It’s time to talk about anti-Asian racism in the UK

The US appears to be taking steps to end anti-Asian discrimination and hate in the wake of the Atlanta shooting. In Britain, however, the problem is still widely ignored.

On March 16, a man opened fire in three spa parlours in the US city of Atlanta, killing eight people, including six Asian women. The shootings, the worst mass killing in the United States since 2019, drew long-overdue attention to the rising wave of physical assaults, racial slurs and verbal abuse Asian communities in the country have faced in the past year. Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, and former President Donald Trump and his supporters’ attempts to baselessly blame it on China, there has been a major spike in anti-Chinese sentiment in the US. And in a country where many struggle to differentiate between Chinese people and other Asian ethnic groups, this resulted in a rising number of hate crimes against all East and Southeast Asians. The Stop AAPI Hate Reporting Center, which tracks incidents of discrimination, hate and xenophobia against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the US, recently revealed that they have recorded 3,795 anti-Asian racist incidents including verbal harassment, shunning and physical attacks between March 2020 and February 2021. The Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, meanwhile, found that the number of anti-Asian hate crimes reported to police rose 149 percent between 2019 and 2020.