‘A lifetime of anti-Asian hate’: New Yorkers rally against hate crimes targeted at Asian-Americans

Grace Lee is afraid to leave her home at night in New York City’s Financial District.

Like many of the city’s 1.9 million Asian-Americans, Lee, 41, fears she’ll become a victim of a growing spree of anti-Asian violence. “I stand in the middle of the platform,” she said, fearing she’ll be shoved in front of a subway train by a racist attacker.

On Sunday, Lee joined hundreds of other Asian-Americans in the city who rallied against a nationwide trend of hate crimes that includes the murder of six Asian women at Atlanta spas last week.

“Everybody has to stand unified to fight racism, that’s the only way to end it,” Kam Yuen, 52, of Queens, said during an anti-hate rally in lower Manhattan. “We have to worry about our elderly, we have to worry about our family members, and then the community in general.”

Police reported the city’s latest hate crime on Sunday as well — an Asian man left in critical condition after he was punched in the face on an uptown No. 1 train Friday.

While hate crimes against Asian-Americans have drawn more attention after the Atlanta massacres — and during the pandemic as some attackers have blamed Chinese-Americans for the COVID-19 pandemic — many in New York said they’ve faced harsh racism for generations.

“It’s not just been a year, it’s been a lifetime of anti-Asian hate,” Sen. John Liu (D-Queens) said during a rally at Union Square. “The Asian-American community has faced a double virus this past year.”

The fear of hate crimes has grown so strong in the city’s predominately Asian neighborhoods that community activists have formed neighborhood watch groups to look out for one another, especially the elderly.

Dao Yin, who is running for the 20th district City Council seat in northeast Queens, on Sunday announced a new patrol group — Main Street Patrol — to keep community members safe as they walk through Flushing, a neighborhood that’s roughly 70% Asian-American.

Hate crimes in Asian-American communities have sparked other forms of activism as well in recent months. After an Asian man was stabbed in the back near Baxter and Worth streets on Feb. 25, Victoria Lo said she launched a group called Chinatown Runners to unify the neighborhood through exercise.

“This time I wanted to use my sadness, fear and rage to be the catalyst for something better, positive healing,” Lo said.

As the protest moved from Union Square into Chinatown’s Canal Street, organizers pointed to centuries of racism against Asian-Americans in the city.

“This park was the original melting pot, Five Points, where you had newly emancipated African-Americans, Irish, Jewish, Italian and the Chinese all living here,” said Ben Wei, founder of the nonprofit COVID Foundation, during the Columbus Park rally.

“Now, we stand on this ground to talk about interracial violence on our community. This is not a coincidence,” Wei said.

Mayoral candidate Andrew Yang said at Columbus Park that he’d put more funding into the city’s Asian Hate Crimes Task Force if elected.

“It has been staggering to see the racism against our community morph and metastasize into something dark, and virulent and increasingly dangerous,” Yang said. “It is not an issue that you can have volunteers addressing if crime against the community goes up 900%.”

Nia White, 18, an organizer for Freedom March NYC, which helped rally some of the Black Lives Matter protests in the city over the past year, said it’s crucial for both movements to stand in solidarity.

“If you only came out for Asian Lives Matter and not BLM, you are part of the problem,” White said. “If you only came out for BLM and not Asian Lives Matter, you are part of the problem.”