On Asian-American Hate

Below, Head of School Mike Simpson’s address to the Stone student body after the events of March 16, 2021.

Today, before we head into this weekend, I’d like to share a few difficult statistics with you. 

Between March 19, 2020 and February 28, 2021 -- since the beginning of the pandemic, through the end of this past February — Asian-American and Pacific Islanders in America have reported 3795 incidents of assault, harassment, and civil rights violations.  This represents an astonishing 150% increase in targeted assault, harassment, and civil rights violations.

For a sense of the scope of this extraordinary increase in targeted acts of hate, verbal harassment represents an astonishing 68% of these incidents; physical assault 11%; online harassment nearly 7%.  And it happens literally everywhere.  Sixty percent of these incidents occurred in public -- either in a place of business or literally on the sidewalk. Over the last year, women are 2.3 times more likely to be assaulted than men. And over the last year, 42% of these incidents were directed specifically at people who identify as members of the Chinese/Chinese-American community.

I’m sharing this with you today for the obvious reason.  Two days ago, a man named Robert Aaron Long murdered eight people, six of whom were Asian-American women.  Here I will add that Robert Aaron Long was taken into custody peacefully, and after his arrest he was described as having “a bad day”.

Whatever conclusions I draw about why assault, harassment, and civil rights violations against the Asian-American and Pacific Islander community have increased by 150% since March 19th of 2020 are almost certainly lacking in enough nuance or expertise to serve anyone here whatsoever.  But here’s what I can say definitively: all such acts of hatred begin in the same place -- with our relationship to language, with our understanding of language, with our relationship to the power of language, with our willingness to allow meaning itself to be weaponized in intentional and in willfully lazy ways.  Language creates the physics of our world; language obliterates everything.

And here’s what I can say definitively as well: all such acts of hatred are perpetuated when we refuse to acknowledge what is true.  When we refuse to acknowledge systemic racism because it feels difficult to do so.  When we refuse to say that George Floyd was murdered.  When we refuse to acknowledge that what happened this week was not only a terribly predictable outcome after this past year, and/also the predictable outcome of a set of interlocking systems: our nation’s relationships to weapons, our nation’s relationship to difference, our nation’s relationship to language, and -- more than anything -- the hundreds of years our nation has systematized overt racism, xenophobia toward the Asian-American and Pacific-Islander community through internment, violence, humiliating caricature, and hate speech.

As we return to one another, as we re-emerge together -- as a school, as a nation -- from these twelve months, it’s important to remember that within this re-emergence will come a kind of reckoning: of who we were before, of what we have learned of ourselves since.  Of what we created, of what we might become, of what we must acknowledge as true.  Let’s never relent as a community in our basic, foundational obligation -- that we are committed to making the world a measurably better place.  To be unrelenting in our commitment to understanding language and understanding meaning.  

To be unrelenting in our commitment to dismantling systems of racisms in all of their forms.

And do so by recognizing what is painful and also true.  What happened two days ago was the predictable outcome of our architecture of hatred.

And it is our duty as a community -- to examine it, to acknowledge it, and to dismantle it.