Authorities are investigating as an hate crime an incident in which a man stopped a protest against anti-Asian racism at the Diamond Bar on Sunday, passing a group of protesters while shouting insults about China.
Video posted on Instagram it showed a black Honda Civic stopped at a traffic light on Grand Avenue and Diamond Bar Boulevard as about a dozen protesters crossed the street.
The driver then drove through an opening between the protesters and turned around while shouting, “F – China!”
Another video showed the man, described by the Sheriff’s Department as a white man in his 50s, standing outside the car, waving his hand and repeating the slander. .
The sheriff’s department is investigating the incident as a hate crime, sheriff Alex Villanueva wrote on Twitter late on Monday.
Dozens of people gathered at the Diamond Bar on Sunday with colorful posters containing slogans like “Stop hating Asians” and “Stop violence against Asians”. The protest was one of several in Southern California, following the shooting of a white man in spas in the Atlanta area last week, which killed eight people, including six Asian women.
Orange County resident Lowell Renold, 25, said the protesters filled every corner of the Diamond Bar intersection. Standing with a sign that said, “Los Angeles County is united against hatred,” Renold joined others. singing: “Without justice, without peace”.
Although he is not Asian, Renold said he participated in the protest to say, “Enough” for white supremacy, hatred and intolerance.
Most drivers honked their horns in support of the protesters.
“There was a lot of love and support in the air,” said Renold.
He did not witness the incident involving the Honda Civic driver, but said it was “really disheartening and sad” for someone to make racist comments at a rally against racism.
“I don’t understand how you can look at something like that and be angry and feel like you’re being attacked,” he said.
The protest also addressed a wave of other attacks against Asian Americans that increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, with some people blaming them for the virus because of its origin in China.
A report by the advocacy group Stop AAPI Hate has documented thousands of racist verbal and physical attacks against Americans of Asian origin since the coronavirus outages began last March.
On Thursday, a Daly City woman was another victim of a series of violent attacks against elderly Asian people in the bay area.
A security camera captured a person running up to the elderly woman, throwing her on the floor and grabbing her belongings before fleeing.
Following the incident, Daly City residents organized a Stop Asian Hate protest on Sunday.
Meanwhile, more than a dozen leaders and members of the Los Angeles Asian and Pacific Island community gathered for a press conference in Koreatown on Monday afternoon to denounce anti-Asian violence and encourage residents to report. hate incidents. Some had signs that read “Stop hatred AAPI” and “There is no place for hatred”.
“We all have to raise our voices,” said Peter Kang, president of the Korean American Chamber of Commerce in LA, in front of Radio Korea’s headquarters. “Everyone has to remember that all lives are important…. Black, Asian, Latino, white – we all live together here. “
Los Angeles Police Department Deputy Chief Blake Chow said that since the shooting in Georgia, the department has increased patrol in neighborhoods with many Asian companies, such as Koreatown and Chinatown, and emphasized that the LAPD tracks hate crimes and incidents, which are meetings that do not reach the level of a crime.
John Lee, a Korean-American councilor who represents the northwestern stretches of the San Fernando valley, said that as he grew up, when people asked him what ethnicity he was, he said American because he felt he needed to emphasize that he could belong to both nationalities.
The Asian-American experience, he said, is “to feel perpetually like a stranger”.
“We cannot allow this effort to diminish,” he said of the Asian community’s work to highlight anti-Asian violence. “We cannot and will not be silent anymore.”
The City News Service contributed to this report.