‘Stop the Asian hate.’ UK rally condemns racism, remembers victims of Georgia shooting
Hundreds of University of Kentucky students and employees gathered on a lawn on the Lexington campus on Wednesday to condemn racism against people of Asian descent in response to last week’s shooting in Georgia where eight people — six of whom were Asian women — died.
The shootings at massage parlors in the Atlanta area on March 16 “was like a punch in my gut,” Keiko Tanaka, a UK professor and Japanese-American, told the crowd. “It broke a dam of years of my frustration, disappointments, sorrows, anger that have been building inside of me.”
Bearing signs and flowers, the masked crowd gathered on the lawn in front of UK’s Memorial Hall to hear administrators, faculty, student and community speakers denounce racism generally and the widely reported rise in discriminatory acts against Asian people during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We want to stop this racism, stop the Asian hate,” said Tracy Lu, the rally organizer and a professor in UK’s College of Agriculture, Food and Environment. Lu said she was glad to see the turnout for the event. “As one of the speakers said: We see humanity here.”
Since mid-March 2020, there have been nearly 3,800 reported racist incidents against Asian Americans, a report from Stop AAPI Hate, a coalition that tracks racist incidents against Asian Americans. The actual number could be higher, as the group only has records of the incidents that have been reported.
“We all want to express our solidarity and support for the victims of the shooting in Georgia and for everyone who is impacted by those events, both directly and indirectly,” said Donna Kwon, a UK music faculty member and Korean-American who spoke on behalf of the Association of Korean University Professors of Central Kentucky.
Kwon said that Asian women have long been hyper sexualized in American culture, in part due to the promotion of prostitution at U.S. military bases in Asia. According to the Stop AAPI Hate report, 68 percent of the racist incidents against Asian people came against women.
Before the crowd, Kwon sang a traditional Korean folk song, “Arirang,” which according to Kwon refers to a “beloved one or a metaphorical mountain path that your beloved one must pass.” Between verses of the song, which the crowd also sang in response, Kwon said the names of the four Korean women who died in the Georgia shooting.
Two years ago, Kwon said she taught an Asian-American music class at UK and she thought that it may have been one of the first Asian American classes taught at the university.
“This is not acceptable,” Kwon said. “There should be more of us teaching this material because otherwise, how can we learn this history?”
Yan Xia, a Chinese-American MBA student, said he told his two kids the night before the rally that “your dad’s going to be a superhero tomorrow. Why? Because I’m going to be standing here speaking for them.”
Xia said he wondered how his two kids, who he said speak better English than Chinese, will be recognized in the future.
“Will they be recognized as American as anybody here, no matter what color they are?” Xia said. “Or will they be laughed at because of their color, because of their hair, because of their accent? Or maybe when they go to school, they will be embarrassed because their mom prepared Asian lunch for them? That’s not fair. That’s not fair.”