On this special intensely focused new episode of Light ‘Em Up we drill deep and focus the light of the truth on Asian Hate Crimes and the fear that has gripped the AAPI communities across our nation.
On February 27th in only 120 minutes 7 New York Asian women (all members of the AAPI community) were attacked.
The FBI defines hate crimes as “criminal offense[s] against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity.”
These are not random attacks – they are targeted and intentional.
Brutal hate crimes have resulted in the deaths of 4 New Yorkers recently.
A 62-year-old grandmother, GuiYing Ma, was brutally attacked with a large rock while sweeping the sidewalk in the Corona neighborhood of Queens, NY in November, 2021. So severely beaten, she laid in a coma from late until dying on February 22, 2022.
On January 15, 2022 a homeless man in an unprovoked attack shoved Michelle Alyssa Go, 40, to her death in front of a Times Square subway train. Go was hit by the train and then run over.
On February 13, 2022 Christina Yuna Lee, 35, was stabbed 40 times and left to bleed to death on the floor of her apartment bathroom by an attacker who pushed in the door after following her home. The individual arrested for this heinous crime has a lengthy prior criminal history having been arrested 7 times in the past 7 years and suffers from a history of mental illness.
Yao Pan Ma, a Chinese immigrant, was beaten to death as he collected cans in East Harlem in April of 2021 – he died of his injuries on New Year’s Eve, 2021.
On Tuesday March 16, 2021, Robert Long was accused of shooting 8 people to death, 6 of whom were of Asian descent, in Cherokee County and Atlanta, GA.
Aggression and hatred towards people of Asian descent is nothing new in the United States. America has a past deeply rooted in fear, hate, and violence. A dark cloud of hatred has cast its shadowy grip over America.
If you really want to track the genesis of hatred directed against Asians and Asian-Americans, it can be traced all the way back to the Page Act, in 1875. The Immigration Act of 1882, also known as the Chinese Exclusion Act, provided for the exclusion from the United States of ALL persons from China – which wasn’t repealed until 1943 - to the internment of Japanese, many of which were U.S. Citizens from 1942-45.
Light ‘Em Up has uncovered that in 16 major cities across the country, anti-Asian hate crimes had more than doubled between 2019 and 2020.
After each incident, Asian-American groups and elected officials have come out in force demanding more be done to address violence against members of their community.
Will it take more policing or better social programs to seriously address this crisis?
An injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere. We all should be deeply concerned.
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In a time of division, facts unite!
Phil Rizzo, Executive Producer