The COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act Will Not Keep Our Communities Safe

Tuesday, May 4th, 2021

Yesterday, May 20, 2021, President Biden signed the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act into law, after it was overwhelmingly and historically passed through the Senate in a rare bipartisan vote of solidarity. It is promising to see our government acknowledge and address the rise in anti-API violence, but it is disheartening that the “solutions” offered do little to actually protect us from racist attacks.

The COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act mandates training for law enforcement to better identify anti-Asian racism and appoints an official in the Justice Department to review and expedite COVID-19-related hate crime reports among other things, but offers no real preemptive resources for violence prevention. Increasing police budgets to track crime statistics is hollow and superficial, and actually stands in contrast to KRC’s values of empowering all communities of color in Southern California.

As an Asian organization, we stand in solidarity with other marginalized communities: Black, Brown, undocumented, low-income, and LGBTQ brothers and sisters. This new law does not address the root causes of this increase in anti-Asian violence and does not provide genuine solutions (like more community resources, social services, education, housing, healthcare, etc.) to create the systemic change we need. It also further perpetuates and reinforces the “othering” of the Asian community, and ignores the police brutality that many Black and Brown people have suffered, furthering the divide between us all.

Instead of increasing the power and budgets of law enforcement, this new law should focus on providing an increase in resources for the most marginalized and targeted in our communties—the undocumented, low-income, immigrant, sex workers, LGBTQ, and communities of color that are too often also targeted, and not protected, by police presence.

Again, the passing of the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act is momentous in its acknowledgement of the API community. However it is hard to celebrate it as it comes at the expense of so many other communities that we at KRC choose to stand in solidarity with.