Skip to content
Connect
Stories

It’s been ‘a litany of lament.’ New speaker series sheds light on the history of anti-Asian hate.

People in this story

Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
Russell Jeung, San Francisco State University; Founder, Stop AAPI Hate, speaks during the Asian America and the World Lecture held in The Cabral Center: John D. O'Bryant African-American Institute at Northeastern University on Sept. 27, 2021.

“A litany of lament.” That’s what Russell Jeung, professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University, and his colleagues saw when they launched a website for Asian Americans to report incidents of anti-Asian hate and discrimination during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Jeung, who founded the platform Stop Anti-Asian American Pacific Islander Hate, spoke at Northeastern University on Monday as part of a new lecture series exploring the troubling rise in anti-Asian bigotry sweeping the country. The wave of hate and xenophobia has been fueled by, among other things, rhetoric used by former president Donald Trump, and repeated by other politicians, blaming the pandemic on China, Jeung said.

But Asian American racism is not a new phenomenon. It has been present throughout our national history, Jeung said, stretching all the way back to the late 19th century when Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 amid widespread paranoia that Chinese immigrants were displacing white American workers.

Continue reading at News@Northeastern.

More Stories

B.B. King performs during the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival on April 28, 2013, in New Orleans.

The history of the blues in America is about more than just music, historian says ahead of Northeastern concert

09.18.2023

Voting rights take center stage on Martin Luther King Jr. Day

01.14.2022
Selenis Leyva attends the 'Orange Is The New Black' Final Season Premiere in New York.

Stand-up comedy and academic research converge in new speaker series ‘Latinxs and Comedy’

09.20.23
Featured Events