Hate crimes vs Asian Americans

People have been moving since time immemorial. They move for different reasons, primarily in search for food or a better life.

Filipinos have moved around the world and end up in countries which colonized them, that is why there is a big number of Filipino Americans. A smaller number moved to the UK in Margaret Thatcher’s time. She campaigned on program against immigration. She could not take on huge populations of migrants like the Indians and Pakistanis who were in the thousands if not millions.

The Filipino community became the target because they were unorganized until my husband and I organized the Pagkakaisa ng Samahang Pilipino. We brought the issue as far as the Court of Human Rights. That first batch was mostly domestic helpers with the Philippine government abetting their expulsion.

But since the COVID-19 pandemic that policy has changed. Filipino nurses and doctors were needed. But there were still incidents of blunt racism and this was more true in the US than in the UK. There is racism against all Asians, particularly if you are chinky-eyed Chinese.

“You don’t belong here, you Asian!”

The model city upon a hill we call America is disintegrating not because of China or Russia, but from within. Its unaddressed social divisions that’s growing into a chasm has manifested not only in white policemen choking to death unarmed, begging blacks, but white and black men attacking and beating old Asian women in broad daylight. I wrote about karma a few months ago when the Capitol, the symbol for democracy, was stormed by White-Anglo Saxon men, part of the 71 million Americans who wanted more of Trump, eight million more than who voted for him in 2016.

In a string of violent anti-Asian attacks in the US last week, Vilma Kari, a 65-year-old Filipina, was attacked, beaten and kicked on her head several times as she lay helplessly on the ground. The New York Times reported that the attacker, Brandon Elliot, “who is Black,” is a “homeless man who was out on parole for killing his mother.” The article then attempts to paint the perpetrator as a victim of the homeless that is lacking in resources. The city’s police commissioner, Dermot F. Shea, “suggested that a lack of resources in the city’s shelter system and inadequate social services may have played some role in the attack.”

He failed to mention that another Filipino American, Noel Quintana, was slashed on the face only in February, as he was riding the train.

The assailant remains at large.

He failed to mention that in 2014, Eric Garner was killed in broad daylight in New York City after NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo put him in an illegal stranglehold, as Eric was gasping for air, crying, “I can’t breathe” 11 times. The uniformed killer was acquitted five months later and the US Department of Justice declined to bring criminal charges; he was only fired in 2019 after hundreds of protests swept throughout the nation and a dozen or so young black people died in police hands.

This episode would eerily echo in May 2020, when George Floyd died as he begged “I can’t breathe” a dozen times as a half dozen Minneapolis police held him to the ground while one officer, Derek Chauvin, knee-choked George for nine minutes.

These are just the three out of the thousands of hate crimes that take place all over the United States, many go unreported, unless there’s a death that leads to crowds of protest until they die down, waiting for the next cycle.

The more criminal part of these episodes is that as the victims were attacked, the bystanders did nothing. Ironically, these incidents were even filmed!

In the latest attack, the guards of the luxury apartment not only did nothing but closed the door as 65-year-old Kari was being kicked repeatedly. The CCTV showed three burly guards approach the door and did nothing as one of them closed the door. The New York Times reports their inaction as part of a more ‘complicated story’ and the Brodsky Organization, the company that owns the luxury building, has said “the staff who witnessed the attack have been suspended pending an investigation in conjunction with their union.” There are no records of a 911 call.

A few weeks ago, a 75-year-old Asian woman was also attacked in San Francisco’s Chinatown by a 39-year-old Caucasian man. Media framed the story as an old woman fighting back her attacker and the family donating almost a million dollars raised from crowdfunding to help fight racism. It took the Asian mother of CNN Katie Lu Stout to notice that video showed “the attacker is on a stretcher and receiving medical care while the woman, screaming and crying, is left alone nursing her wounds and her trauma.”

According to the Stop Asian Hate organization, Asian Americans reported almost 4,000 hate crime incidents in the past year. Of these reports, 7.9 percent were from Filipinos and almost 68 percent of total reports were made by Asian women. The top states for anti-Asian attacks were California, New York, Washington, and Texas (Esquiremag.ph, Ichimura).

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Why are Vice President Leni Robredo, Senator Risa Hontiveros, and Maria Ressa of Rappler silent on the hate crimes on Asians in the US when they are only too quick to echo US tirades against President Duterte’s human rights record?

As we celebrate Easter, we are reminded of the Good Samaritan story.

The priest and a priest’s assistant came and went as the Jew was robbed, beaten and left to die. It was the Samaritan, who were hated by the Jews, that saved the Jew.

These episodes point to the fact that these hate crimes are not a Trump problem; he may have unmasked the devil, but the core of this social chasm is an American problem.

DFA Secretary Locsin said this “will influence Philippine foreign policy.” As it should. If the Americans cannot even assure the security of Filipinos in their homeland, how much more can they “defend her ally” across the Pacific, unless of course there’s profit to gain.

Out of the millions of Filipinos in the USA, those victims could have been any of our mothers or sisters.