Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2020;45(4):647-667.
doi: 10.1007/s12103-020-09545-1. Epub 2020 Jul 7.

Anti-Asian Hate Crime During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Exploring the Reproduction of Inequality

Angela R Gover  1 , Shannon B Harper  2 , Lynn Langton  3
Affiliations

Anti-Asian Hate Crime During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Exploring the Reproduction of Inequality

Angela R Gover et al. Am J Crim Justice. 2020.

Abstract

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is believed to have emerged in Wuhan, China in late December 2019 and began rapidly spreading around the globe throughout the spring months of 2020. As COVID-19 proliferated across the United States, Asian Americans reported a surge in racially motivated hate crimes involving physical violence and harassment. Throughout history, pandemic-related health crises have been associated with the stigmatization and "othering" of people of Asian descent. Asian Americans have experienced verbal and physical violence motivated by individual-level racism and xenophobia from the time they arrived in America in the late 1700s up until the present day. At the institutional level, the state has often implicitly reinforced, encouraged, and perpetuated this violence through bigoted rhetoric and exclusionary policies. COVID-19 has enabled the spread of racism and created national insecurity, fear of foreigners, and general xenophobia, which may be related to the increase in anti-Asian hate crimes during the pandemic. We examine how these crimes - situated in historically entrenched and intersecting individual-level and institutional-level racism and xenophobia - have operated to "other" Asian Americans and reproduce inequality.

Keywords: Asian; Asian American; COVID-19; Coronavirus; Hate crime; Pandemic.

PubMed Disclaimer

References

    1. Alba, R., & Foner, N. (2006, October 1). The second generation from the last great wave of immigration: Setting the record straight. Migration Policy Institute. Retrieved from https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/second-generation-last-great-wav....
    1. Addington, L. (2008). Current issues in victimization research and the NCVS’s ability to study them. Bureau of Justice Statistics. Retrieved from https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/Addington.pdf.
    1. Ahrens D. Drug panics in the twenty-first century: Ecstasy, prescription drugs, and the reframing of the war on drugs. Albany Government Law Review. 2013;6:397–436.
    1. Aoki K. The yellow Pacific: Transnational identities, diasporic racialization, and myth(s) of the Asian century. UC Davis Law Review. 2010;44:897–951.
    1. Aziz, S. (2020, April 12). Anti-Asian racism must be stopped before it is normalised. Al Jazeera. Retrieved from https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/anti-asian-racism-stopped-norm.... Accessed 23 Apr 2020.

LinkOut - more resources