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How the UK’s East and South-East Asian communities are fighting COVID-related violence
By: []
Date: 2021-12
For example, one community organisation, Kanlungan, reports that Filipino precarious migrants face difficulties in accessing healthcare and childcare, loss of employment, being forced to choose between working and destitution, overcrowded housing, and living in constant fear and isolation during the pandemic due to the government’s ‘hostile environment’ policies. As one interviewee put it, “You’re scared. Every step, you look back, because you don’t know. Are the doctors going to tell on you? They said it’s confidential, but you don’t really know if it’s true.”
When it comes to anti-Asian racial violence, a ‘hate crime’ focus also builds on – and perpetuates – racialised constructions of the Chinese as a successful and well-integrated model minority. The response to these crimes is then used to demonstrate that the government ‘cares’ for ‘deserving’ minorities, like the Chinese and sometimes other East and South-East Asians, with whom they are often conflated. However, it simultaneously legitimises the expansion of police powers that disproportionately affect migrant and minority communities.
A further glaring structural problem is the way in which, with the exception of the Chinese, East and South-East Asians in the UK are rendered invisible in official ethnic and racial categories, within an aggregated group called ‘Asian: Other’. This lack of acknowledgement – we might call it neglect – constitutes a form of structural violence, and to quote from the recent book ‘Empire’s Endgame’, is “an active, wilful and targeted technique of state power”.
Community response
Yet, it is in the context of this vacuum of state support that community responses have emerged. In the UK, we are witnessing a historically significant moment for East and South-East Asian community organising – which is now happening on an unprecedented level. Though the experience of COVID-19 has devastated and traumatised our communities, it has also galvanised a new anti-racist consciousness, which has led to the development of new networks of mobilisation.
Existing community organisations, such as Kanlungan, Hackney Chinese Community Services, daikon, Remember and Resist, and SEEAC (South-East and East Asian Centre) have responded to racist attacks through work on recognising, confronting and, indeed, interrogating hate crime. They have also offered a range of community-oriented support and healing projects that respond to wider racial violence and COVID impact.
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