The American Political Science Association condemns the mass shooting and murder of eight individuals, six of whom were women of Asian descent, in Georgia on Tuesday, March 16, 2021. We condemn this act of racial and ethnic violence and all incidents of racial and ethnic violence and discrimination committed against members of the Asian and Asian American community over the past year.
Political science scholarship provides a framework for understanding the latest eruption of violence against the Asian community in the United States. The racist misogyny, which has roots in America’s white supremacist history–including the US government’s exclusionary immigration policies of the 19th century, Western colonialist and misogynistic views of Asia and Asian women, and the racist internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, and scapegoating of Asian Americans for phenomena like economic recessions or pandemics—has led to the deadly escalation of anti-Asian and anti-Asian American violent hate incidents since March 2020, according to Stop AAPI Hate.
White supremacy in the United States has fueled discrimination and has obscured and erased the violent realities of anti-Asian American racism from the public narrative. As Drs. Whitney Hua and Jane Junn wrote in the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, “[r]acial implicit biases and discrimination against all communities of color, including Asian Americans, are preserved as the racial order continues to exist and normalize them.”
Read the full statement at politicalsciencenow.com/apsa-statement-condemning-anti-asian-violence-racism-sexism-and-historical-exclusion. ■
APSA has also compiled a list of resources for addressing anti-Asian hate and violence, available at: www.apsanet.org/resources/addressinganti-asianhate.
These resources include:
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• Data on anti-Asian hate from StopAAPIHate
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• Demographic information on Asian Americans and Asian American political behavior from AAPI Data
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• A new symposium on AAPI politics in PS: Political Science & Politics
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• Paula D. McClain's 2019 presidential address, “Crises, Race, Acknowledgement: The Centrality of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics to the Future of Political Science.”
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• Resources on COVID-19 and racism from Asian Americans Advancing Justice and Learning for Justice.
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• Information on the Asian Pacific American Caucus (APAC) and the APSA Committee on the Status of Asian Pacific Americans in the Profession
