Background on Credibility

Growing up as an Asian American, I’ve never had feared about my life or my parents or my friends until COVID-19 hit. Additionally, growing up in an Asian populated city, I’ve read a myriad of articles covering different situations and cases with Asian American children, adults, and the elderly community being in danger for simply minding their own businesses. Every time my parents needed to go grocery shopping or just leaving the house, I would always ask to go with them because I was worried something would happen to them because of their race. For this project, I plan to bring such issue to the high schools in the Bay Area to teach them how to upstand in these hate crime situations and how to help from a different perspective. In many circumstances, there will be a fear to upstand and help the victims, but according to Hollaback!, there are many other strategies from the bystander perspective, including the 5D’s: distract, delegate, document, delay, and direct.

With coronavirus ‘originating’ from China, many Asian Americans are hated, threatened, and beat because of the tweet from former President Donald Trump calling COVID the ‘Chinese Virus.’ According to Dr. Mishal Reja, in his ABC News article, it was determined that “former President Donald Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric around the coronavirus, which is believed to have orientated in China, helped spark anti-Asian Twitter content and ‘likely perpetuated racist attitudes’” (2021). Because of remarks like Trump’s, in cities such as San Francisco, the rise of “hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (went) up an astonishing 567 percent from the previous year” (Associated Press, 2022). The importance of highlighting such an issue is to combat racism one case at a time and to fight against the divider of races in the world. While racism is a huge, serious issue to tackle, I specifically chose xenophobic hate as I am Asian American, and believe the change to protect is necessary.