This week, Alex discusses the recent violence against the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community and it’s implications for public health with Dr. Melissa Borja from the University of Michigan. Please note that this episode about anti-Asian racism includes discussions about heavy subjects, including violence, hate speech, and the recent murders of eight people in Atlanta, Georgia. 

Alex Murra:

Hello everyone. This is Alex jumping in briefly before our episode starts. This episode about anti-Asian racism includes discussions about heavy subjects, including violence, hate speech, and the recent murders of eight people in Atlanta, Georgia. We wanted to take this time to say their names and to take a moment of silence to remember them and acknowledge that real people and families have been and are currently being impacted by anti-Asian racism.

Alex Murra:

Let us remember Yong Ae Yue, Suncha Kim, Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Kim, Daoyou Feng, Xiaojie Tan, Delaina Ashley Yaun and Paul Andre Michels.

Alex Murra:

Thank you. And please remember that if at any time you feel that you need support, please contact your local crisis center or University of Iowa Counseling Services.

Alex Murra:

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to From the Front Row, brought to you by the University of Iowa College of Public Health. My name is Alex Murra, and if this is your first time with us welcome. We’re a student run podcast that talks about major issues in public health and how they are relevant to anyone both in and out of the field of public health.

Alex Murra:

Today, we’ll be chatting with Dr. Melissa Borja, who is an assistant professor in the Department of American Culture at the University of Michigan, and a core faculty member in the Asian Pacific Islander American Studies Program. Dr. Borja researches migration, religion, politics, race and ethnicity in the United States, focusing on how Asian American religious beliefs have developed in the context of pluralism and the modern American state. She is an affiliated researcher with the Stop Asian American Pacific Islander, or AAPI Hate Reporting Center, which was formed in 2020 as a response to racist attacks on the AAPI community as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. She earned her PhD in history from Columbia University, an MA from the University of Chicago and an AB from Harvard University.

Alex Murra:

Today, she is here with us to discuss the rise in hate incidents on the AAPI community during the pandemic. Welcome to the show, Dr. Borja.

Melissa Borja:

I’m so glad to be here. Thank you for having me.

Alex Murra:

So to start this off, can you tell us about your path to becoming a professor in Asian Pacific Islander American studies and how your work has influenced your involvement with the Stop AAPI Hate Reporting Center.

Melissa Borja:

I grew up in Saginaw, Michigan, in the wake of the killing of Vincent Chin. Vincent Chin was a Chinese American man who was killed the night before he was supposed to be married by two white men. And his killing was understood by Asian Americans in Michigan at the time to be the consequence of anti-Asian racism in the 1980s associated with increased competition from Japanese automakers.

Melissa Borja:

My parents are immigrants from the Philippines and this experience really affected them and really affected how they raised my siblings and me. And I think we always had a deep sense that our lives were a little precarious in Michigan, as Asian Americans. I think in the beginning, that sense that I needed to keep my head down and try to fit in was the main way that I responded to the situation and how my parents responded to the situation. But later in life, when I became a teenager, I discovered that maybe that’s not the most productive way to address this issue.

Melissa Borja:

So I went away to college. I decided to study history and 9/11 happened. And 9/11 really shaped the course of my scholarly career. I saw many Arab American, Muslim friends especially really suffer in the wake of 9/11 in the Islamophobia that we saw on full display. So at that moment, I decided that I would merge my commitment to studying history and my commitment to addressing injustice in the world by being a scholar who studied Asian American experiences.

Melissa Borja:

So I would say that in many ways, my career reflects both a deep passion for scholarship, a deep love for building knowledge, because I believe that we can only change the world if we understand the world, but it also reflects a deep pain and deep sorrow about the injustices that continue to shape our world. And I think it’s useful to sit on both ways of approaching this work.

Melissa Borja:

I got involved with the Stop AAPI Hate Reporting Center around this time last year. We were all at home. It felt overwhelming at that moment. My husband is a healthcare worker and he was preparing to address the healthcare dimensions of the pandemic. But as an Asian American studies scholar, I also realized that there were really useful things I could do in response to the alarming stories I was hearing from friends all across the country of being coughed at, spit upon yelled at, while they were going about their business; going grocery shopping, walking down the street, bringing their kids to school. And these stories had occurred since January.

Melissa Borja:

So a colleague of mine, Russell Jeung at San Francisco State University, started the Stop AAPI Hate Reporting Center with other community organizations, and he asked me if I would like to help with it. I took on the piece that addresses tracking anti-Asian hate incidents, as well as examples of Asian American resistance to racism that were reported in news media.

Alex Murra:

Thank you so much for sharing your personal stories. I think a lot of Asian Americans can resonate with some of that, those feelings of having motivation from traumatic events that have happened during their lifetime and whether or not that’s influenced their studies. I know that it definitely has for mine. My mother’s Korean American. Seeing things of how she’s been treated in the healthcare system, motivated me to go into public health and medicine as well. So thank you for sharing that.

Alex Murra:

Our next question has to do a lot with the historical background of racism. A lot of people have been seeing these single incidents of anti-Asian hate events recently, we’ve been seeing lots of reports and I think some people are starting to think that maybe this is new, but it’s not. How do these current incidents represent the history of systemic anti-Asian racism in the United States?

Melissa Borja:

So you’re exactly right. I’m a historian by training and any chance for us to put recent anti-Asian racism and anti-Asian violence in broader perspective is really welcome to me. So yes, there’s a very deep history of anti-Asian sentiment in the United States. And this anti-Asian sentiment has taken a variety of forms. It’s taken the form of immigration policies that have excluded Asian people from migrating to the United States. It’s taken the form of local policies that have made it difficult for Asian American kids to have access to the same schools that white kids do, and it’s also taken the form of acts of harassment and horrific acts of violence.

Melissa Borja:

So to give examples of acts of violence against Asian Americans, we can point to, for example, anti-Chinese efforts in California, where Chinese immigrants were massacred. We can point to also acts of violence and harassment directed towards Filipino Americans, especially those who were pushing for labor protections in the 1930s. We can also look at American actions abroad. And here is where I think it’s really important for us to think about Asian Americans in light of not only their immigration to the United States, but also the broader history of American empire.

Melissa Borja:

I already mentioned that my parents are from the Philippines, and you can’t understand Filipino American experiences without understanding the presence of the United States in the Philippines as a colonial power, as a military power in the region as well. I can’t not talk about violence against Asian Americans without talking about various forms of imperial violence that we’ve seen; the Philippine American war, violence in Asia during World War II, violence in Asia during the Korean War and the Vietnam War and the Secret War in Laos.

Melissa Borja:

And so in many ways, the anti-Asian racism and violence that we’ve seen in the past year is the combination of many forces of history. We see the history of empire, the history of racism, the history of violence, and we need to think about all of these pieces together. We also need to remember that there are a variety of people who comprise the community of Asian Americans. And so each group carries to the experience of being Asian American a very distinctive story instead of understandings and entry points into this issue. So the experience of a Hmong American person is going to be quite different from a Japanese American person, given the particular historical circumstances and backgrounds.

Alex Murra:

Could you speak a little about how the experiences of Asian Americans can help inform and fit into the larger landscape of racial discrimination in America? Last summer we had this Black Lives Matter Movement with the death of George Floyd. How can this movement also tie into those racial movements as well?

Melissa Borja:

One thing that’s been very striking to me is to see how this has been a moment where Asian Americans are insisting that we are no longer invisible. And I’ll just give one example. I live in Indiana, and an Asian American women’s group has been insisting that the governor condemn anti-Asian racism. He condemned racism, but he could not even get himself to say the word Asian American. And this was very striking to the organizers behind this effort because time and time again, Asian Americans have been erased. Their stories have been erased. Their experiences have been erased. Their experiences of racism in particular have been erased. And part of that has to do with the very powerful paradigm of thinking about race and racism in the United States as a black/white issue.

Melissa Borja:

Absolutely, Asian Americans have had a different experience of racialization and racism than Black Americans have, but Asian Americans have experienced racism. Asian Americans have been denied migration because of their race. They have been denied citizenship because of their race. They have been denied the opportunity to marry other people because of their race. And so to deny that Asian Americans do and have experienced racism is really, I think, a faulty premise, and that’s what a lot of Asian Americans are pushing back against at this moment; the long history of being rendered invisible.

Melissa Borja:

I do think the events of the summer; the Black Lives Matter protests that have taken place for several years now, but especially in the wake of the deaths of George Floyd and Brianna Taylor, really shaped the conversation about race and racism in the United States in a way that I think opens up new possibilities for Asian Americans in this moment. So we see institutions and individuals engaging in conversations about what it means to not just honor commitments to diversity inclusion, but to honor commitments to equity and to actively be anti-racist. And those conversations I think that took place in the summer are shaping conversations now and how a broad array of Americans are thinking about the experiences of Asian Americans during this pandemic. So I think that that has been a very interesting development.

Melissa Borja:

We’ve also, I should add, seen a lot of solidarity work between Black and Asian American communities in this current moment. And there’s a long history of Black and Asian solidarity too. It’s not like this is the first time we’ve seen that, but I think we see a lot more intentional and explicit calls for Black and Asian Americans to work with each other and in concert with other groups that have experienced racism; Native people, Latinx people, Muslim people, for example. And so I think we are at a watershed moment and it is tumultuous and it’s traumatic, but I also think it’s transformative.

Alex Murra:

Yeah. I can definitely agree with you on that aspect. I know that probably before this past summer, we didn’t really have too many conversations about race in all honesty. It was something that was hushed and kind of pushed to the back. Every once in a while it was mentioned. But I think that as people are able to find their voices and then different communities supporting each other, things have really started to change slowly for the better.

Alex Murra:

Now we’re going to kind of shift the conversation, moving from some of the historical background of racism to maybe some of the current health disparities and issues with hate incidents that we’ve been seeing. I was wondering if you can talk about how Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are always talked about in this one large sum group, despite there’s a really large range of life experiences that people have, [inaudible 00:14:54] resulted in us not being able to really see true patterns and either health data or even economic data. Do you have any reason or any explanation as to why agencies continue to report aggregated data for Asians instead of maybe sub-categorizing it into the different groups?

Melissa Borja:

The category of Asian American is so difficult to work with. I freely acknowledge it. We only began to use the category of Asian Americans in the late 1960s, and it was imagined by its first proponents as a political tool in order to forge a coalition between different ethnic groups that until that point had really been defining themselves as Japanese American, Chinese American, Filipino American, and so on. And we’ve seen over time, the category of Asian American broadened to include more groups of people. So over time we added Pacific Islanders, we added more engagement in the experiences of Muslim Americans. And of course we have to think about how South Asian Americans, so people from India and Pakistan are also part of the category of Asian American Pacific Islander even if they’re not often imagined as being part of that category in popular consciousness, I should say.

Melissa Borja:

One thing that makes working with Asian American communities and studying Asian American communities is the really mind-boggling internal diversity within that category. You have a wide array of ethnic groups. You have a wide array of languages. I helped organize one of the first voter engagement projects in Indiana to reach out to Asian American voters across the state. And we had outreach in five different languages, and we didn’t even scratch the surface. So tremendous variation within the Asian American community on that front.

Melissa Borja:

And then when it comes to things like health, we have to remember that there is a wide gap between upper middle-class and wealthy Asian Americans, who I think get most of the attention. If we think about the model minority stereotype, we think about upwardly mobile, upper middle-class Asian Americans who live in comfortable homes and who do well in school. And the one problem, there are many problems with the model minority stereotype, is that it obscures real forms of poverty and suffering that exists within Asian America.

Melissa Borja:

So we have within the category of Asian American, some of the highest earning ethnic groups, Indian-Americans, and we also have some of the groups that experienced the highest levels of poverty, like Burmese Americans and Hmong Americans. And those people who have high levels of poverty, also unsurprisingly have high levels of other health problems, and those health disparities exist within Asian America in the same way they exist in the rest of the country, along lines of socioeconomic privilege.

Melissa Borja:

I would add one thing that is interesting in the past few years has been a move to disaggregate the data, to try to collect data differently and to collect Southeast Asian data differently from an East Asian American data. I think that that is a really useful next step, but I don’t see a lot of that happening in the country to be honest. I haven’t seen as much forward movement on that as I would like, but I think that’s where we’re going.

Melissa Borja:

I should add one more thing because the historical perspective is important. Asian Americans migrate to the United States in very different circumstances, and that also shapes different experiences in the United States in different health outcomes. I gave the example of Hmong Americans just a few minutes ago. Hmong Americans are the focus of my own research. And I know that Hmong Americans came to the United States not only with lower levels of education on average, but also carrying with them the trauma of years of war. Many came to the United States with injuries that made it difficult for them to work because of the war. Exposure to toxic chemicals, again, because of the war. And their pre-migration experiences and their experiences as refugees means that they entered into the United States with a very different opportunity structure for prosperity and health, then say a Taiwanese American immigrant, who came to the US to get a PhD in chemistry.

Melissa Borja:

So both of those groups of people are under the same category of Asian American and really different backgrounds and circumstances. And so as much as we can, we need to understand that internal diversity and collect data that helps us offer nuanced understandings and nuanced responses to the diverse needs of the community.

Alex Murra:

Thank you for offering that historical perspective. Obviously in public health, we know that data drives policy changes. I hope that eventually we can have really good data that shows really all these little nuances that you’ve discussed.

Alex Murra:

Moving on to one of the most recent reports from the Stop AAPI Hate Reporting Center. There were 3,800 anti-Asian racist reports in the past year with a large amount being directed towards women. What are some potential reasons as to why Asian American women are disproportionately affected, and what are some other notable trends that you guys examined so far?

Melissa Borja:

This is such an important issue. I’m obviously distressed by what happened in Atlanta last week, but I’m also grateful for the opportunity to help us think about how racism can intersect with other forms of oppression. So I’ve been insisting in the past week that we need to understand how Atlanta reveals two things; there’s a very long history of violence against Asian Americans, but also a very long history of violence against women. And those two things are so intertwined that it’s hard sometimes to disentangle was this a racist act or a sexist act? I do know that my team’s research at the University of Michigan, we found multiple examples of where an Asian American person was subjected to an attack that combined blaming them for the coronavirus, giving them a racist slur and giving them a misogynistic term. It happens over and over again.

Melissa Borja:

I have a lot of questions still at this point. I think we’re not entirely sure how this works in terms of how Asian American women experience this harassment. We do know that women are targeted more. This is true in Stop AAPI Hate’s data, and also true in the data my team has collected. My team focuses on incidents reported in news media. That’s been consistent, but we don’t quite know how this actually works. So we have a lot of questions at this point. We wonder, for example, do the assailants think that Asian American women will just be more likely to take it? Are they seen as an easier target? And is that why they are attacked more? We don’t know for sure, but we do know that women are attacked more.

Melissa Borja:

We also do know that women are leading most of the efforts to respond to anti-Asian racism. And I think that should give us reason to hope. We know from broad research that women are often at the forefront of grassroots change in social movements. That has been true for the past year that Asian American women have been leading calls for change at the local state and national levels. And so that’s a really interesting trend we’ve noticed.

Melissa Borja:

Finally, one thing that we’ve noticed is that these incidents of harassment have taken place largely in public. And there is something really interesting that’s going on, which is we’ve been living in a pandemic and a lot of us don’t leave our homes that often. I don’t know about you, but I can’t think about the last time I stepped outside, because we are living in a pandemic and we’re trying to reduce how much we’re interacting in public. And yet it is in public where most of these instances are happening. And March and April were the months when at least my team saw incidents surge in 2020. I should add, we haven’t started collecting data for 2021 yet. So we imagine that those will increase. Incidents were really high in March and April. That was a time when we were living under lockdown for the most part, so I find that very interesting.

Melissa Borja:

Most of the incidents have taken place at businesses, on the street and on public transit. So if we hear Asian American people, especially Asian American women say they’re afraid to go about their daily life, it makes sense. It reflects a reality. That’s where they’re getting attacked while they’re just going about their daily lives. So I would have to say that that is one of the most concerning elements about this past year that we can’t even go to the grocery store without feeling a little worried that someone might cough on us or yell a racist epithet at us.

Melissa Borja:

Finally, one more thing that I have been really struck by, which is that these racist incidents and we use the term incident because some of them are hate crimes, but some of them are forms of verbal harassment that don’t necessarily amount to a crime, but we consider all of these things on a broad array of expressions of anti-Asian hostility that are worth considering, that have also contributed to a climate of fear among Asian Americans, no one is really immune from being targeted. So it’s affected all age groups. We’ve seen horrific acts of violence against elderly people. We’ve also seen horrific acts of violence against children. The most widely covered event in 2020 with the stabbing of a Burmese American family in Midland, Texas, where they were shopping at a Sam’s Club and a man came at them with a knife, shouted that they were Chinese people and had brought the coronavirus to the United States and stabbed the father in the face, as well as at least one, possibly both of his sons who were ages two and six.

Melissa Borja:

So I think it’s really important for us to remember that all Asian Americans have been affected by this sometimes in really violent ways like we saw in Texas, and sometimes in subtler ways. I’ll just share one other striking report I learned from the Brookings Institution a couple of weeks ago. Studies have shown that one in four Asian American youth has experienced racist bullying during the pandemic, and that in 50% of those cases an adult was able to intervene and did not. I think that that is another way that Asian Americans are affected by this. Asian Americans are worried about their children going to school, and some have speculated that that’s why Asian American families have been less likely to send their children in-person schooling, even when they have the option to and have opted for virtual learning instead.

Alex Murra:

Yeah. I always think it’s so heartbreaking to hear any of these incidents, whether it’s a violent event or even just hearing from a family member or a friend that they had been yelled at or harassed in some way when trying to go to the store. One of the things that’s concerned me a lot is also just how people are weaponizing the virus. I never really heard about hate incidents involving coughing or spitting too much before the coronavirus, but then all of a sudden we have this respiratory virus and it’s become this weapon to hurt people. It’s been a very alarming trend.

Alex Murra:

Kind of touching on this; you briefly mentioned the work that your team has done within Stop AAPI Hate, and that’s analyzing media outlets like Twitter. We were wondering at what point did you start to see an uptick in the use of anti-Asian language in the media and how the use of hateful language is just as dangerous as actual hate crimes.

Melissa Borja:

So language matters. We’ve always insisted that it’s important for us to use language that is responsible, especially language that is responsible to communities that are very vulnerable to this moment. And it is for that reason, that major organizations like the WHO, and the CDC have asked people to not use stigmatizing rhetoric and stigmatizing terms like China virus or Wuhan flu.

Melissa Borja:

I have not studied Twitter activity before the pandemic, but other researchers have those who work on health communications. And researchers found that there have been a downward trend in anti-Asian bias for the past 10 years and that was reversed in early March as soon as very prominent leaders began using stigmatizing terms like China virus.f The use of those terms, again, reversed a 10 year long decline in anti-Asian bias. And other researchers have found that expressions of anti-Asian sentiment online increased when President Trump was diagnosed with COVID in October.

Melissa Borja:

This is a very interesting pattern. My research team looked at stigmatizing rhetoric used by political candidates in 2020 and the lead up to the election and we were struck by a couple things. The first is that there were very partisan patterns. It was primarily Republicans who were using this rhetoric. Almost no Democrats used it. Primarily Democrats were saying positive things in support of Asian Americans experiencing racism. Only one Republican politician said anything along those lines, although some Republicans did support Grace Meng’s resolution in September 2020. But my point is that this does seem to indicate that this might’ve been a political strategy on the part of the Republican party.

Melissa Borja:

The other thing that I think is useful to keep in mind is not everyone was using this language. A few prominent politicians were using this language and had a particularly big platform. One activist at Stop AAPI Hate has described President Trump as a super spreader of hate because his tweets were re-tweeted and liked a lot compared to other politicians like Tom Cotton, who were using this. Now Trump is no longer president, he is no longer on Twitter, but we see the continued use of stigmatizing rhetoric that has been documented to harm Asian Americans. We see this at the state level. I literally just had a conversation with a teacher at my daughter’s school who insisted that the term China virus is the correct term to use because it’s tradition.

Melissa Borja:

Now this to me was very concerning because as a researcher, I’m less interested in tradition, more interested in following where the data lead us. And if the research indicates that the term China virus does harm to a community, then we should let that inform our decisions more than what we have done in the past. We can choose to use different words. It’s not that hard to say COVID-19 rather than China virus.

Melissa Borja:

But I think that on the matter of hateful language versus hate crimes, the reality is that most of the incidents that have been reported to Stop AAPI Hate self-reporting system, as well as most of the incidents that have been reported in news media, have been verbal in nature. And there have been some but not necessarily hundreds or thousands of incidents of violence and hate crimes, but I think it’s useful for us to think about these types of acts of racism on one spectrum of anti-Asian racism. So these are extreme ends of all of the ways that Asian Americans had been suffering anti-Asian racism in the past year in particular. So you can use harmful language and maybe that’s not going to amount to a hate crime, but it does contribute to the perception of Asian Americans as a perpetual foreigner, as a threat and that can create a public understanding of Asian American people that will make them more vulnerable to acts of hate and violence.

Alex Murra:

Thank you. I think that all this work that’s coming out of the Report Center is incredibly interesting. It’s very important too, because it brings a very stark attention to what’s happening.

Alex Murra:

I think a lot of the questions that people might be having right now is that as students of public health, or even just as regular community members, what can we do to be allies not only to Asian Americans, but also to other minorities as well?

Melissa Borja:

I think there are a lot of different things you can do in an interpersonal level and also in an institutional level. Some of the most basic things you can do in this current moment is to express care and concern for Asian American people who are hurting right now and who are afraid. I’ve seen a lot of stories on social media of people being surprised that anti-Asian racism exists, and also Asian American people continue to feel frustrated that their experiences are minimized or even denied.

Melissa Borja:

I think the first thing we can do is acknowledge that anti-Asian racism is a problem, has been a problem, that Asian American people are hurting right now. We can continue to help people know about the support and resources that exist. This is one of the biggest problems for Asian Americans who tend to report hate incidents and hate crimes at lower levels. A lot of this has to do with very practical barriers, like language barriers. Many Asian Americans are immigrants and might not feel comfortable using English. But we also know that a lot of Asian Americans don’t even know that the resources exist out there. And so as much as we can continue to spread the word about how people can report these incidents to Stop AAPI Hate, to local bias hotlines, vice crime hotlines, to various institutions that exist within universities,. That’s very useful.

Melissa Borja:

I also think one of the most important things we can do is focus not just on stopping anti-Asian harassment and violence, but focus on building up safe and inclusive communities where Asian American people and other people can thrive, and that means supporting local Asian American institutions that do the long-term work of building communities, supporting communities. I keep thinking about how in the wake of the killings in Atlanta, how amazing it was to hear an Asian American woman who is a state Senator in Michigan, speak about this issue, and an Asian American woman who’s a state Senator in Georgia speak about this issue, and how we have members of Congress who are Asian American women speak about this issue, and how we have a vice-president who’s an Asian American woman and Black woman speak about this issue.

Melissa Borja:

In many ways, one of the most important things we can do is to continue to engage Asian American people and help them see their agency and build their political power in this moment, because when we put Asian American people in positions of power at all levels, it makes it safer for Asian Americans to go about their daily lives. It makes governments more understanding and responsive to the needs of Asian American people. So this is really important work we need to do in the long run. We need to address the harm in the current moment, but we need to have our eye on the bigger picture and where we want to be in five and 10 years, and that means building up Asian American institutions and building Asian American power now.

Alex Murra:

Thank you for all of that advice on how to be a good ally. I love these ideas of building stronger communities and promoting Asian American voices.

Alex Murra:

To wrap everything up, one of the questions we always like to ask all of our guests is what is the one thing that you thought you knew, but were later wrong about?

Melissa Borja:

I feel embarrassed admitting how naive I was in thinking that once the pandemic would be close to ending, these attacks on Asian Americans would end. And I was really naive also in thinking that once we removed politicians who had stigmatizing rhetoric that we might see a decline in anti-Asian rhetoric and anti-Asian racism, and that’s not true. I think one thing that this points to in my view is that the pandemic is only one context in which these acts of anti-Asian racism and violence are happening.

Melissa Borja:

I think another context, which is more long-term is the context of tensions between US and China. I don’t think that issue is going to go away anytime soon. We know from US history that geopolitical tensions can sometimes make, can often make Asian Americans very vulnerable. I gave the example earlier of the killing of Vincent Chin and the tensions between Japan and the United States in the US, especially with regard to Japanese auto manufacturers and US auto manufacturers. There’s that. There’s also the example of the Second World War when we incarcerate a Japanese Americans who were seen as a threat and a challenge to American safety and security.

Melissa Borja:

I think that we need to remember that there are other factors that are contributing to the perception of Asian Americans as a threat. And a lot of the conversation around the pandemic has focused on Asian Americans being seen as a disease threat, but I also think we need to engage in how there are all sorts of ways that China and therefore Asian Americans are going to be … Chinese are going to be blamed for a variety of things, and Asian Americans in turn will be blamed for a variety of things that don’t have anything to do with disease. The context of US/China tensions is I think the more long-term issue that I’m very worried about. And I just didn’t think that that would be the primary context I would need to be worried about a year ago.

Alex Murra:

Yes. I definitely agree with that. I was in the same boat I think with, “Oh, when we start having vaccines come out and pandemic maybe starts to lessen, then maybe all these anti-Asian hate incidents would start to decrease.” I think it’s a very great way to wrap everything up, thinking about the historical context and even current political context and how we can move forward to keep this movement going and to actually create change in the long-term.

Alex Murra:

I wanted to thank you, Dr. Borja, for coming on and joining us today. All of your expertise was very insightful and I think we can learn a lot from it. So thank you so much for coming on today.

Melissa Borja:

I’m so grateful to be here. Thank you.

Steve Sonnier:

That’s it for our episode this week. Big thanks to Dr. Melissa Borja for coming on with us today.

Steve Sonnier:

This episode was hosted, written, edited, and produced by Alex Murra. You can find more about the University of Iowa College of Public Health on Facebook. Our podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with your colleagues. Our team can be reached at cph-gradambassador@uiowa.edu. This episode is brought to you by the University of Iowa College of Public Health. Keep on keeping on out there.