UC Berkeley To Hold Anti-Asian Violence Panel Discussion

Berkeley CA

30 March, 2021

12:59 PM

Description

BERKELEY, CA — UC Berkeley will hold a virtual panel discussion later this week on the surge of anti-Asian violence and hate incidents in the United States. The panel will confront America's long history of anti-Asian racism and present-day patterns linked to the pandemic and cultural anxieties about Asian ascendancy and Western decline according to the Berkeley News, university's official news website. The April 1 panel discussion will be broadcast live on YouTube from 5 to 6 p.m. The panel will be moderated by Raka Ray, UC Berkeley's Dean of the Division of Social Sciences in Letters and Sciences. The panel will include presentations by Professors Russell Jeung (San Francisco State University), Catherine Choy (UC Berkeley), and Kimberly Hoang (University of Chicago). Michael Lu, UC Berkeley's Dean of the School of Public Health, will introduce the panel. This event is presented as part of the Social Science Matrix On Point discussion series. The panel is being held amid a nationwide surge of attacks on people of Asian descent including the March 16 Atlanta spa attacks that killed eight people including six Asian women. Law enforcement officials have not concluded that the incident is a hate crime. There have been nearly 3,800 hate attacks against Asian people in the last year according to the group Stop AAPI Hate. That the explosion of anti-Asian hate incidents followed former President Donald Trump's incendiary rhetoric amid the pandemic is no coincidence according to a UC Berkeley expert. Trump's use of the terms "China virus" and "kung flu" were especially problematic, UC Berkeley Asian American and Asian Diasporas Studies Associate Professor Lok Siu said in an interview with Berkeley News, the university's official publication. "… that automatically associated the virus with Chinese people, a racial category that references people of Chinese descent, regardless of location," Siu told the publication. "By blaming the Chinese as the cause of the pandemic, he ignited anti-Chinese sentiments and channeled popular fear and rage against East Asian-appearing persons." The results of a UC San Francisco study published in the American Journal of Public Health support Siu's conclusion. The study concluded that a direct correlation between the use of the #Chinavirus hashtag and anti-Asian sentiment, ABC News reports. The rise in anti-Asian hate incidents illustrates that such sentiments fuel violence, Dr. John Brownstein, the study's author said according to the ABC News report. "We often see that online conversations that contain messages of hate don't stay online," Brownstein said. "Oftentimes, the conversations that take place on social media results in real world consequences." Co-sponsors of the April 1 panel discussion include the UC Berkeley Social Sciences Division initiative "Toward a Racially Just Social Science," APASD, AAPISC, the Sociology Department, the School of Public Health, Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies, the Department of Gender and Women's Studies, and Stop AAPI Hate. To submit questions in advance of the panel discussion visit here. To view the panel discussion live on YouTube visit here.