arrow Chong Bretillon and her dog Telly in Dutch Kills, Queens Jax F. Floyd
For Asian American New Yorkers, the outsized mental strain of living through the coronavirus pandemic has been exacerbated by a commensurate rise in anti-Asian sentiment. The bias swept into our region in large part due to xenophobic rhetoric connecting COVID-19 to Asian Americans, including then-President Donald Trump s habit of blaming the virus on China.
As bias incidents and hate crimes against Asian Americans increased, the nonprofit Asian American Federation set up a bias reporting form on its website to report hate crimes in the tri-state area. It tallied more than 500 reports between the beginning of 2020 and February 2021 (and estimated that the actual number is significantly higher). In the city, the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism says the number of anti-Asian hate crimes reported to the NYPD rose from 3 in 2019 to 28 last year.