HOUSTON, US
Hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) in the US continue to plague communities across the country, prompting the Biden administration to take action.
The latest high-profile hate crime took place in the state of Indiana on Jan. 11, when an 18-year-old Indiana University student of Asian descent was stabbed repeatedly in the head on a city bus because of her race.
According to the criminal complaint, the suspect, Billie Davis, 56, who is white, started stabbing the victim in the head with a folding knife as she exited the bus. Davis allegedly told investigators that she stabbed the victim because she was Chinese, saying “it would be one less person to blow up our country.”
Davis has been charged with attempted murder, aggravated battery, and battery by means of a deadly weapon.
“This terrifying confrontation is a continuation of a soaring national crisis: anti-Asian racism intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic and rising US-China tensions,” said the Indiana Chapter of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum in a statement, emphasizing that this “is not an isolated event. AAPIs across the country have found themselves in the crosshairs of racial harassment, discrimination, vandalism, and violence.”
“There is fear. Because that could be any of us,” said Rogene Gee Calvert with the nonprofit AAPI advocacy group OCA-Greater Houston.
“I could be sitting in a bus or sitting anywhere and somebody could come up and do something violent to me because they’re angry. It doesn’t matter where we are, who we are or what we’re doing, but if people have been indoctrinated to believing that we are here to do something wrong, then they will equate whoever they see as Asian as being those people they hate, whether it’s an authoritarian government or country. Their mentality is that we hate those people because we hate those governments.”
“I fear the ‘normalization’ of this racial hate and how it…
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