New York City Mayor Aashiq Andrew Yang said Wednesday that anti-Asian racism in the Big Apple is growing “very deep” – as he spoke on the massacre of eight people, including six Asian women, at an Atlanta-area spa in Georgia.
“I grew up Asian-American in New York and I’ve always been accustomed to a certain level of racism, but it made fun of invisibility, disdain, but it deepened something else – you can feel it on the streets of New York, He told reporters in Times Square.
“I am roaming the streets with my family and you can understand that the energy has changed, which has now started as a feeling of invisibility or foreignness, now hatred, violence, assault, people feel Is that we are not in our own country or in our own roads. “
Yang, a Taiwanese immigrant and one-time Democratic presidential candidate, called the attack in Atlanta “heartbreaking”.
“The lives of these six women were seen in such a cruel and insensitive manner – this is heart-wrenching,” Yang told reporters. “Because if you think about these women, their lives, their hopes, their dreams, their children, their families, they will never see them again and why? Due to this insensitive act of racial-violent violence which has unfortunately become very common in our country. “
“Make no mistake, these women were targeted based on their race,” Yang announced.
Georgia police arrested 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long in an Atlanta-area shootout at three massage parlors on Tuesday. He was charged with eight counts of murder.
Authorities said Wednesday that they have not ruled out that the attacks were racially motivated – but Cherokee County Sheriff’s spokesman Capt. Jay Baker said that Long considered himself a “sex addict” and that he called the spa ” Seen as a “temptation” for him that he wanted to eliminate. ”
According to officials, compared to two incidents in 2019, the NYPD’s hate crime task force recorded 28 anti-Asian attacks last year amid a coronovirus epidemic.
Amid a wave of targeted violence against the community in New York, Yang has called for more funding from the Asian Hate Critics Task Force of the NYPD.
“We should reach out to foreign-language media and communities in different languages,” Yang said Wednesday.
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