On International Women’s Day (however the term “women” might be defined), we can celebrate Eileen Gu’s successful escape from racist America to non-racist China.
Despite President Biden’s efforts, “74% of Asian American, Pacific Islander women experienced racism in past year, report says” (NBC, 3/3/2022):
As anti-Asian attacks on Asian American and Pacific Islanders continue to rise, a report released Thursday underscores how women in the racial group endure a disproportionate number of such incidents.
The research, spearheaded by the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, revealed that 74 percent of Asian American and Pacific Islander women reported having personally experienced racism or discrimination in the last 12 months, roughly the time since the Atlanta-area spa shootings, in which eight people, most of them Asian women, were murdered, the report pointed out.
Russell Jeung, a co-founder of hate incident tracking forum Stop AAPI Hate, which also worked on the report, said many are likely to be dealing with the intersectional harassment of being both Asian Americans or Pacific Islanders and women.
With an anti-racist president in the White House, who could be responsible for this?
Choimorrow said the results show that the danger that women across ethnicities in the community are in goes far beyond issues caused by racist “China virus” rhetoric and long predate the pandemic. It’s why, Choimorrow said, the solution isn’t as simple as passing hate crime legislation, like the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act.
“To be honest, if you think about it, having something like the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act also sort of reinforces that notion that this is a creation of Covid, and therefore we’re addressing it as that,” Choimorrow said. “There’s no recognition of what we have endured as people for hundreds of years. You’re not looking for the right solutions if you’re only looking at the context of the last two years.”
The article illustrates the importance of wearing masks outdoors (2/15/2022 in NYC):
Apropos of the photo, masking among Asians seems to some extent cultural and predates Covid. In NYC’s biggest Asian communities everyone in stores is still masked and and probably about 90% of the Asian people on the streets are still masked — as compared to say 50% of the tourists. I used to travel to Asia, this was before Covid, and you would see lots of people in Beijing and Tokyo masked. I found the custom curious and Professor Internet seemed to give two reasons, politeness, that you have a cold and don’t want to spread it to others, and poor air quality in for example Beijing, that the mask would somehow help with that.
I had a period in my life when I dated Japanese girls. One of the cultural tidbits I picked up WRT use of masks in Asian societies was: it is considered inappropriate for an Asian woman of a fertile age to show up in public w/o spending effort to look pretty. That holds even if she’s going to a convenience store (konbini – コンビニ, LOL:)
So to save herself an effort she just dons a mask:) This also serves to dissuade chikan (痴漢).