USA TODAY
By Kristine Phillips
May 19, 2021
Excerpt:
Jasmine Li’s daughter ignored the group of boys. The fifth grader was standing at the curb outside her Southern California elementary school one day in October, waiting for her parents to pick her up, when they asked her if she had COVID-19.
A few minutes later, she walked to the school’s front office to see if one of the staffers could call her parents. She passed by a bigger group of boys, including the ones who taunted her earlier.
They chanted “COVID” as she walked by. Again, she ignored them.
“She said she was almost in tears when she got to the front office,” Li said. “You would think that school is the one place where you don’t have to worry about this issue … but unfortunately, that’s not the case.”
Li, a Chinese American living in Aliso Viejo, Calif., has heard stories of harassment and attacks against Asian American and Pacific Islanders since the start of the pandemic last year. But she never thought it would happen to her child, at her school, in a state with the largest Asian population in the country.
“It’s really disheartening to hear my daughter, a 10-year-old, getting this experience at school,” Li said, “the one place where they should be safe and safe from harassment.” Li asked USA TODAY not to name her daughter or her school for fear of retaliation.
There have been thousands of similar stories of bias- or hate-motivated conduct fueled by a false rhetoric that blamed the pandemic on the AAPI community. Though the news has been dominated by videos of violent and sometimes deadly attacks, less attention has been paid to this vast gray area of verbal harassment that is neither a criminal nor civil rights violation.
In New York City, a group called Safe Horizon, which provides resources and counseling to crime and abuse victims, reports hate incidents to the city’s human rights commission for data gathering.
“With data, it produces resources and education for the community,” said Queenie Ng, a clinical forensic specialist at Safe Horizon.
‘One gaping hole’
Ng said she has been called derogatory names so many times since last year that she’s lost count.
Early in the pandemic, she said, a city bus driver pulled up and yelled a racial slur at her as she was standing near Central Park in Manhattan. Another time, somebody called her the same racial slur in a building lobby.
Such “sidewalk harassment” is “one gaping hole” in the government’s power to do anything, said William Yeomans, a former Justice Department attorney who spent nearly three decades enforcing civil rights laws and prosecuting hate crimes and others.
“If somebody calls somebody names on the street and harasses them, the federal government is not authorized to do anything about that,” Yeomans said. “There are serious First Amendment consequences.”
Absent any threats or physical harm, the government has limited power to do anything, no matter how ugly or hurtful the speech is. Even if the recipient of verbal abuse felt threatened or intimidated, charging an instigator who did not make an explicit threat is challenging because prosecutors must prove that the harasser intendedto threaten someone, Yeomans said.