Asian in the Time of COVID-19: Creating a Social Work Agenda for Asian American and Pacific Islander Communities.

The health of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities remains an understudied area of racial/ethnic minority research in the United States, and even more so in the field of social work. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted how AAPI health and social welfare issues have not received adequate attention in social policy, social work practice, and research. Contrary to model minority myths, AAPIs are subject to racialized attitudes and discrimination, which have been associated with adverse physical and mental health outcomes, including increased anxiety, depression, and suicidality. Drawing from the theoretical framework of AsianCrit, which is grounded in critical race theory, authors analyze health disparities among AAPI communities as reflected in COVID-19 hospitalizations and fatalities, as well as increases in acts of anti-Asian racism and xenophobia. Better understanding health disparities of AAPI communities needs to be a key research issue for social workers in future years. The authors conclude by offering a short set of recommendations to improve social policy, social work practice, and research to more aptly address contemporary social issues impacting AAPI communities.

Sweet Home: Writing from a Known Space

In the thick litany of yet more disasters, epidemics, and catastrophes that have taken place during and since the 2021 ASA conference, Cathy Schlund-Vials's presidential address offers us a strange, if not queer, clearing in the woods—a "Black mark” made from "poured gasoline . . . in the shape of a cross” burning in the night on the lawn of an eight-year-old mixed-race Cambodian American adoptee with a white father and Japanese mother in Valdosta, Georgia. The image of a "black mark” in the shape of a cross in front of a mixed-race Cambodian American adoptee counters many preconceived notions of who the traditional targets of antiblack racism are, but it is also the strangeness of Schlund-Vials's rememory of that incident that also opens up a space for us to ask how our distance or estrangement from that experience might produce intimacy. I have met Cathy Schlund-Vials once, probably too brief of a moment for her to remember, and I have never had gasoline poured on my lawn in the shape of a cross or my family's car keyed with phrases telling us that "God hates mongrels.” And yet, there is something about the isolation she describes that makes that burnt patch of grass familiar to me even if distant. It is not the charred earth we share but all the everyday forms of social distancing imposed on her and her family that gives meaning to a mutual sense of already knowing isolation long before coronavirus (and its now multiple variants) made loneliness and the melancholy it engenders a national mental health crisis. In other words, without diminishing the seriousness of the epidemic, her address highlights the multiple ways the virus has exacerbated the processes of "social distancing” already in play long before this pandemic began.

Between Empirical Data and Anti-Blackness: A Critical Perspective on Anti-Asian Hate Crimes and Hate Incidents

While women are more likely to report a hate incident to the StopAAPIHate reporting site, multiple sources of data show that men are as likely or more likely to experience a hate incident than women. [...]Asian Critical Theory (or AsianCrit) allows us to examine how race and racism affect the lives of Asian Americans within US society.5 Through this theoretical lens, we can better understand our unique racialization as Asian Americans;this racialization positions us as both model minorities and perpetual outsiders to US society. [...]even if not always dominant, the interspersal of images of Black-on-Asian-crime in coverage of anti-Asian violence tends to emphasize physical assaults by Black individuals, thereby playing on commonly accepted racist stereotypes of Black criminality.10 And while we may recognize that dominant discourses of safety and its antithesis (e.g., with regard to anti-Asian violence) are rooted in white supremacy and anti-Blackness (Jenkins 2021), most critiques of anti-Asian violence rarely examine the interconnections between them.11 For this reason, a large part of our paper calls for a critical racial analysis of widely circulating narratives around racist incidents against Asian Americans and their racialization as non-Black people of color. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND AND NARRATIVE CONTEXT In January and February of 2020, the first cases of COVID-19 in the United States were detected by public health agencies.12 The source of the virus was likely China (ibid), but the World Health Organization advised media organizations not to "attach locations or ethnicity" to the disease to avoid stigmatizing ethnic groups.

Guest Editors' Preface

In moments of crisis that test the stability of US nationalism—the civil war, the expansion of American empire, World Wars I & II, the civil rights era, the post-industrial era, 9/11, COVID—a pattern of violence against Asian Americans seems to make an appearance. Nearly a third of the nurses who have died of coronavirus in the United States are Filipino, even though Filipino nurses make up just 4% of the nursing population nationwide.2 Over 1.2 million Asian Americans labor in food-related industries nationwide—at farms, food processing factories, grocery stores, and restaurants—and are placed at higher risk of infection and mortality.3 In the spring of 2021, in the span of two months, lone white gunmen murdered Asian Americans in Atlanta, Indianapolis, and San Jose (all of the victims were essential service workers). In presenting the data, Wong and Liu invite us to consider how anti-Black tropes and invocations of a persistent "Black-Asian conflict" diverted attention away from the role of white supremacy in fomenting an anti-Asian climate. The new White House immediately promised to "Build Back Better" with a sweeping plan to restore domestic stability and the nation's reputation abroad;implied was the beating back of Trumpian revanchism.

The Why and Whither of Asian American Studies: Toward a Reckoning

Yuri Kochiyama (1921–2014) On March 11, 2020, roughly three months after the first death attributed to the newly discovered SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) virus was confirmed in Wuhan, China, the World Health Organization elevated its characterization of the ensuing outbreaks from "public health emergency of international concern" (PHEIC) to global pandemic. [...]we editors, along with the contributors to this special issue, acknowledge from the outset that the formation of Asian American studies—along with ethnic studies and gender/sexuality studies—was first and foremost a paradigmatic endeavor, one that, as Lisa Lowe productively characterizes it, remains "key to thinking in comparative relational ways about race, power, and interconnected colonialisms. More than a few students found themselves spending more time in the community than in school. [...]were born a host of Asian American community organizations and services, as well as an increasing vector of Asian American political activism in defense of our communities. "4 Such reckonings, intimately tied to the formation of Asian American studies as a critical race-based interdiscipline born out of 1960s civil rights movements and liberation fronts, encapsulate the field's aspirational politics.

The CCP after the Zero-Covid Fail

China has two repressive systems that exist simultaneously: the highly coercive and surveilled system in Xinjiang, and the trust-based model of everyday repression prevalent throughout the rest of the country. The trust-based model has undergirded grassroots governance in China and facilitated the routine implementation of Zero-Covid. Drawing on a protest event dataset, I analyze the key characteristics of the covid protests erupted in November and December of 2022, before situating them in the larger context of China's political future under Xi Jinping's rule. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has responded to the protests with a combination of concession and repression. But neither the carrot nor the stick is able to fundamentally address the deep-rooted social problems or halt the tide of dissent. Coupled with structural economic challenges, these protests could be the harbinger of a new era of contentious state-society relations in China, the seeds of which were sown years ago–only precipitated and underscored by the CCP's covid debacle.

Abolition as Durational Performance: Mutual Aid Aesthetics in Chicago's Southeast Asian Neighborhood

Responses to rising anti-Asian violence during the COVID-19 pandemic prompted multiple, often conflicting, actions including calls to defund the police, calls for more police, bystander interventions, and the exploitation of violence to promote influencers' brands. In Chicago's "Argyle" Uptown neighborhood, an area known as a Southeast Asian refugee business district, Asian Americans and local white government officials promoting liberal multiculturalist urban renewal projects used the news after the Atlanta spa shooting to advance their plans for gentrification and increased policing. How do we understand the colliding narratives of racial antagonisms, racial solidarities, and the genocidal logics of urban renewal, as they emerge at the intersection of settler colonialism and the afterlife of slavery? How is this question complicated by the entwined issues of refugee resettlement and multiculturalist solutions to anti-Asian violence? In this article, I argue abolition as durational performance offers an embodied, performance studies based analytic and methodology for the study and praxis of abolition. Abolition as durational performance centers the creation of life-affirming institutions, relations, and spaces while navigating the histories and bodily impacts of white supremacy, anti-Blackness, native genocide, and US liberal war on refugee resettlement as it is enacted through urban renewal and redevelopment projects. I focus on Axis Lab, a community-based arts and architecture organization based in Chicago, which launched its mutual aid and public arts project in June 2020. This is an abolitionist project inspired by the Black Panther breakfast and political education programs.

Ten Years After Oak Creek: Federal Policy Recommendations to Protect Communities Targeted by Hate

2022 was a year marked with significant anniversaries of hate against the AAPI community both historic and recent, from the 40th anniversary of the hate-driven murder of Chinese American immigrant Vincent Chin to the one-year anniversary of recent mass shootings in Atlanta and Indianapolis. These commemorations, moreover, came amidst a series of hate crimes targeting Sikh men in Richmond Hill, Queens, and a years-long spike in violence against Asian Americans - particularly Asian American women - ignited by the COVID-19 pandemic. One anniversary in 2022, however, is both important on its own right as a marker in the history of targeted violence and useful for contextualizing recent trends of hate in the US: the 10-year remembrance of the shooting at a gurdwara, a Sikh house of worship, in Oak Creek WI.

A Place for Us: Parks as a Social Justice Issue for Asian Americans

Krishnan and Park's communities of Jackson Heights and Elmhurst in New York City - home to a 75,000-strong, rapidly growing Asian American population - were the epicenter of not one, but two pandemics in 2020. As COVID-19 claimed the lives of their elders, trapped in nursing homes and cramped apartments, anti-Asian hate awaited them at every turn, stalking them on subway platforms and sidewalks. As these twin pandemics surged through their communities, their parks saved their lives. Their open spaces allowed them to escape the physical, mental, and social constraints of quarantine into fresh air. They allowed them to exist in community with their neighbors. And today, from daily t'ai chi ch'uan and yoga to annual Diwali, Eid, and Lunar New Year celebrations, their parks have become places of continued healing and growth. Here and across New York City, their public open spaces are essential to meeting the multiple challenges they face, from public health to public safety. They must recognize the extraordinary value of their park system and deepen their investment for all neighborhoods, and for future generations. Every community needs and deserves space to thrive.

A/Moral Divide: Questions for an Asian American Studies Research Paradigm

Research for the community ultimately aims to effect social change. Transpacific studies offers an analysis about global power, war and colonial presence, and unequal exchanges between nations that explores the transnational ties of Asian Americans.11 For instance, Laura Kina and Wei Ming Dariotis's work examines the intersection of American empire and the racialized/gendered representations of mixed-race Amerasians. The promise of transpacific studies and critical refugee studies is that they not only assess the traumas, needs, and conditions of Asian American communities, but they also examine the subjectivities, hopes, and futures of migrants and refugees as active, creative agents themselves.14 For example, transpacific scholar Wesley Ueunten writes about resistance to the construction of an American military base in Okinawa: Old people, as old and tiny as my Baban [grandmother] in my memories of her, have come to sit on the beach every day in quiet but unrelenting resistance to American Manifest Destiny and Japanese fatalistic dependency on that Destiny. In theory then, the genealogical and discursive analyses of transpacific studies and critical refugee studies would shed light on how we view social realities, and illuminate what's often missing in the analysis of these concepts.

Editors' Preface

[...]many authors suggest that the ideas and critiques and activist struggles that established the field either remain or, having shifted away, are now being revisited. Yê´n Lê Espiritu, in her article in this issue, looks at the ways critical refugee studies demands the global study of race, imperialism, and war, beyond the domestic landscape of what some consider Asian American studies. Jean-Paul R. Contreras deGuzman, and Douglass Ishii in a separate essay, share candid reflections on the life of contingent labor in the university and what is being asked of a field that claims to center critiques of power and work for transformative justice.

Editorial Comment: Pathologies, Performance, and Promiscuous Care

5 The authors are cautious about drawing too-easy parallels between the two pandemics, citing, for example, Marc Arthur's point that "there was never a race for a cure or vaccine to end AIDS like there is for COVID-19" (Anderson and Ybarra;Nereson);they also emphasize that the HIV and AIDS pandemic is ongoing.6 But the callousness on vivid display in the United States over the past two years, which ensured that COVID-19 has disproportionately impacted Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, the elderly, the immunocompromised, the incarcerated, and the poor, recalls the cruelty of public health policies during the first wave of HIV and AIDS. The issue opens with Anderson's and Ybarra's essay.11 It triangulates the first wave of the HIV and AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, performance theory, and the COVID-19 pandemic to trace how the legacies of queer care that emerged in response to HIV and AIDS circulate powerfully in our discipline today. "12 Anderson and Ybarra "contend that it is not merely coincidental that performance theory would elaborate such a claim within the context of the first wave of the HIV/AIDS epidemic … not because they have a causal or direct connection, but because they point to the same urgent question: 'Someone is dying in front of your eyes. What are you going to do about it?'" They go on to trace the complex legacies of queer care as practiced (and refused) at the 2022 American Society of Theatre Research annual conference in San Diego.

No Place for Hate California: A Model for Community-Centered Policymaking

These are just three of more than 11,000 reports of hate against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) shared with the Stop AAPI Hate coalition during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many more acts continue to go unreported, making the actual number much higher-potentially in the millions. Reports of anti-AAPI hate come from all fifty states and the District of Columbia, with nearly 40 percent from California. In response to the rise in hate against AAPI communities, Stop AAPI Hate introduced No Place for Hate California, a package of first-in-the-nation, state-level policy proposals. Together, these proposals take a gender-based, public health, and civil rights approach to addressing the racialized and sexualized verbal harassment experienced by AAPIs (especially AAPI women) in public, which comprise a majority of the reports submitted to Stop AAPI Hate. Stop AAPI Hate partnered with state legislators and mobilized a coalition of over fifty community-based organizations.

Queering Diasporic Desi Solidarity: South Asian Activism in US and UK Multiracial Social Movements

This article explores the linkages between queerness, racialization, activism, and community care in the South Asian diaspora. It examines activism, organizing, and social movement work practiced by queer diasporic South Asians in the UK and the United States. By analyzing the South Asian activist relationship to, and solidarity and partnership with, Black liberation activism, this article conceptualizes a framing of queer South Asian diasporic solidarity. This solidarity is framed through contrasting articulations of joint struggle, allyship, and kinship in queer communities. To articulate this struggle, the article contrasts histories of South Asian racialization, politicization, and queerness in the UK and the United States, and synthesizes first-person activist accounts of modern-day queer South Asian activists in the diaspora. Finally, it argues that queer feminist South Asian activists in both countries are employing a model of queered solidarity with Black activists and Black liberation, though in differing forms in each country, that centers queer intimacies and anti-patriarchal modes of organizing for liberation across queer communities of color.

To Write in Unwellness: Documenting A/P/A Voices

In this collectively written essay, we write as volunteers with A/P/A Voices: A COVID-19 Public Memory Project to share and hold space for this archive's stories, images, sounds, and silences. A/P/A Voices first emerged in Spring 2020 when a group of public-facing scholars, activists, and cultural workers converging at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU recognized the critical need to document the myriad experiences of Asian Americans, Asian immigrants, and Pacific Islanders during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the past year and a half, A/P/A Voices volunteers have conducted over seventy-five oral histories with community organizers, mutual aid workers, healthcare workers, and cultural workers across the country, and over seventy-five artifacts (artwork, videos, other ephemera) have been donated by participants. Through a collective form of writing we describe as dwelling in unwellness, we consider how the A/P/A Voices project and its improvised form of curation—informed by interruption, relational co-laboring, listening, and slowness—is necessitated by prolonged crisis. We ourselves are not outside of the pandemic;rather, as scholars, cultural workers, activists, and caregivers who navigate different levels of precarity, we are entangled within and beyond its folds. Thus, our writing with, rather than about, this project begins with the following questions: How do we connect our experiences of crisis to A/P/A Voices and to one another? How is our work enacted in solidarity with other communities of color devastated by racism and carceral violence, as well as disproportionate economic violence and the uneven effects of an ongoing public health crisis? What does it mean to engage a memory project from a place of unwellness?

The impact of racial discrimination on the health of Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic: a scoping review.

ABSTRACTObjective: Cases of discrimination and hate crimes against Asian Americans have surged ever since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, with deleterious effects. This scoping review synthesizes the literature on how pandemic-related discrimination is associated with the health of Asian Americans.Design: First, application search terms were entered into selected databases. Next, using a set of inclusion criteria, the articles were screened and assessed for eligibility. Data from the selected articles were extracted and summarized to answer the research questions.Results: Thirty-five studies were included. Almost all the studies examined psychological well-being. The remaining studies examined physical and workplace well-being. All the studies found that discrimination was associated with poorer health outcomes.Conclusion: Further research is needed to address the gaps in knowledge about how pandemic-related discrimination is associated with various domains of health among Asian Americans.

The Burden of Hate: How Nonwork Discrimination Experienced During the COVID-19 Pandemic Impacts Asian American Employees.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied by a sharp increase in prejudice and discrimination targeting Asian Americans in the USA. Thus, in addition to the public health risks associated with the virus, exposure to discrimination poses a unique threat to the health and well-being of Asian Americans. Indeed, empirical evidence has documented the linkage between experiencing anti-Asian discrimination during the pandemic and health decrements among Asian Americans. The goal of this study was to expand that research to also consider the ways experiencing discrimination in a nonwork context may spill over to affect the general and job-related well-being of Asian American employees as well as the potential mitigating role of coworker compassion. Results from a sample of 311 Asian American employees demonstrated that experiencing nonwork discrimination was associated with decrements in physical health and increased depression and job-related exhaustion. Further, there were significant interactions between nonwork discrimination and coworker compassion for engagement, emotional exhaustion, and depressive symptoms such that nonwork discrimination was more strongly related to each outcome when coworker compassion was low. The findings from the current study suggest that experiences of racial derogation, even those that occur outside the workplace environment, are detrimental to the well-being of employees and that coworker compassion is a positive resource that may foster healthier and more inclusive work environments. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10869-022-09848-6.

Politics, not Vulnerability: Republicans Discriminated against Chinese-born Americans throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic

Asian Americans became targets of increasingly hostile behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic. What motivated this? Fears of contagion arising from a behavioral immune system may have motivated hostility toward Asian Americans, especially among those Americans vulnerable to COVID-19. Additionally, stigmatizing rhetoric from right-wing figures may have legitimated anti-Asian behavior among those Americans who held stronger anti-Asian sentiments to begin with or who were more receptive to right-wing rhetoric. We explore these possibilities using a behavioral game with a representative sample of Americans at two points: in May and October 2020. Participants were partnered with a U.S.- or Chinese-born American in a give-or-take dictator game. The average American discriminated against Chinese-born Americans in May but not October 2020, when China was no longer a COVID-19 hotspot. But among Republicans, who may have held stronger anti-Asian sentiments to begin with and who were likely more receptive to right-wing rhetoric, discrimination - that is, differential treatment - was both stronger in May compared to non-Republicans and persisted into October 2020. Notably, Americans who were more vulnerable to COVID-19 were not especially likely to discriminate. © New York University in Abu Dhabi Corporation - Abu Dhabi, 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association.

REFRAMING HATE

The concept and naming of "hate crime," and the adoption of special laws to address it, provoked controversy and raised fundamental questions when they were introduced in the 1980s. In the decades since, neither hate crime itself nor those hotly debated questions have abated. To the contrary, hate crime has increased in recent years-although the prominent target groups have shifted over time-and the debate over hate crime laws has reignited as well. The still-open questions range from the philosophical to the doctrinal to the pragmatic: What justifies the enhanced punishment that hate crime laws impose based on the perpetrator's motivation? Does that enhanced punishment infringe on the perpetrator's rights to freedom of belief and expression? How can we know or prove a perpetrator's motivation? And, most practical of all: Do hate crime laws work? This Essay proposes that we reframe our understanding of what we label as hate crimes. It argues that those crimes are not necessarily the acts of hate-filled extremists motivated by deeply held, fringe beliefs, but instead often reflect the broader, even mainstream, social environment that has marked some social groups as the expected or even acceptable targets for crime and violence. In turn, hate crimes themselves influence the social environment by reinforcing recognizable patterns of discrimination. The Essay maintains that we should broaden our understanding of the motivations for and effects of hate crimes and draws connections between hate crimes and seemingly disparate phenomena that have recently captured the nation's attention.