Op-Ed: Anti-Asian hate growing in US

FILE PHOTO – People gather for a Stop Asian Hate rally in the wake of what police said was a racial attack on Asian American students on the subway, in Philadelphia, Tuesday, Nov. 30, 2021. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)
Hate against Asian Americans is growing in the US, not fading. A majority of AAPI adults – 53 percent – say they experienced an act of hate last year due to race, ethnicity or nationality, according to a new survey by Stop AAPI Hate.
That’s an increase of four percent from the previous year.
If you haven’t heard anyone report about it in the news, maybe that’s because the news media has been mesmerized by the Trump/Musk debacle, a veritable festival of white-on-white-hate.
It’s remarkable only because the world’s richest man and the so-called world’s most powerful man are trading nuclear tongue lashes.
May they self-destruct to their mutual satisfaction.
Their mega-toddler food-fight is really a distraction from more important matters, like the hate that exists toward Filipinos and the broader AAPI community.
But to see Musk call Trump an ingrate who wouldn’t have won the election if Musk hadn’t pumped money into his campaign. Or to see Trump call Musk inflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome should at least help explain the cruel streak both men try to hide behind the lie of politics
Last week, they let it all out. You didn’t need to be fly on the wall to see the authentic Trump/Musk dissolve into public hate and indiscretion.
Not that Musk isn’t right some of the time. Trump’s budget, the so called “Big Beautiful Bill,” is full of pork and raises the national debt to $2.4 trillion dollars. And they call themselves conservatives.
It would also cut millions of poor from Medicaid, all so that the very rich can get up to $400,000 or more in tax cuts.
They don’t need those tax cuts more than the poor need health care.
If the bill passes, it will be Trump’s cruel, hateful legacy.
Of course, Trump is the guy who is carelessly deporting thousands – and not only criminals. He’s sent ICE after good immigrants who live and work amongst us. They are people with homes, families and jobs. They pay taxes and want to be citizens. It’s people like Carol a/k/a Ming Li Hui from Hong Kong who now lives in Kennett, Missouri, and made the front page of the New York Times. She’s the kind of good immigrant who shows up for all their immigration appointments in good faith, only to be snagged, and held for deportation. That’s Trump’s mean cruel deception. Sort of like General Funston capturing Aguinaldo with a dash of perfidy.
But Carol’s deportation is making people wonder. All of Carol’s friends in Missouri voted for Trump and are now seeing how he treats a beloved member of the community. Trump is exposed as the mean, lawless and unkind person he is.
Enough to dump Turmp?
Maybe that’s why Trump just on Friday allowed for the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvdoran migrant deported by mistake along with Venezuelan gang members to Trump’s rental super-max prison in El Salvador. After losing a legal fight over the need for due process for deportees, the Trump administration is now saying Garcia is returning to face human trafficking charges.
When did they trump up those charges?
And if Garcia is coming home to face the law – a nice fig leaf for Trump to use – I guess all those rounded up and given a super-max hair cut will have to come back as well, to get the due process that is owed them.
This is just Trump’s chaotic and perverse way of governing, not to mention his odd sense of justice.
He doesn’t know how to do things right unless it enriches himself.
Of course, Elon Musk’s style isn’t much better. He’s the guy who cuts US AID’s budget so severely, it stops food and medicine from getting to the thousands of starving children and families in Africa.
Musk is right, however, to say there is “pork” in that “Big, Beautiful Bill.” If Trump and others deny it, they’re lying. In a big omnibus bill, items are there for one reason. Legislators asked for them in exchange for their support. That’s the way it works.
Pork is pork.
The bill is full of pork. Not tofu.
And that’s what the Trump/Musk matter really is about. It’s the rubbernecking car wreck that slows us all down and diverts attention from stuff they don’t want you to see or know. Like all those deportations, the full-scale firings of public employees and the fallout from the economic whiplash of tariffs on or off. They are all acts that are unlawful and reckless.
Oh, and things that get lost in the shuffle like the rise in AAPI Hate.
Back to AAPI hate
It’s still with us.
It was all jacked up during the pandemic with Trump’s “China Virus” and “Kung Flu” rhetoric, and the hate hasn’t gone away.
If anything, AAPI hate has been fanned by more Trump xenophobia. Trump’s attempt to stop Harvard’s international students last week was stopped by a judge on Friday, as is the pattern of most of Trump’s unlawful, unconstitutional acts. In this case, Trump claimed the Communist Chinese Party was using young scholars at Harvard, essentially as spies.
Is that any different from the way previous administrations went after Chinese scientists like Wen Ho Lee and other academics? Only now the suspicion is on everyone right down to the young undergraduates.
And since Filipinos are often mistaken for Chinese, we’re ll spies now.
Whatever happened to academic freedom? Trump is trying to destroy our sense of higher ed with this hybrid xenophobia mixed with anti-Communist Mc-Carthyism.
It’s an America first stance that is just wrong and destined to make America last.
Oh, and it turns good Americans against Asians and Asian Americans, both citizens and non-citizens, including Filipinos and Filipino Americans.
The biggest jump in hate numbers came from young adults age 18-29, college and graduate school age.
Seventy-two percent of them experienced some kind of hate vs. those 30-44 (54 percent), 45-59 (46 percent), and those 60 and older (44 percent).
Young people are feeling it.
According to the study, the hate takes place online (39 percent), in public (37 percent) and businesses (31 percent).
The most common transgressions were slurs or being refused service by a business.
The most startling thing is AAPI didn’t report it.
Over 3 in 4, or 77 percent said they did not go to a formal authority or agency because they didn’t think it would make a difference (60 percent). Or didn’t think it was serious enough (65 percent), or didn’t trust institutions to do anything (46 percent).
Given the Trump/Musk display, those numbers are not likely to go down.
The attitude, “Why bother?” pervades.
We just take the hate. It never goes away.
Isn’t it funny that under Biden, there was a real push toward social justice. We didn’t have to take it, after all. One of the first things Biden did was recognize the hate in America toward AAPI groups.
With the erasure of all things DEI under Trump, we’re open season again.
And if we complain now, he just needs to call on his sycophants, FBI director Kash Patel and DOJ Civil Rights head Harmeet Dhillon to say, all is well in Trumpland.
They aren’t.
The Trump/Musk thing has people understanding just how bad things are when the truth is played out in public and the principals can’t even be nice and lie to each other anymore.
That’s not a reassuring sign coming from those “in charge,” the people with all the power and the money.
The oligarchs.
Already, Trump’s threatening to cut off Musk’s billions of dollars of contracts and subsidies. Musk has threatened to defund the GOP and call for Trump’s impeachment.
It’s the MAGA civil war of money and egos. Stand back and watch the implosion.
You can bet our enemies are looking on it all with glee.
Emil Guillermo is an award-winning journalist, news analyst and stage monologuist. He writes for the Inquirer.net’s US Channel. He has written a weekly “Amok” column on Asian American issues since 1995. Find him on YouTube, patreon and substack.
As a standup, he is performing at the World Series of Comedy at Laughs Unlimited in Old Sacramento, Wednesday, June 11 at 7 p.m. Get discount tickets. CODE: GIVE or FUNNY