This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board.
Racism directed against Asian people in America is old and urgent. The recent murder spree carried out in Asian spas and massage parlors in Atlanta â in which eight people, including six Asian women, were shot and killed â is the latest horrific entry in the history of violence Asian American and Pacific Islanders have been subject to in the United States.
This violence sickens and shocks us, but perhaps our shock is a failure in and of itself. Asian Americans have been sounding the alarm on their lack of protection for over a year as attacks against Asian Americans have sharply risen. Covid-19, despicably dubbed âKung Fluâ and âthe Chinese Virusâ by former President Donald Trump, has triggered a wave of irrational violence against people of Asian descent. Between this pieceâs publication and when our board first gathered to grapple with the Atlanta shooting, a woman of Filipino descent was brutally attacked in Times Square by a man spitting that she did not âbelong here.â Yet even as the threat became more evident and pressing â even as New York reported a more than nine-fold increase in anti-Asian hate crimes, and an 84-year-old Thai man lost his life in San Francisco to a brutal attack his family describes as racially motivated â most of American society remained unfazed until Atlanta. It took a massacre for us to pay attention.