Essential California PRESENTED BY WISE BREAD*   March 18, 2021 Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It’s Thursday, March 18, and I’m writing from Los Angeles. Talk of pandemic anniversaries has been everywhere as the slow tide of the calendar washes back into March, forming a long litany of One Year Sinces. One year since the bottom fell out, one year since everything was canceled, one year since the first local shelter-in-place orders. It has also been almost exactly a year since Russell Jeung, a professor of Asian American studies at San Francisco State, co-founded the group Stop AAPI Hatein response to the alarming rise in discrimination and racially motivated attacks perpetrated against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) in the U.S. Even before the coronavirus spread across the globe, the then-epidemic fueled a torrent of hate and xenophobia. On Tuesday morning, Stop AAPI Hate released a report documenting how thousands of Asian Americans had faced racist verbal and physical attacks or had been shunned by others since coronavirus shutdowns began last March. As my colleague Anh Do reported, the study found that most of the incidents occurred at businesses or on public streets, and more than two-thirds of the attacks in the study were reported by women. Anh tweeted that morning that for Asians, going out was no longer just about masking and social distancing. “You must be vigilant - alert to guarding yourself, your family, your peers,” she wrote. [Read the story: “Asian Americans have been verbally and physically attacked, shunned during pandemic, study shows” in the Los Angeles Times] On Tuesday evening, eight people, including six women of Asian descent, were shot to death at massage parlors in the Atlanta area. At least four of the women killed were of Korean descent. The Atlanta killings come in the wake of a series of violent attacks against Asian American senior citizens in the Bay Area and New York City, and research that shows anti-Asian hate crimes have surged across the country. Authorities said Wednesday that the 21-year-old white suspect accused of visiting a string of businesses with Asian workers and murdering predominantly women of Asian descent “did not appear to be” motivated by race. But, as my colleagues report, “many Asian Americans saw it differently. The mowing down of so many Asian women, at businesses known to employ Asian workers, was a racial targeting by its very circumstances, they said.” [Read the story: “Violence has Asian Americans questioning how far they have really come in their American journey” in the Los Angeles Times] Rep. Judy Chu (D-Monterey Park), the first Chinese American woman elected to Congress, laid the eight deaths directly at former President Trump’s feet, saying that “President Trump clearly stoked the flames of xenophobia against AAPIs with his rhetoric” about the coronavirus. Anti-Asian incidents and attacks exploded during the pandemic, but the racist sentiment fueling the attacks is sadly far from new. As Qian Julie Wang wrote in a New York Times op-ed last month, anti-Asian sentiment “is woven into the very fabric of this country,” from the Page Act of 1875 that effectively barred Chinese women from entering the U.S. to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. That ugly historical legacy has deep roots in California, where the same 19th century Chinese immigrants who helped build the state’s early infrastructure were subject to racist laws and violent attacks. In People vs. Hall, an 1854 California Supreme Court case that one legal scholar characterized as “containing some of the most offensive racial rhetoric to be found in the annals of California appellate jurisprudence,” the state’s high court ruled that testimony from Chinese witnesses was inadmissible when a white person was on trial. In essence, the decision “made it impossible to prosecute violence against Chinese immigrants.” The law remained on the books in 1871, when 18 Chinese immigrants were killed by a brutal Los Angeles mob. [See also: “Anti-racism resources to support the Asian American and Pacific Islander community” from NBC News] From the white mob that rampaged through the Filipino farmworker community in Watsonville, Calif., in the early days of the Great Depression to the more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent incarcerated during World War II, anti-Asian brutality has often been tied to periods of national peril and fear. Elizabeth Choi, a 51-year-old Korean American homemaker in Brea, told my colleagues that her daughter had advised her not to go to “too many areas outside of Asian areas.” “When they’re looking for a Chinese face” to blame the pandemic on, “any Asian face” will do, Choi’s daughter told her.