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"This week, we witnessed a horrific act of misogynistic and anti-Asian racist violence where eight people, including six women of Asian ancestry, were killed by a white man. We are deeply saddened and shocked by this violence. We mourn alongside the families and loved ones of those who lost their lives, and we stand in solidarity with the Asian communities.
As sociologists, we know that these murders need to be understood in the context of the continued escalation of hostility against Asian communities. Over the past year, we have seen a dramatic increase in racism and violence being targeted towards Asians in Canada. Statistics Canada (2020) found that a larger proportion of Asian Canadians perceived an increase in harassment and/or attacks based on race, ethnicity, or skin colour since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. In particular, Chinese (30%), Korean (27%), and Southeast Asian (19%) participants reported the largest perceived increases in discriminatory harassment or attacks. Vancouver Police reported an eight-fold increase in anti-Asian hate crimes, from 12 incidents in 2019 to 98 in 2020. Incident reporting data collected both in the US (by the group Stop AAPI Hate) and in Canada (by Chinese Canadian National Council Toronto) show that about two-thirds of the reports came from women. The present-day anti-Asian sentiment is another manifestation of white supremacy that has been instigated by certain politicians and tolerated by the wider society (Grover, Harper & Langton, 2020; Wu, Qian & Wilkes, 2020; Wu et al., 2020).
We are also cognizant that this is not a new social issue. Racist and gendered constructions of Asian women and men date back to the history of European colonization of the Asia Pacific and later the US imperialist dominance in the region. In Canada, the state enacted overt racist policies such as the head tax in 1885 and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1923 to virtually ban Chinese immigration. These discriminatory state policies existed alongside racist discourses designed to legitimate and normalize prejudice towards Chinese immigrants. More recently, we have seen similar racist discourses being invoked concerning SARS and the COVID-19 pandemic (Jang et al., 2021; Keil & Ali, 2018; Leung, 2008; Li & Nicholson, 2021). Such racist scapegoating rhetoric alongside the racialized misogynist objectification of Asian women has created the conditions for the present-day racist and gendered violence.
We are appalled by how the police and the media have repeated the suspect’s victim-blaming narrative, resulting in a discourse whereby racist and misogynist fetishization of Asian women was invoked to explain away hateful mass murders by a white man, as discussed in an interview given by CSA president and scholar, Dr. Xiaobei Chen on CBC. The conduct of the police and the media amounts to a massive act of reproducing and reinforcing anti-Asian racism and misogyny, which compounds the dehumanization of the victims and the pain to the Asian communities.
The summer of 2020 drew attention to the issue of societal racism, following the murder of George Floyd and the global protests by Black Lives Matter. We understand these acts to be a manifestation of white supremacy, patriarchy, and ongoing societal racism against Indigenous, Black, Asian, and other racialized groups. We also understand that it is crucial to address the intersection of racial, xenophobic, gender, and class oppressions and we remember in solidarity that settler-colonial violence against Indigenous women and girls remains an unresolved and often trivialized problem despite the convening of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. As an Association and scholarly community, we condemn and refute all racisms, including anti-Asian racism, and intersectional hate and violence. We extend our support to Asian and Asian Canadian colleagues, students, and community members who experience venomous racism daily. Together, let us use our teaching and research to actively work against politically induced hate. We can lead by teaching about the history of anti-Asian policies and sentiments in Canada, we can choose to speak out against anti-Asian racism in our surroundings and broader society, and we can use our scholarship to hold those who peddle hate accountable.
The CSA Executive Committee" |
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