Five years ago, a gunman went on a shooting rampage at three Atlanta-area spas, killing eight people, six of whom were Asian women. The brazen attacks on 16 March 2021 sent shock waves through Asian communities already under siege from a surge in violence during the pandemic.
The shooting – following a spate of attacks targeting Asian seniors – sparked protests, mutual aid organizing and sweeping policy changes. For a moment, Stop Asian Hate looked poised to become the social justice movement of the 2020s.
But within two years, the momentum sputtered as the media and the country moved on. Meanwhile, conflicting stances on the role of police in public safety left the community at odds over how to effectively curb hate crimes against Asians. Today, activists say the movement is at a crossroads under Donald Trump’s second, more aggressively anti-immigrant administration.
“One of the things the initial Stop Asian Hate movement did was frame the issue around hate and interpersonal violence,” said Phi Nguyen, the executive director at Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Atlanta from 2021 to 2023. “One of the policy responses we saw was more hate crime legislation, but I don’t think those policies get to the root causes of violence.”
A campaign that ‘galvanized political power’
Hostility toward Asian Americans crested in the early months of 2020, as the country went into a pandemic lockdown and Trump, in his first stint as president, labeled Covid-19 the “Chinese virus”. Asian people across the country reported being shunned, spat on, bullied and beaten in public spaces. Racial slurs were deployed with abandon.
In response to the rampant racism and growing anxiety, a coalition in California’s Bay Area – AAPI Equity Alliance, Chinese for Affirmative Action, and San Francisco State University – formed the Stop Asian Hate campaign to document the forms of discrimination and harassment Asians were experiencing. What began as the reporting center quickly morphed into a rallying cry: between 2020 and 2024, Stop AAPI Hate recorded nearly 13,000 reports of anti-Asian hate incidents, along with more than 2.4 million unique visitors to its website.
The campaign “galvanized political power” to push through legislation that bolstered mutual aid, public safety and education efforts across the US, said Manjusha Kulkarni, the executive director of AAPI Equity Alliance and a co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate.
In Chinatowns across the country, hundreds of volunteers banded together to form patrol groups and escort vulnerable seniors home. Martial arts instructors taught self-defense classes to women. In July of 2021, California legislators invested a historic $156m in victim support, mental health and educational resources to combat anti-Asian hate. Illinois and New Jersey lawmakers passed laws requiring Asian American history to be taught in public schools. These policy wins will outlast the movement itself, Kulkarni said.
“I can say without hesitation that we didn’t forecast in any way that a movement would spring up,” she said. “When we see overall what’s been achieved, it’s been quite tremendous.”
Ideological divides posed challenges
But within the diverse and burgeoning Asian activist community, stark ideological divides were manifest from the outset. Younger, reform-minded activists pushed for non-carceral, community-based interventions while older business and political leaders backed tough-on-crime policies.
In the summer of 2020, the New York police department created an Asian hate crime taskforce in response to growing attacks against Asian New Yorkers. The initiative drew support from celebrities such as China Mac and William Lex Ham, but was widely criticized by progressive AAPI organizers for expanding “systems of criminalization”. When actors Daniel Dae Kim and Daniel Wu offered a $25,000 reward for information about the suspect who shoved an elderly Asian man in Oakland’s Chinatown, local organizers likened the reward to a “bounty” on Black and Brown men.
Two months after the Atlanta spa shooting, more than 100 AAPI-led groups released a statement in opposition to the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act, which made the reporting of hate crimes more accessible. “Hate crime classifications and statistics do not change the structural conditions that lead to violence against marginalized communities,” the statement said.
Among progressive organizers, an enduring critique of Stop Asian Hate is its complicity in perpetuating anti-Blackness within the community. This development was especially apparent given that the movement coincided with a period of mass Black Lives Matter protests after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. News reports and social media posts repeatedly showed people of color as perpetrators of anti-Asian violence, despite research indicating that a majority of attackers are white.
“The movement consistently allied itself with anti-Black narratives, visually and otherwise, in cherrypicking street-level violence against Asian elders, selectively highlighting perpetrators who are Black or Black-presenting,” said Dylan Rodríguez, an ethnic studies associate professor at the University of California, Riverside, who has written extensively about the Stop Asian Hate campaign.
Nguyen, formerly of Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Atlanta, said the movement’s framing of racial violence as individualized, rather than systemic and structural, was shortsighted.
Instead of bringing more police into communities of color, Nguyen said, local and state governments could have invested more resources into mutual aid and legal funds for immigrants, or language access for mental health services and anti-poverty programs.
Building a more sustainable movement
Stop Asian Hate was, in many ways, a phenomenon of the Joe Biden era, which ushered in unprecedented investments in racial and environmental justice initiatives after four years of Trump’s presidency.
Since Trump returned to office for a second term, he has slashed diversity and inclusion programs and funding for non-profits, including many led by Asian Americans. The shuttering of outlets such as NBC Asian America, which rigorously covered AAPI issues, took away the media attention that built momentum for the movement.
More recently, anti-Asian hate made headlines with a controversial ruling in the case of 84-year-old Vicha Ratanapakdee, who became the face of the movement when his killing fueled mass protests in the Bay Area in 2021. In January, a jury in San Francisco cleared Ratanapakdee’s attacker, Antoine Watson, of murder and elder abuse charges – a decision that upset Ratanapakdee’s loved ones and community leaders, who felt he was targeted for his race. (Watson was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and assault.)
For Connie Wun, the executive director of AAPI Women Lead, the most important legacy of the movement is that it brought attention to the collective and personal experiences of Asians in America, particularly women and migrants – like the women killed in the Atlanta spa tragedy – who are often subjected to both gender- and race-based violence.
And yet the everyday realities for Asian women and girls, immigrants and refugees, have grown “exponentially worse” than before, Wun said. ICE arrests of Asians under Trump are nearly four times higher than under Biden, according to a new report from Stop AAPI Hate. A January survey found that half of Asian adults said they’ve been impacted by the administration’s anti-immigrant policies.
This kind of state violence, Wun said, also constitutes anti-Asian hate, yet it was barely addressed in the reckoning that erupted during the pandemic.
A more sustainable movement, Wun said, would involve more “intergeneration conversations” about the root causes of racial violence and a vision of justice that doesn’t involve law enforcement. It would involve a more intentional effort to address the inequities between the many ethnic groups that fall under the umbrella of “Asian America.”
Today, the Stop AAPI Hate coalition continues to track hate incidents, but it also prioritizes community-based and political advocacy efforts in Congress, Kulkarni said. Last May, Stop AAPI Hate and four other organizations filed a class-action lawsuit against the justice department over what they claim to be an “unlawful termination” of more than $810m in public safety grants.
One of the more hopeful outcomes of the movement has been the establishment of rapid response networks and emergency funds for victims, Nguyen said. When ICE agents raided a Hyundai plant in Georgia last year, arresting nearly 500 Korean and Latino workers, organizers knew how to quickly deliver resources to detainees.
These recent ICE raids show that the fight against anti-Asian violence needs to be integrated into the broader antiracist movement against all communities of color, Nguyen said: “It should be an interracial and intersectional movement that’s connected to history.”
