Its success – or failure – can have lasting implications for both the survival of pending hate crime legislation in Congress and the strength of democratic control over the state of Peach.
So, they are calling on their own to mobilize. Asian Americans, say political leaders, have largely sat on the sidelines of United States politics. His first dive into the organization, which has been growing for decades and yielded its greatest results in 2020, is to keep Georgia at the center of the political universe.
“With the new political currency that Asian Americans have in Georgia, we are willing to spend it and get things done,” said Chris Chan, advisory chair of the Asian American Action Fund chapter in Georgia.
That desire for action was palpable in a weekend protest near the Georgia State Capitol. The flags were half-masted on Saturday; metal barricades surrounded the entire building and stretched across the block.
The police are “trying to humanize the killer,” said Lucy Lee, a Chinese-American resident of Marietta who was among more than 600 protesters.
“They are trying to stigmatize the victims and the Asian community,” said Lee, who wore a red, white and blue jacket and carried a huge American flag. “This is the part that I can’t really tolerate anymore.”
Before the March 16 shooting, Lee said, she was not politically active. Now that has changed.
“I am an American. I’m not just here to make money and go back to Asia, ”said Lee.” I’m here to stay. ”
‘You need to be involved’
Last year, a combination of grassroots organization and targeted advertising helped to increase AAPI’s political participation ahead of the presidential election and the Senate’s second rounds. Groups like the Asian American Action Fund have spent millions adapting their messages to AAPI voters. Campaign direct mail and online and TV ads denounced Donald Trump’s mismanagement of the pandemic – and extolled the power of AAPI voters to make history in the 2020 elections. Organizers knocked on doors and called voters in more than one country. dozen languages.
In addition, a year-long increase in anti-Asian violence driven by rhetoric from the Trump White House has also motivated Asian Americans to get involved, especially in Georgia, experts say. Asian Americans in the state saw the biggest leap in any group in voter turnout between 2016 and 2020, with a 91% increase in ballot papers. Exit polls showed that most of those votes were given to Joe Biden.
If Democrats rely on the same consistent disclosure manual for AAPI voters, they are likely to maintain their momentum across the state in the forthcoming elections. Georgia’s Asian American leaders, largely Democrats, want to keep the rapidly diversifying Atlanta suburbs in blue. Young Asian activists, older voters who were once again reluctant to become politically involved, and the black and Latin communities became part of that coalition. This coalition was shown at the weekend rally, where hundreds of black, Latin and Asian leaders and community members gathered in memory of the victims of the shooting.
“We have seen the Asian-American community with this economic power and demographic growth translate into real political power,” said state deputy Sam Park, who is Georgia’s first Korean-American state representative.
Gwinnett County, which was once a Republican stronghold and the second most populous in Georgia, elected Park in 2017, making him the first Asian-American Democrat elected to the General Assembly. The influx of immigrants from almost half a dozen Asian countries – Korea, China, Vietnam, India and Pakistan – helped to boost its success. Gwinnett County, which is now 11% Asian-American, rocked Hillary Clinton in 2016 by six points. Biden tripled those gains in 2020, winning the district by 18 points.
Park and other Asian American state leaders say they can draw a straight line between Trump’s anti-Asian rhetoric around the coronavirus last March and the sharp rise in violence against members of their communities.
The Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism has found an almost 150 percent increase in anti-Asian hate crimes reported in the 15 most populous cities in America since March 2020. Defenders believe that many other crimes go unreported due to reluctance of the victims to demonstrate, sometimes out of distrust of the victims in the police or fear of retaliation. And until recently, most incidents happened without much public attention. Women and the elderly are particularly vulnerable, advocates say. Among the eight victims killed on March 16, six were Chinese and Korean women between the ages of 51 and 74. (The other two victims were white and Latin).
“Certainly, for AAPIs who may not have been involved before, this is a warning to say, ‘You need to be involved,'” said Judy Chu (D-Calif.), President of Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus. With 21 members, the group is the largest that has ever existed in the history of the Congress.
“The fact that we have AAPI leaders is a result of the increase in AAPI’s political participation. But we need it even more at all levels of governance, ”said Chu.
Four other Asian Americans now join Park at the Georgia State House as deputies and senators; they represent the diverse Asian communities in Georgia. A fundamental principle of their reach is the desire to crush the idea that Asian Americans are a “model minority”, which leaders say is a myth that portrays them as monolithic, universally successful and without political agency. Inspiring more Asian Americans to get involved has allowed for more nuances in the policies that affect them.
“A lot of conventional wisdom, or what people have told or heard from me, is that Asians don’t come. There aren’t many of them, “said Michelle Au, a state senator elected in 2020.” People tend to have these unfair stereotypes about this constituency and the power of their votes. “
The Senate district of the state of Au has the highest percentage of Asian Americans in Georgia, according to Census data – almost a quarter of its constituents identify themselves as Asians, more than double the Georgia average and four times that of Georgia. United States average. She is convinced that these demographics played a role in Georgia’s newly created blue status.
“Could you argue quite plausibly that [Asian Americans] were the margin of victory in the state of Georgia, ”said Au. “Because we’re done.”
This new sense of political agency is giving Georgia’s AAPI leaders a high level of responsibility for complying with hate crime legislation and, at the same time, getting more members of their community to become politically involved. Last June, in the wake of the death of Ahmaud Arbery, a young black man killed by white security guards in the past, Georgia lawmakers passed legislation that punishes hate crimes. But the March 16 shootings will test the limits of this law, which does not apply to autonomous crimes and can only be used as an additional charge.
Robert Aaron Long was charged in Fulton and Cherokee counties on eight counts of murder by the shooting. Investigators in both counties have not yet classified the shooting as a hate crime. Cherokee County police instead cited their alleged sexual addiction as the reason.
His reluctance frustrated many state leaders inside and outside the AAPI demographic, who helped promote the passing of the hate crime law last summer.
“I am tired of hearing what happened to this sick and misguided person. I am not interested in whether or not he had a bad day, ”said Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock in his speech at Saturday’s rally.
‘You will only invite more thieves’
Still, not all Asian Americans in Georgia see the massacre as inherently political. The Korean-American Association of Greater Atlanta, the region’s most established community group representing more than 50,000 Korean-Americans, was slow to recognize that the shooting was a hate crime.
Their silence caused friction among members of the Korean-American community in Atlanta. Defenders familiar with the discussions say the association at first did not want to call the shooting a hate crime until investigators did. Waiting too long, they argue, may have caused more tension.
“You will only invite more thieves if you leave a room with a broken window unattended,” said Brian Kim, a Gwinnett County organizer and religious leader in the Korean-American community. Kim said he and others in the field took the lead in organizing events against hate crimes, while the American Association of Korea took a step back.
There is also a level of internal conflict over political involvement among Asian Americans. Many who have been in the United States for generations are quite conservative. Before Democrats increased their reach to Asian Americans and more began to run for public office, a larger proportion were more likely to vote for Republicans, according to Asian Americans who have lived in Georgia for decades. Republicans in the state have not yet launched a sustained outreach campaign for the electoral bloc before next year’s elections.
Meanwhile, AAPI Democrats say they are planning to take advantage of this demographic group’s voting power beyond the Senate battleground and governor elections in the coming years.
“We have to keep everything warm,” said Chan. Asian-American political organizers need to “keep our political strength going and our momentum, and then we will move on to 2022,” he said.
Au and Park were among Asian leaders who met with President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday. During the meeting, they proposed a series of actions to stem the spread of anti-Asian violence, including the use of better data to track and report the number of hate crimes that occur.
Sheikh Rahman, a Bangladeshi state senator, also met with Biden and Harris last week. He said the president had tears in his eyes as he heard community advocates and political leaders talk about the racist violence they have faced over the years.
“They understood what was going on,” said Rahman. “This was a dark meeting.”
The day after that meeting, at the rally in the shadow of the Georgia State Capitol, Lee spoke about how she never spoke about issues affecting the Asian American community, despite living in the United States for more than 30 years. But, she said, the shootings gave her little choice, especially when Cherokee County officials refused to call the shootings a hate crime. According to her, the massacre is the climax of a series of hate crimes against Asians in the country last year.
“I want to be a part of this country,” said Lee. “That’s why I feel, as a loyal American like everyone else, I want to make this country – even though it is the largest country in the world – even better.”
Catherine Kim and Eugene Daniels contributed to this report.