At the Crossroads: COVID-19, Racism, and Disinformation

Quotes

• Congressman Ted Lieu

  “When America experiences fear, minority communities have been scapegoated.”

  “One of the reasons that you see a certain kind of hatred and discrimination against Asian-Americans is from something I call the “foreigner syndrome,” that when someone looks at me their first view is that I’m not American, or I’m a second-class citizen, or that I’m not of this country and I have dual loyalties in another country. And this isn’t even just from conspiracy theories or specific disinformation memes, this is embedded in our own government.” 

  “As we see a heating up of the rhetoric between the U.S. and China I think the situation could get worse, and it is my hope we can counter this with factual information and really drive home the link that you have to view Asian-Americans as you would view any other American, which is: they’re Americans.”

• Prof. Jonathan Corpus Ong

  “We need to account how hate speech and right-wing ideology might travel internationally through social media, but we also need sociological and historical perspectives, nuancing how racism—and internalized racism—are experienced by AAPI communities, in our ethnic diversity, our sociolinguistic differences, [and] our class differences.”

  “We need to really understand how disinformation works, where it comes from, and who funds it. We need to know how disinformation can sow confusion, create divisiveness, and create enemies and scapegoats. Disinformation only works because it activates our community’s deep stories, anxieties, and fears, and we need to confront those too.”

  “The narratives targeting black communities...I would want to understand more how Black on Asian crimes are being reported in this manipulative kind of ecosystem that targets black communities and have these kinds of research speak to one another. I think we need more understanding there.”

• Rui Zhong

  “[In Chinese Media], violence against Asian Americans is framed in a way that showcases instability in the United States both in terms of law enforcement and in terms of cultural problems that the United States has.”

  “The impetus to really be specific about state actors, specific types of policies, is something that the foreign policy community should really try to focus on because U.S.-China state tensions are not going away. But how people approach making U.S.-China policy is something that is always a work in progress.”

  “It doesn’t matter what kind of foreign policy we have in the aftermath [of the Atlanta spa shooting] if the communities of Asian descent in the United States feel unsafe and unsupported.” 

• Michelle Ye Hee Lee

  “It’s really important, especially for journalists, to understand as we cover these recent attacks, that violence and harassment and racism against Asians in this country dates to the arrival of Asians in this country.”

  “Over the entirety of our time here, we have faced different eras and different types of violence and harassment, and it’s important to contextualize that this is not just a surge in attacks, not just a one-off incident around COVID but it’s actually a part of our longer history.”

  “Moving forward, there really needs to be some sort of cultural competency training for newsrooms year-round. It can’t be done on a breaking news situation. Because cultural competency around different communities is so different, we should be training our journalists and our editors and all of our news managers to understand how different communities interact, what their cultural boundaries are, what their limitations are, how to approach them, what context to keep in mind when you talk with them, [and] have language resources on hand.”