Reports of hate incidents against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders — discrimination, harassment, or assault — increased significantly between April and June 2021, a report from Stop AAPI Hate finds. According to an analysis of the 9,081 incidents reported to the Stop AAPI Hate website between March 19, 2020 and June 30, 2021, nearly the same number of incidents occurred in the firsts six months of 2021 as in more than nine months in 2020, with nearly twenty-five hundred incidents reported between April and June. The most commonly reported type of incident was verbal harassment (63.7 percent); followed by shunning, or the deliberate avoidance of AAPI individuals (16.5 percent); physical assault (13.7 percent); civil rights violations, such as workplace discrimination, refusal of service, or being barred from transportation (11 percent); being spat or coughed on (8.5 percent); and online harassment (8.3 percent). Women reported 63.3 percent of the incidents; individuals of Chinese descent reported (43.5 percent), followed by those of Korean (16.8 percent), Filipinx (9.1 percent), Japanese (8.6 percent), and Vietnamese (8.2 percent) descent; and 48.1 percent of reported incidents included at least one hateful statement regarding anti-China and/or anti-immigrant rhetoric. A comparison of 2020 and 2021 trends found that in 2021, the percentages of verbal harassment and shunning among all reported incidents fell, but the percentages of physical assault, vandalism, and online harassment increased.

(Photo credit: GettyImages/william87)