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Erasing Invisibility Gives Space to Humanity: 15 AAPI Olympic Athletes from the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, China to the 2018 Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea
The Olympic athlete’s journey is long and arduous. It takes heart, courage, and perseverance.
Yet Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) Olympic athletes and the AAPI community in general is facing another difficulty: although hate crimes decreased by 7% overall in 2020, there has been an almost 150% increase in hate crimes against the AAPI community.
In April, Sakura Kokumai was at a park she usually frequents in Orange County, California when a man started yelling derogatory racist slurs at her. She was aware of the anti-Asian hate crimes affecting the AAPI community because it was reported almost daily by the news, but she didn’t expect it to happen to her at the park where she usually trains. Kokumai is in fact an AAPI athlete who will compete in the Summer Olympics in Tokyo, Japan in karate.
What Kokumai also didn’t expect was the large number of bystanders who silently witnessed the hate crime and did nothing to stop the man from harassing her.
Racist verbal and physical attacks are malicious, terrifying, and just plain wrong. Yet these hate crimes in combination with the silence of bystanders…
