within the Asian American community, even folks from the Italian and Irish American communities who talk about the history that their ancestors endured in this country. Whether we're talking about the Irish, the Black community, the Asian American community, you're right, we want our kids to increase what they're learning about. The contributions of such diverse communities, in the history of this country, to this country, and to who has built it up to what it is today.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Congresswoman Grace Meng of New York, thank you so much for joining us today.

Grace Meng: Thank you for having me.

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