How hate incidents led to a reckoning of casual racism against Asian Americans

But amid the coronavirus pandemic, as the Asian American community confronts the racist stereotypes, catalyzing a generation’s activism and a heightened focus on the group, both Cai and Samburg say they’re seeing a slight shift in the way people identify not only overt racism, but casual, everyday racism as well.

“It is violence — especially for a group that has been de-racialized and basically whitened,” Nadia Kim, professor of sociology and of Asian & Asian American studies at Loyola Marymount University, said.

And seen as a compliant “model minority,” Asian Americans have often been positioned in a way that makes white people feel their racism is exonerated.

“It is violence — especially for a group that has been de-racialized and basically whitened,” Nadia Kim, a professor of sociology and of Asian & Asian American studies, said.

Ellen Wu, a historian who wrote “The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority,” previously explained that white liberals wielded the model minority stereotype in the 1960s in an effort to squash the rising Black civil rights movement and cherry-picked Asian American “success stories” as “proof” of meritocracy and equal opportunity for people of color.

“Much of America, including other people of color, really have internalized this notion that Asian Americans, especially like East and South Asian Americans, they're doing so well, so they kind of collapse class, socio-economic privilege, with the lack of racism,” Kim said of the “model minority myth.” “But it makes no sense because actually groups that interact the most with white America tend to report the highest rates of discrimination.”.

Tran, a sociologist and an associate professor at the City University of New York's Graduate Center, also said that since Asian America has a heavily immigrant population, microaggressions against them are more accepted because they’re not seen as people who are relatable or “close to home.”.

The longtime blindness to racism toward Asian Americans has put the community in a unique and difficult position as nonwhites, Kim said.

The failure from the culture at large to recognize Asian Americans as people of color who experience racism, and not as “honorary whites,” has made it more difficult for many to speak out in the past, she added.

What’s more, Tran said that because of significant language barriers, many Asian Americans have experienced difficulty even finding the words to voice injustices against them.

There’s nothing “casual” about casual racism, Tran said.

“The nature of these interactions … made it much more likely that people will just bury these slights and these hurts and these negative feelings deep, deep within themselves,” Tran said.

“It's impossible to separate the casual racism we experience from those identity struggles, those mental health struggles, and from this constant feeling that you basically are a walking contradiction,” Kim said

Though the country has seen mass protests before in the 1960s, social media abetted the recent revolution and, Kim said, the heavily circulated images served as undeniable proof that racism against Asian Americans does, in fact, exist