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Earlier today I attended the launch of the Asian Australian Alliance's preliminary incident report on COVID-19 racism, by @redrabbleroz @echewy @ThomsonChng and others. Here's a few key insights. 1/n https://asianaustralianalliance.net/covid-19-coronavirus-racism-incident-report/covid-19-racism-incident-report-preliminary-report/
Post COVID-19 anti-Asian racism is gendered, with women disproportionately affected.
Racial slurs, jokes, and verbal threats were the three most common types of racist incident. Note the relatively low experience of exclusion/ discrimination vs the high proportion of racist attacks. This is not 'harmless'.
Most incidents took place in public - either on the street or in supermarkets. They were mostly random opportunistic attacks by people unknown to the victim, based purely on racial profiling.
Online abuse constituted 9.4% of all incidents, and amongst those, almost half were on Facebook. It's also worth noting that some people took the time to carry out abuse by email, which suggests more premeditation that social media.
Here's an example of physical intimidation from the report. A Vietnamese-Australian woman was targeted.
Here's an example of a 'joke' that was mentioned in today's launch.
(See this article on the impacts of racist and other discriminatory humor: https://theconversation.com/psychology-behind-the-unfunny-consequences-of-jokes-that-denigrate-63855)
(See this article on the impacts of racist and other discriminatory humor: https://theconversation.com/psychology-behind-the-unfunny-consequences-of-jokes-that-denigrate-63855)
Here's an example of a verbal threat:
And an example of exclusion:
In his comments about these incidents, @redrabbleroz said common themes were: reference to eating habits, especially eating bats; accusations of hoarding; stereotypes of Asians as disease-carriers; and references to the Chinese Communist Party.
The report makes a number of recommendations. I'll just highlight 3 here:
1. Need for a national anti-racism strategy
2. Improved data collection & sharing RE racist incidents
3. Creation of multilingual reporting channels
1. Need for a national anti-racism strategy
2. Improved data collection & sharing RE racist incidents
3. Creation of multilingual reporting channels
You can read the full report here: https://asianaustralianalliance.net/covid-19-coronavirus-racism-incident-report/covid-19-racism-incident-report-preliminary-report/
