Coronavirus: how Asian-Americans are fighting back against race hate in Covid-19 era
- Asian-Americans are using social media to organise and fight back against racially motivated attacks
- Critics say Donald Trump made things worse by calling Covid-19 the ‘Chinese virus’
Kyle Navarro was kneeling down to unlock his bicycle when he noticed an older white man staring at him. Navarro, who is Filipino, tried to ignore him, but that soon became impossible.
The man walked by, looked back and called Navarro a racial slur. He “spat in my direction, and kept walking,” Navarro said.
Navarro, a school nurse in San Francisco, already had anxiety about racism related to the coronavirus, which emerged in China and has Asian people facing unfounded blame and attacks as it’s spread worldwide. Now, he was outraged.
“My first instinct was to yell back at him in anger. But, after taking a breath, I realised that would have put me in danger,” Navarro said.
Instead, he took to Twitter last week to turn the ugly moment into an opportunity for a conversation about racism, generating thousands of sympathetic comments.
Asian-Americans are using social media to organise and fight back against racially motivated attacks during the pandemic, which the FBI predicts will increase as infections grow. A string of racist run-ins in the last two weeks has given rise to hashtags – #WashTheHate, #RacismIsAVirus, #IAmNotCOVID19 – and online forums to report incidents. Critics say President Donald Trump made things worse by calling Covid-19 the “Chinese virus”.