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“To be clear, the Biden administration has been very good about reaching out to the community and making sure that they understand what the community’s concerns are, but that is still different from having someone that already knows what the community is facing,” he added.

While it has embraced Harris’s sentiments, the administration thus far has fallen short of what many Asian American politicians, activists and public figures had been wanting to see from the White House: a seat at the most powerful table in Washington.

“That is not something you would say to the Black Caucus, ‘Well, you have Kamala, we’re not going to put any more African Americans in the Cabinet because you have Kamala,’" she told reporters. “Why would you say it to AAPI?”

Neera Tanden, an Indian American, was on track to become Biden’s budget director, a Cabinet-level position, before she withdrew her nomination earlier this month after facing bipartisan opposition.

The reported incidents range from verbal harassments to physical altercations.

As a man in his late 20s, Kim is not the typical victim of anti-Asian attacks. Chung Joe said that most attacks target the more vulnerable members of the Asian American community.

"Women are targeted more than twice as often as men," she said, and "we are seeing a spate of hate and violence targeted at our seniors."

Nearly 44% of all incidents reported to Stop AAPI Hate have come from California. Asian Americans account for roughly 15% of California's estimated 40 million people, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

"The Federal Government must recognize that it has played a role in furthering these xenophobic sentiments through the actions of political leaders, including references to the COVID-19 pandemic by the geographic location of its origin," Biden said. "Such statements have stoked unfounded fears and perpetuated stigma about Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and have contributed to increasing rates of bullying, harassment, and hate crimes against AAPI persons."

Said Park in a social media post on Tuesday: “Thank you for your solidarity, your generosity, your kind words and support for the AAPI community … the point of this is to allow you to make the decision to be safe when you are about to be in a risky place or situation because a ride costs too much. So keep this post in mind for your safety.”

Professor Brian Levin, with the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, says preliminary data show hate crimes targeting people of Asian descent surged nearly 150% last year across 16 major cities, from 49 in 2019 to 122 in 2020.

Many who chose to attend the training said they had been on the receiving end of racism

"And my other hope is that Asian Americans around the country realize that, look, we can't live our lives in fear. We have to at least do something about it and stand up to it," Kim said.

And a non-profit called Stop AAPI Hate (AAPI stands for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders) collected 3,795 reports of what it describes as hate incidents, from verbal harassment to physical assault, between March 19, 2020, and Feb. 28, 2021.

Teddy Tong, a 64-year-old ophthalmologist, had never fired a gun before attending the training and has no plans to buy one. But he said he wanted to learn how to handle firearms "in case that need ever arises." "It seems like a very practical and useful lesson at this point," he said.

Nationwide, the increase in violence has fueled a conversation about the causes of anti-Asian racism, and how to address it. Three weeks ago, the U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties held a hearing on the rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans.

Edward Chang, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Riverside, said the hearing is a good start, because over the years Asian Americans "were either being ignored or not invited" to discussions about race. "Asian American communities have been invisible," Chang said.

One woman - a senior physician at one of the area's top hospitals - was rattled by the experience. She declined to be identified because she wasn't sure how her colleagues would react to her considering using guns.

"I think it's ridiculous... I can't believe that I'm living in America now at this day and age where I have to think about how I can fend for myself and my family. And it's taken me to acquiring firearms to do that," Chung said.

A few weeks ago, he took his 16-year-old daughter to a gun range to teach her how to shoot. "I feel like I'm equipping her with something that empowers her, and hopefully she would never have to use it," he said.

I discovered that Asian Americans had been writing and fighting in English since the late 19th century: the sisters Sui Sin Far and Onoto Watanna, Carlos Bulosan, John Okada, Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston and many more.

I didn’t learn about them before because racism isolates us, disempowers us and erases our history.

Against this racist and sexist fiction of the Oriental, we built the anti-racist, anti-sexist fiction of the Asian American. We willed ourselves into being, but as with every other act of American self-conjuring, we became marked by a contradiction between American aspiration and American reality.

On the one hand, Asian Americans have long insisted that we are patriotic and productive Americans. This self-defense often leans on the model minority myth and the idea that Asian Americans have succeeded in fields such as medicine and technology because we immigrated with educational credentials and we raise our children to work hard. But Asian Americans are also haunting reminders of wars that killed millions of people and generated many refugees. And Asian Americans have come to satisfy the American need for cheap, exploitable labor — from working on railroads to giving pedicures. We were and are perceived to be competitors in a capitalist economy fractured by divisions of race, gender and class and the ever-widening gap of inequality that affects all Americans.

As long as the United States remains committed to aggressive capitalism domestically and aggressive militarism internationally, Asians and Asian Americans will continue to be scapegoats who embody threat and aspiration, an inhuman “yellow peril” and a superhuman model minority.

“Asian American” has now morphed into a newer fiction: the “Asian American and Pacific Islander” community, or A.A.P.I. But again, there are contradictions inherent in this identity

Asian-Americans have our own, less well-known place in the civil rights story. Asians also lived in the South in the 1950s, and we, too, would have been told to move to the back of the bus. In the 1860s, there were segregated schools for Chinese-American children, for families that looked like ours.

When a racist incident happens to your child, Dr. Chen said, don’t jump into solving the problem. First ask how they feel and listen. Tell them you don’t know all the answers, but you can find solutions together.

It’s been a year since the pandemic began. Ideas around race and identity have shifted in a seismic way. My daughter has gone from sewing masks for her bears, to carrying Black Lives Matter posters and voting with me in a presidential election. Her memories of these historic events will take shape over time.

But Kim, who now serves on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, tells NPR's All Things Considered that when he began to look into the issue, he learned that Asian Americans in particular seemed to be subject to this policy.

Kim says that the problem isn't limited to just one administration. Recently, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders working in national security and diplomacy signed a statement condemning the recent rise in hate crimes against the AAPI community.

"No American should be asked to prove their loyalty, absent evidence to the contrary," the statement reads. "We as Asian-Americans are integral in combatting and securing America's collective cognitive security."

He currently has a bill pending that would address diversity at the State Department through measures such as monitoring its abilities to recruit a diverse workforce and assessing the effectiveness of the department's anti-harassment and anti-discrimination policies.

This narrative – that "others," often from far-flung places, are to blame for epidemics – is a dramatic example of a long tradition of hatred. In 14th-century Europe, Jewish communities were wrongfully accused of poisoning wells to spread the Black Death. In 1900, Chinese people were unfairly vilified for an outbreak of the plague in San Francisco's Chinatown. And in the '80s, Haitians were blamed for bringing HIV/AIDS to the U.S., a theory that's considered unsubstantiated by many global health experts.

Some public health practitioners say the global health system is partially responsible for perpetuating these ideas.According to Abraar Karan, a doctor at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, the notion persists in global health that "the West is the best." This led to an assumption early on in the pandemic that COVID-19 spread to the rest of the world because China wasn't able to control it.

China's response was not without fault. The government's decision to silence doctors and not warn the public about a likely pandemic for six days in mid-January caused more than 3,000 people to become infected within a week, according to a report by the Associated Press, and created ripe conditions for global spread. Some of the aggressive measures China took to control the epidemic – confining people to their homes, for example — have been described as "draconian" and a violation of civil rights, even if they ultimately proved effective.

But it soon became clear that assumptions about the superiority of Western health systems were false when China and other Asian countries, along with many African countries, controlled outbreaks far more effectively and faster than Western countries did, says Karan.

Some politicians, including former President Donald Trump publicly blamed China for the pandemic, calling this novel coronavirus the "Chinese Virus" or the "Wuhan Virus." They consistently pushed that narrative even after the World Health Organization (WHO) warned as early as March 2020, when the pandemic was declared, that such language would encourage racial profiling and stigmatization against Asians. Trump has continued to use stigmatizing language in the wake of the Atlanta shooting, using the phrase "China virus" during a March 16 call to Fox News.

A report by researchers at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF), released this month, directly linked Trump's first tweet about a "Chinese virus" to a significant increase in anti-Asian hashtags. According to a separate report by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, anti-Asian hate crimes in 16 U.S. cities increased 149 percent in 2020, from 49 to 122.

Suspicion tends to manifest more during times of vulnerability, like in wartime or during a pandemic, says ElsaMarie D'Silva, an Aspen Institute New Voices fellow from India who studies violence and harassment issues. It just so happened that COVID-19 was originally identified in China, but, as NPR's Jason Beaubien has reported, some of the early clusters of cases elsewhere came from jet setters who traveled to Europe and ski destinations.

the West is usually regarded as the hub of expertise and knowledge, says Sriram Shamasunder, an associate professor of medicine at UCSF, and there's a sense among Western health workers that epidemics occur in impoverished contexts because the people there engage in primitive behaviors and just don't care as much about health.

In the early days of COVID-19, skepticism by Western public health officials about the efficacy of Asian mask protocols hindered the U.S.'s ability to control the pandemic. Additionally, stereotypes about who was and wasn't at risk had significant consequences, says Nancy Kass, deputy director for public health at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics.

According to Kass, doctors initially only considered a possible COVID-19 diagnosis among people who had recently flown back from China. That narrow focus caused the U.S. to misdiagnose patients who presented with what we now call classic COVID symptoms simply because they hadn't traveled from China.

It's reminiscent of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, Kass says. Because itwas so widely billed as a "gay disease," there are many documented cases of heterosexual women who presented with symptoms but weren't diagnosed until they were on their deathbeds.

That's not to say that we should ignore facts and patterns about new diseases. For example, Kass says it's appropriate to warn pregnant women about the risks of traveling to countries where the Zika virus, which is linked to birth and developmental defects, is present.

But there's a difference, she says, between making sure people have enough information to understand a disease and attaching a label, like "Chinese virus," that is inaccurate and that leads to stereotyping.

Karan says we also need to shift our approach to epidemics. In the case of COVID-19 and other outbreaks, Western countries often think of them as a national security issue, closing borders and blaming the countries where the disease was first reported. This approach encourages stigmatization, he says.

Instead, Karan suggests reframing the discussion to focus on global solidarity, which promotes the idea that we are all in this together. One way for wealthy countries to demonstrate solidarity now, Karan says, is by supporting the equitable and speedy distribution of vaccines among countries globally as well as among communities within their own borders.Without such commitments in place, "it prompts the question, whose lives matter most?" says Shamasunder.

Ultimately, the global health community – and Western society as a whole – has to discard its deep-rooted mindset of coloniality and tendency to scapegoat others, says Hswen. The public health community can start by talking more about the historic racism and atrocities that have been tied to diseases.

Additionally, Karan says, leaders should reframe the pandemic for people: Instead of blaming Asians for the virus, blame the systems that weren't adequately prepared to respond to a pandemic.

Although WHO has had specific guidance since 2015 about not naming diseases after places, Hswen says the public health community at large should have spoken out earlier and stronger last year against racialized language and the ensuing violence. She says they should have anticipated the backlash against Asians and preempted it with public messaging and education about why neutral terms like "COVID-19" should be used instead of "Chinese virus."

Past research on other communities of color finds that repeated exposure to racism and racial violence can grind one's physical and mental health down. Race-related stress has been linked to higher infant mortality rates and cardiovascular disease in African American communities, and researchers continue to find more insidious ways racism harms health.

Without the research specific to Asian Americans' experience, it means any problems currently facing the Asian American community will likely continue to fester, unnoticed and unaddressed.

One is the model minority myth, which can suggest that Asians don't suffer economic or health disparities compared to whites.

From 1992 to 2018, only 0.17% of the National Institutes of Health's budget went to studying Asian, native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Americans.

"Aside from the language barrier, immigrants may not understand the justice system and that may be another reason that prevents them from reporting."

"If you look at all those cases, you will find that many people had the same or similar experiences before they reported,"

From March 19, 2020 to Feb 28, 2021, a period encompassing the ballooning of the country's coronavirus pandemic and some politicians' insistence on linking the virus to China, the Stop AAPI Hate Reporting Center recorded nearly 3,800 separate incidents of hate against Asians in the United States.

"White toxicity and racism have put an inordinate amount of pressure on Asians living in diaspora communities to cope with the trauma of being in an environment that does not see them and does not protect them."

Some have directly blamed the anti-China rhetoric of former President Donald Trump, who often made mention of the pandemic as the "China virus" or the "kung flu".

The coronavirus hit the state hard and early, grinding its bustling cities and businesses to a halt. The virus has already claimed over 50,000 Californian lives.From March to May 2020 alone, over 800 Covid-related hate incidents were reported from 34 counties in the state, according to a report released by the Asian Pacific Policy Planning Council.

Those numbers have since intensified in Orange County, where anti-Asian hate incidents are up by an estimated 1200%, according to the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism.In neighbouring Los Angeles County, hate crimes against Asian Americans are up 115%, CBS News reported.

The bill designates an official at the US Justice Department to expedite reviews of violence and hate crimes related to Covid-19. It also provides grants for state and local governments to improve their own reporting systems.

"We are in a moment of reckoning right now," Ms Nguyen adds. "We have been systematically erased on every single level and people can start to combat that by educating themselves about us.

Six women of Asian descent are among the dead, raising suspicions of a hate crime. Long claims race did not play a role in his decision to target the businesses, police said, relaying details from questioning the gunman.Long is believed to have "frequented these places, and he may have been lashing out,"

he has a sexual addiction.

Tuesday's violence has amplified fears in the Asian American community, which is already experiencing a spike in attacks and harassment since the coronavirus pandemic began.

Feelings of anger within the community increased late Wednesday as comments made by a Cherokee County Sheriff's Office official as well as a post on his Facebook page were perceived as inappropriate, insensitive, and anti-Asian.

Long was "pretty much fed up and kind of at the end of his rope. Yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did."

"[Long] does claim that it was not racially motivated" and cautioned the investigation is still early.

screenshots of Baker's Facebook account surfaced showing a post that promoted t-shirts amplifying a racist perception of the coronavirus.

As of early Wednesday afternoon, only half of the victims had been publicly identified.

In addition, Elcias R. Hernandez-Ortiz, 30, of Acworth was injured,

Police in Atlanta say they're not yet publicly naming the victims from the two shootings in that city; a representative says the department is still working to identify them.

Atlanta Police Chief Rodney Bryant said, "We are still early in this investigation, so we cannot make that determination at this moment."

"This was a tragic day, with many victims," Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said.

In a later interview with CNN, Bottoms said that she was aware of the suspect's claims that the killings were not racially motivated, "but I am taking that with a grain of salt."

The shocking violence could have been worse, Bottoms said,

Because of the family's tip, police were able to track Long's cellphone, which helped them narrow his movements after the attacks.

Reynolds said his county is mostly a bedroom community and had just one murder in the past year. "We don't have a lot of crime in that area," he added.Long was initially identified through surveillance camera footage from one of the crime scenes, the sheriff said. After his agency posted images to social media, Long's parents got in touch to say they believed it was their son in the pictures.

The group Stop AAPI Hate says it has received nearly 3,800 reports of what it describes as hate incidents — including verbal harassment and physical assault — since the COVID-19 pandemic began last March. In the aftermath of the Atlanta-area attacks, officials in cities such as New York and Seattle said they would boost law enforcement's presence in Asian American communities.

On Wednesday, Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta issued a statement saying that although details are still emerging, the broader context of racial tension in the U.S. cannot be ignored.

The first attack targeted Young's Asian Massage in Acworth in Cherokee County, northwest of Atlanta, where the sheriff's office said four people died and at least one other person was injured.

Surveillance footage from a neighboring business appeared to show Long's Hyundai Tucson SUV entering the spa's strip mall parking lot around 4:50 p.m. ET.

The second and third attacks came about one hour later on Piedmont Road in northeast Atlanta. Women who called emergency dispatchers to ask for help at the pair of Atlanta spas urged police to come quickly, according to 911 audio that was released on Wednesday.

Officers arrived at the spa less than two minutes after the dispatch call went out, according to police. They found three women dead from gunshot wounds inside.

The second 911 call came in about nine minutes later, from a woman at Aromatherapy Spa, almost directly across the street. Police were dispatched on a report of gunshots fired and arrived two minutes later. When they entered the business, they found that a fourth woman had been killed.

From Atlanta, the suspected gunman fled to the south, as police spread the alarm to be on the lookout for his vehicle. As he drove south on Interstate 75, the authorities set a trap for him.Around 8 p.m., Crisp County Sheriff Billy Hancock said, his agency got word "that a murder suspect out of north Georgia was getting close to entering our county."

Some 30 minutes later, Georgia State Patrol troopers performed a maneuver on Long's SUV that caused it to spin out of control, Hancock said. The suspect was taken into custody without incident and taken to the county jail, he said. Long was later transferred back to Cherokee County.

Long bought a gun on Tuesday before the shooting rampage.

As for what Long's plan might have been in Florida, Baker said he understood the gunman wanted to target "some type of porn industry in that state."The FBI is assisting both Cherokee County and Atlanta police in handling the case,

"Long has since been moved to the Cherokee County Adult Detention Center, and has been interviewed by both the Atlanta Police Department and FBI."

Biden spoke about the killings on Wednesday, saying he was briefed on a phone call with Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray.

I am making no connection at this moment to the motivation of the killer," the president added. "I'm waiting for an answer, as the investigation proceeds, from the FBI and from the Justice Department."

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp said he and first lady Marty Kemp "are heartbroken and disgusted by the heinous shootings that took place last night. We continue to pray for the families and loved ones of the victims."

With the Senate runoffs approaching on Tuesday, Asian-American political operatives from across the country have joined local groups in Georgia to try to ensure that the tens of thousands of Asian-Americans who voted for the first time in the general election will vote again this week.

Mr. Trump’s rhetoric on the virus, among other things, made progressive organizers and Democratic candidates optimistic that Asian-American voters would flock to them. In some cases, it did motivate people.

Over the last two decades, as their numbers grew, Asian-Americans as a whole moved left politically and slowly amassed enough power to help decide some tightly contested House races in districts where they had clustered

Now, as Mr. Biden forms his administration, Asian-American congressional leaders and many of their colleagues are already chafing at what could be a cabinet without a single Asian-American secretary for the first time in decades.

At the presidential level, Asian-Americans cast a record number of ballots in battleground states where Joseph R. Biden Jr. notched narrow victories. But a New York Times analysis showed that in immigrant neighborhoods across the country, Asian-American and Latino voters shifted to the right

For the first time, three Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders sought a major party’s nomination for president. One, Ms. Harris, is set to be vice president; another, the entrepreneur Andrew Yang, has been privately telling New York City leaders that he intends to run for mayor this year.

When analysts get a complete picture of the 2020 electorate, he said, the data will probably show that the total number of ballots cast by Asian-Americans nearly doubled.

Despite the modest increase in support for Mr. Trump, roughly two-thirds of Asian-American voters backed Mr. Biden — a fact often cited by the Asian-American officials who have urged the president-elect to pick a cabinet secretary from their community.

Roughly 30 percent of Asian-American voters do not identify as either Democrats or Republicans, and many are settling in the suburban swing districts that are the focus of both parties.It is a demographic and political reality that has been playing out in parts of Southern California for years. Randall Avila, the executive director of the Republican Party of Orange County, said he had found that many Asian-American voters — and potential candidates he had worked to recruit — approached Republican ideas with an open mind.

The real victory, experts on the Latino and Asian-American vote agreed, would be for voters of color to be pursued with the same vigor as white voters, who are routinely grouped into subcategories based on where they live, or their income or education level.“Democrats need to stop obsessing about white rural voters and white suburban moms,” said Janelle Wong, a professor of American studies at the University of Maryland.

One place they may demonstrate their growing political power is in Georgia this week. Neil Makhija leads an Indian-American political organization that is running a $2.5 million campaign to turn out A.A.P.I. voters in the state’s Senate runoffs. He sees the significant increase in Asian-American voter participation in November as a success — and a lesson.“What we’re going to try to do is take some of what we’ve learned,” he said, “and really go all in.”

Kulkarni likened the rise of hate against Asian Americans since the pandemic began to the 19th century era of "yellow peril," during which racist laws as well as stereotypes of East Asian immigrants as a threat to society proliferated in the US.

From then through the end of 2020, the organization received more than 2,800 firsthand reports of anti-Asian hate across 47 states and Washington, DC, according to data released this week.

The majority of those incidents -- about 71% -- were cases of verbal harassment, while shunning or avoidance made up about 21%. About 9% of the incidents involved physical assaults, and 6% included being purposely coughed or spit on, according to a Stop AAPI Hate news release.

A report published Wednesday by the Asian American Bar Association of New York noted that from January 1 to November 1, 2020, the New York Police Department saw an eight-fold increase in reported anti-Asian hate crimes compared to the same period in 2019.

From 2017 to 2019, the organization received less than 500 reported instances of hate against Asian Americans. But from February to December last year, they said they estimate there have been 3,000 incidents of hate cataloged by their group and others.

Yang attributes the rise of anti-Asian hate in the US partially to former President Donald Trump, who repeatedly referred to the coronavirus as the "China virus" in the early days of the pandemic.

Experts also blame the insecurity and fear brought on by the pandemic. People may respond to threats of disease or other crises by scapegoating another group perceived as falling outside the cultural norms -- in this case Asian Americans, the authors of the Asian American Bar Association report wrote.

Asian Americans are seen as easy targets for crime, perhaps because of language and cultural barriers that might prevent them from reporting incidents, according to Yang. And the elderly are particularly vulnerable, with concerns that they could be targeted for robberies as they are out shopping for the Lunar New Year.

But community leaders say that more needs to be done.Both Kulkarni and Yang are calling on community solutions to help address the problem. Yang called for bystander intervention training and local efforts such as neighborhood walk services and shopping services for the elderly. Kulkarni has called for more support and resources for Asian Americans to help them address incidents of assault and harassment.