What Stop AAPI Hate Misses: A Movement Stalled by Historical Blind Spots

Protestors hold signs at the DC Rally for Collective Safety: Protect Asian/AAPI Communities at McPherson Square on March 21, 2021. Photo courtesy of Miki Jourdan.

In the wake of increasing COVID-19-related anti-Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) racism in America, a coalition of AAPI advocates launched the Stop AAPI Hate Movement on March 19, 2020 to document AAPI experiences of racism and hate crimes. The movement brings awareness to racist attacks against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, builds solidarity within and outside the community, and advocates for policy changes to prevent racial violence. In 2021, Stop AAPI Hate was very active in organizing rallies and launching social media campaigns such as #StopAsianHate. Since then, the movement has lost steam and has not recovered. Stop AAPI Hate’s deceleration is largely attributable to the movement’s misalignment between its target mandate—documenting immediate incidents of anti-AAPI violence—and its self-appointed mandate—addressing the systemic issues that contribute to their violence.

Examining history is crucial for understanding the movement’s misalignment because it reveals that anti-AAPI racism is rooted in broader patterns that continue to shape violence against AAPI communities today. In the late 19th century, US immigration policy toward AAPI immigrants was marked by exclusionary laws that revealed and reinforced racial biases. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, an act barring Chinese laborers from entering the US, responded to deep-rooted, anti-AAPI biases that had been building through the 19th century, motivated by economic competition, stereotypes, and the rise of Chinese immigrants who were deemed as threats to American jobs and society. The act reinforced media portrayals of Chinese immigrants in political cartoons and propaganda as threatening, unassimilable, and as a racial “other.”

This immigration framework entrenched a racial hierarchy that portrayed AAPI people as perpetual foreigners and unassimilable, underpinned by white supremacy. Historical immigration policies reflect the embedding of deep-seated prejudice in American society that continues to prompt the systemic violence AAPI people face today. Despite the act’s eventual repeal in 1965, the racism sustaining its structure continued and intersected with other areas of policy, including foreign affairs.

Hostility against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders justified American interventionist behaviors abroad by subordinating and exploiting vulnerable groups. For instance, the US aggravated anti-AAPI prejudices during the Vietnam War, when American military personnel spurred the growth of Vietnam’s sex tourism industry. Soldiers’ desire for carnal satisfaction and recreation stimulated demand for bars, brothels, and other establishments, which local proprietors, struggling under economic duress, met. Western perceptions of Asian women as submissive and hypersexual fueled this demand.

The war led to economic hardships in Vietnam and forced local women into the sex trade as a means of survival. Amanda Boczar, a historian specializing in gender and military occupation during the Vietnam War, highlights the impact of this dynamic. In An American Brothel: Sex and Diplomacy during the Vietnam War, Boczar writes that “prostitution promised quick money but often failed to live up to that expectation. More often it only brought legal trouble, illness, and backlash.” This dynamic resulted in a power imbalance where Vietnamese women depended on their own exploitation and commodification for survival, without the guarantee of economic stability. Their economic vulnerability strained social structures, as their relationships with American soldiers became sources of tension and moral scrutiny among local communities.

Stereotypes perpetuated by Western media through film and popular culture fueled the fetishization of Asian women during the Vietnam War. Depicted as exotic, submissive, and hypersexual, Western films and literature reinforced a mindset that reduced Asian women to mere objects of male desire, casting them as “comfort women” without agency or voice. Documentaries like Hearts and Minds portrayed film scenes of US soldiers with Vietnamese women that reinforced a power dynamic, representing these women as tools of relief for men in war. The perpetuation of those stereotypes continues today, as evinced in media narratives during the COVID-19 pandemic, which reignited harmful tropes of the AAPI community. The media and prominent politicians accused them of being “virus spreaders” and “foreign threats,” leading to a surge in anti-AAPI sentiment, some of which manifested as hate crimes. 

On March 16, 2021, a 21-year-old man attacked three Asian-owned massage parlors in Atlanta, killing eight people, six of whom were Asian women. The man was later apprehended and charged with multiple counts of murder. The media’s coverage varied: some news outlets downplayed racial motives, while others highlighted the targeting of AAPI women, sparking discussions on anti-AAPI violence and its connection to broader racial issues. This incident and the surge in anti-AAPI harassment during the COVID-19 era underscore a broader pattern: social justice movements tend to be prompted by individual atrocities instead of general outrage at systemic inequalities, which are not as salient. These patterns trace back to historical race and gender stereotypes reinforced on Asian women during the Vietnam War, when Western media and military presences imposed myths of hypersexualized Asian women. The legacy of these stereotypes persists, reinforcing cycles of objectification against Asian women. In this context, the Stop AAPI Hate movement continued addressing visible anti-AAPI hate crimes like the Atlanta spa shootings, but their efforts were limited as they focused on highlighting individual atrocities of violence over systemic issues, therefore falling short of their target mandate to dismantle entrenched racism against the AAPI community.

Thus, Stop AAPI Hate lost steam because it focused its firepower on addressing hate crimes as individual incidents of hate that, though connected, were never conceived as part and parcel of a larger historical process of AAPI degradation. The movement’s failure to cast the anti-AAPI hate of recent years as a historical unfolding and not just a moment in time is the reason why the movement decelerated. People think of the pandemic-induced xenophobia as an aberration that has been overcome and not as a thread in a wider historical tapestry.

Stop AAPI Hate glosses over how media portrayals have historically undergirded the rise in AAPI hate. What the movement misses is that incidents like the Atlanta spa shootings were not simply “racially motivated” attacks induced by fears of the pandemic, but rather constitutive of a long history of Asian women fetishization and exclusionary immigration policies. Understanding this history reframes normative conceptions of hate within the global context of empire and race-making.

Tiffany Pham (CC ’26) is a staff writer at CPR and a student studying political science and history.