On Tuesday, May 31, 2022, last month KPOP boy group from South Korea, BTS received an invitation from the President of the United States, Joe Biden, to come to the White House. BTS was officially invited to meet with President Joe Biden to discuss issues of Asian inclusion and representation and to address Asia’s anti-crime, hate and discrimination while celebrating Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Heritage Month which lasted for a full month last May. . From the press release that was distributed by the White House, why they chose to invite BTS is that with this, it is hoped that the BTS platform will act as young ambassadors who spread messages of hope and positivity throughout the world.
From this quote, what exactly is racism and why is racism a serious problem and very important to discuss? According to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, the definition of racism is an ideology that contributes to mythical statements about other racial and ethnic groups that demean that group or community. This idea also holds that there is a causal relationship between a race’s physique and personality, intelligence, morality, and other cultural and behavioral traits, which makes some races ‘innately’ superior to others.
Cases of racism against Asians in the United States have not emerged recently. Quoted from The Washington Post, the issue of racism against Asia in America has been going on for several centuries. The allegory dates back to the 1700s, when Chinese doctors were making detailed epidemiological pictures of smallpox victims. But a few years later, this was unreasonably claimed by the French. This is claimed as a fact of excellence of European medicine. After that a racist idea emerged that the Chinese were a dirty race and carriers of deadly diseases. Years of brutality also happened to the Asian community there. In 1886 alone, mobs burned at least twelve Chinatowns in California to the ground.
At this time In the United States (US) hate crimes against Asians and their descendants are on the rise. The fact that the first outbreak of Covid-19 was reported in Wuhan, China is the reason. Based on Worldometer records, the number of positive corona patients in Uncle Sam’s country as of March 23, 2021 was 30,580,072 people. The total number of positive corona patients across the country is 124,423,295 people. This means that almost one in four people who have contracted the corona virus worldwide is in Uncle Sam’s country. Not only the number of patients, the US is also the country with the most fatalities in the world. Already 556,003 people in the US have died from the corona virus attack.
Stop AAPI Hate, an organization that tracks incidents of hate and discrimination against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, recorded at least 500 incidents in the first 2 months of this year. If you look at the last year, the number is definitely higher, reaching 3, 795 complaints. Most reports noted that 68% were verbal abuse. While 11% includes physical attacks. The latest problem is that 2 Indonesian citizens (WNI) in Philadelphia, USA are reported to have been victims of beatings by 5 unknown people. This is known from a launch issued by the Indonesian community in Philadelphia. They said that 2 Indonesian citizens had been ganged up at a station while waiting for the train to depart on Sunday, March 21, 2021, evening local time. The violence is predicted to be racism-based violence. The two young people first told them they had been targeted by a gang of gangsters because of racial motives.
In recent times there have also been reports of Asian deaths in the United States. One of them was the murder of an 87-year-old Thai immigrant, Vichar Ratanapakdee, and the brutal assault of a 67-year-old man in San Francisco who was not publicly named. Then there was the problem of beating a 27-year-old man named Denny Kim in Koreatown Los Angeles. Denny said his attackers shouted, “You guys have the Chinese Virus, go back to China”. In 2020, to the information of the New York City Police Department (NYPD), there were 29 racially motivated attacks against Asian Americans in New York City. Twenty-four of the issues were interpreted to have “coronavirus motivation.” A growing wave of violence against Asians led many toward racial motives after news of the Atlanta area killings spread across the nation.
To reduce the level of hate crimes against Asian communities in the United States that has soared due to the Covid-19 pandemic, United States lawmakers sent an anti-hate bill to President Joe Biden’s desk in later May aimed at avoiding violence against Asian-Americans, following a rise in attacks. Concerns include killings during the coronavirus pandemic. After that, the House of Representatives passed a law called the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act with a strong bipartisan vote of 364 to 62, a few weeks after it was approved by the Senate with almost unanimous support. Biden endorsed the law, which would speed up the review of COVID-19-related hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI), broaden public understanding of the issue, and provide guidance to state and local governments on how to combat hate crime.
However, why do cases of racism continue to this day? In 1950, UNESCO explained that all humans on earth are the same creature, namely as homo sapiens which consists of several populations, and the largest population is a race. There is no scientific evidence that reports if there is an intellectual correlation between biological race differences. This behavior is the basis if there are no scientific facts that can place certain racial hierarchies superior to other races. But the reality that has existed so far is a social construction that places certain races superior to other races in various aspects.
There are still many people who have the mindset or mindset that their race is better, their race is the most superior, and so on. Even though we know that as a person we have the right to be respected and treated equally regardless of skin color, race or whatever.
