WVU Libraries Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion Resource Guide

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is believed to have emerged in Wuhan, China in late December 2019 and began rapidly spreading around the globe throughout the spring months of 2020. As COVID-19 proliferated across the United States, Asian Americans reported a surge in racially motivated hate crimes involving physical violence and harassment. Throughout history, pandemic-related health crises have been associated with the stigmatization and “othering” of people of Asian descent. Asian Americans have experienced verbal and physical violence motivated by individual-level racism and xenophobia from the time they arrived in America in the late 1700s up until the present day. At the institutional level, the state has often implicitly reinforced, encouraged, and perpetuated this violence through bigoted rhetoric and exclusionary policies. COVID-19 has enabled the spread of racism and created national insecurity, fear of foreigners, and general xenophobia, which may be related to the increase in anti-Asian hate crimes during the pandemic. We examine how these crimes – situated in historically entrenched and intersecting individual-level and institutional-level racism and xenophobia – have operated to “other” Asian Americans and reproduce inequality.

As coronavirus disease 2ů19 (COVID-19) has rapidly spread across the United States, so has xenophobia and discriminatory acts against Asian Americans. From March 19, 2Ů2U. to May 13, 2Ů2Ů, more than 17ŮŮ anti-Asian hate incidents were documented across the United States. according to reports by the STOP AAPI Hate campaign from the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council. In one incident. a trucker threw a drink atan Asian American wearing a mask and gloves and yelled. "Hey Chink, you're f-ing nasty."1 Although this new rise of racism is alarming, the association between disease, racism. and Asian Americans isnot new in US history. "Yellow Peril," or the tear that Chinese and other Asian immigrants were a threat to America and Western culture. led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882-the first racial-based exclusion law in American history. At the turn of the 2ůth century. public health officials perceived Chinese and other "Orientals" as infested with disease, subjecting them to undue quarantine, medical examinations, and interrogations. For example, during the 19ůů to 19Ů4 bubonic plague in San Francisco, California. a Chinese American man. found dead in his apartment in San Francisco's Chinatown. was falsely accused of being the source of this plague; disease transmission was later found to be from rats and fleas. Nevertheless, ungrounded public xenophobia and bias against Chinese Americans resulted in the entire Chinatown area being quarantined and forced vaccinations during this period.

Since March 2020, Asian Americans have experienced an alarming increase in racial discrimination and racially motivated violence.1 Commentators have attributed this distressing fact to the blame placed on China for causing the Covid-19 pandemic, given that the virus was initially discovered in Wuhan. Some top U.S. government officials perpetuated this attitude by referring to Covid-19 as the “China Virus” and “Kung Flu.” Because non-Asian people in the United States often conflate Asian subgroups, many people have directed their anti-Chinese sentiment toward people of other Asian heritage. Violence against Asian Americans has persisted at high rates throughout the pandemic, most recently involving the shootings of multiple women, leading to their deaths.

This research explores the discordant reactions of local Asian Indian migrant organizations to the passage of Arizona Senate Bill 1070. The objective is to illustrate how migrants from India to Arizona negotiate their identities in the context of this anti-immigrant climate. The research draws insight largely from local records and publications of Asian Indian migrant organizations, including monthly newsletters, board meeting minutes, and other materials found on organizational websites. The analysis chronicles how various Asian Indian migrant organizations shape public discourse about migrant identity, belonging, and citizenship through their reactions to Arizona Senate Bill 1070. The place-based approach provides a way to re-think traditional migration theories and explore the role of racialization in better understanding the consequences of migration from India to the U.S.

This three-part free verse poem encapsulates my response as a Filipina American peminist scholar to the increasingly hostile anti-Asian violence aided and abetted by 45 amid this pandemic through a critique of Andrew Yang's naive "We Asian Americans are not the virus . . . "

BACKGROUND: Social media is a rich source where we can learn about people's reactions to social issues. As COVID-19 has impacted people's lives, it is essential to capture how people react to public health interventions and understand their concerns.
OBJECTIVE: We aim to investigate people's reactions and concerns about COVID-19 in North America, especially in Canada.
METHODS: We analyzed COVID-19-related tweets using topic modeling and aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA), and interpreted the results with public health experts. To generate insights on the effectiveness of specific public health interventions for COVID-19, we compared timelines of topics discussed with the timing of implementation of interventions, synergistically including information on people's sentiment about COVID-19-related aspects in our analysis. In addition, to further investigate anti-Asian racism, we compared timelines of sentiments for Asians and Canadians.
RESULTS: Topic modeling identified 20 topics, and public health experts provided interpretations of the topics based on top-ranked words and representative tweets for each topic. The interpretation and timeline analysis showed that the discovered topics and their trend are highly related to public health promotions and interventions such as physical distancing, border restrictions, handwashing, staying home, and face coverings. After training the data using ABSA with human-in-the-loop, we obtained 545 aspect terms (eg, "vaccines," "economy," and "masks") and 60 opinion terms such as "infectious" (negative) and "professional" (positive), which were used for inference of sentiments of 20 key aspects selected by public health experts. The results showed negative sentiments related to the overall outbreak, misinformation and Asians, and positive sentiments related to physical distancing.
CONCLUSIONS: Analyses using natural language processing techniques with domain expert involvement can produce useful information for public health. This study is the first to analyze COVID-19-related tweets in Canada in comparison with tweets in the United States by using topic modeling and human-in-the-loop domain-specific ABSA. This kind of information could help public health agencies to understand public concerns as well as what public health messages are resonating in our populations who use Twitter, which can be helpful for public health agencies when designing a policy for new interventions.