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Asian Americans Use Social Media to Mobilize Against Attacks

Associated Press

   Kyle Navarro was kneeling down to unlock his bicycle when he noticed an
   older white man staring at him. Navarro, who is Filipino, tried to
   ignore him, but that soon became impossible.

   The man walked by, looked back and called Navarro a racial slur. He
   "spat in my direction, and kept walking," Navarro said.

   Navarro, a school nurse in San Francisco, already had anxiety about
   racism related to the coronavirus, which emerged in China and has Asian
   people facing unfounded blame and attacks as it's spread worldwide.
   Now, he was outraged.

   "My first instinct was to yell back at him in anger. But, after taking
   a breath, I realized that would have put me in danger," Navarro said.

   Instead, he took to Twitter last week to turn the ugly moment into an
   opportunity for a conversation about racism, generating thousands of
   sympathetic comments.

   Asian Americans are using social media to organize and fight back
   against racially motivated attacks during the pandemic, which the FBI
   predicts will increase as infections grow. A string of racist run-ins
   in the last two weeks has given rise to hashtags -- #WashTheHate,
   #RacismIsAVirus, #IAmNotCOVID19 -- and online forums to report
   incidents. Critics say President Donald Trump made things worse by
   calling COVID-19 the "Chinese virus."

   For a group with a history of being scapegoated -- from Japanese
   Americans detained during World War II to a Chinese American man killed
   by autoworkers angry about Japanese competition in the '80s -- there's
   urgency to drown out both bigotry and apathy.

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