Day 69: Full Bloom
Washington, D.C.’s historic cherry blossoms are in full bloom as President Biden announces new actions to combat anti-Asian hate crimes. The rise in violent discrimination against women and elderly, especially, has given rise to concern across borders.
Too many Asian Americans have been “waking up each morning the past year feeling their safety and the safety of their loved ones are at stake,” Biden said earlier this month, citing the reported origins of the pandemic and the racist rhetoric of the previous administration as cause for the uptick in violence.
Social media chatter also points to the U.S.’s history of anti-Asian propaganda and legislation and thee already existing tension between Black and Asian communities exacerbated by such incidents captured on video as one Asian-American police officer standing guard as a White officer knelt on George Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds.
“They’ve been attacked, blamed, scapegoated, and harassed. They’ve been verbally assaulted, physically assaulted, killed,” Biden said of AAPIs (Asian-American and Pacific Islanders), “…And it’s often met with silence. That’s been true throughout our history, but that has to change — because our silence is complicity. We cannot be complicit. We have to speak out. We have to act.”
The cherry blossoms were a gift from Japan, symbolic of the allyship between the two nations and ultimately surviving even the Pacific War.
Earlier this year, cherry trees in San Francisco’s Japantown were vandalized, stripped even of their branches, and people nationwide raised more than $30,000 in funds to replace them.
The hatred that targets AAPIs doesn’t differentiate based on nationality. Most of the victims of the mass shooting in Georgia were Korean-American.
Biden is calling on Congress to pass the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act first introduced in the House May 5th, 2020. “Before this pandemic started, I urged everyone — including elected officials — to not blame Asian Americans for the virus,” Representative Grace Meng (D-NY), who re-introduced the bill alongside Senator Mazie K. Hirono (D-HI) on March 11th, 2021, said via statement. “My words were not heeded.”
Additionally, the White House is reinstating their AAPI initiatives, the Department of Health and Human Services is allocating funding for AAPI survivors of domestic and sexual violence, and the Department of Justice is establishing a cross-agency initiative to combat and investigate anti-Asian violence.