Most of Asian Americans in LA County fear hate crimes, survey finds
Cesar Echano was walking in a Cerritos park when a man started to yell at him.
"That you don't belong here — go back to where you belong," he recalled.
While the confrontation began as just a man yelling, it quickly escalated to the man attacking Echano. By the time the man was done hitting Echano, his face and shirt were covered with blood.
"He punched me very, very hard," he said. "He's young and it was so hard that I almost lost [consciousness]."
Many Asian Americans and Pacific Islands live in fear, hoping that they never experience what Echano endured. According to a survey by the Pat Brown Institute For Public Affairs, two-thirds of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the Los Angeles County area fear becoming the next victim of a hate crime and a quarter said that they were a target of a hate crime, just like Echano.
"When we asked respondents if someone had verbally or physically abused them or had their property damaged because of their race and ethnicity," said researcher Nathan Chen. "We found that one-fourth of AAPI said that they experienced this form of hate — and remember this poll is specifically to Los Angeles County."
During the pandemic, anti-Asian hate crimes in skyrocketed to the highest its ever been in nearly two decades. According to the L.A. County Commission on Human Relations found that anti-Asian hate crimes rose 76% in 2020, the highest its been since 2001.
"We got reports almost on a weekly basis people reporting that they were victims of a racial slur — in extreme cases they were physically attacked," said James An.
An is the president and founder of the Korean American Federation of Los Angeles, to stop the uptick in anti-Asian hate crimes.
"With the onset of the pandemic, it's become necessary because it is happening so often," he said. "We just decided we need to make our community aware, at least make our non-English speaking Korean community aware that these things are happening."
According to the survey, 80% of the AAPI community believe that anti-Asian racism has become a serious problem in the region with half of all Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders experiencing some kind of racial discrimination.
"Just because you don't see it yourself doesn't mean it's not happening," said An. "People in our community are being targeted because of the communities that they come from and it has to stop."
