The Virus and the Violence: Reflections on ‘Anti-Asian’ Hate and Racist Maskaphobia1
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have witnessed a surge in overt and covert racist violence targeting East and Southeast Asian diasporic communities transnationally. This has taken a range of forms, from assaults on elders, to the shooting of Asian massage parlour workers, to maskaphobia – a term coined by Yinxuan Huang (Young, 2020) describing public assaults against masked Asians. The dominant framing of such events has been ‘hate crimes’, illustrated in the popular hashtag #StopAsianHate. This chapter analyses the reporting of ‘anti-Asian’ racism focusing in the Greater Toronto Area in conversation with international events and social media discourses. Weaving personal memories, storytelling, histories of anti-Asian racism on Canada-occupied Turtle Island, and academic/activist analysis, this chapter critically engages with maskaphobia and responses to ‘anti-Asian’ racism. Drawing on Haritaworn’s (2015) argument that ‘hate’ and ‘crime’ individualize and pathologize systemic violence, Thobani’s (2007) analysis of Canadian citizenship, and Lawrence and Dua’s (2005) articulation of settler of colour complicity, this chapter argues that carceral solutions and settler colonial nationalism inevitably empower white supremacist systems and centre settler colonial modes of belonging. Instead, Asian alignment and solidarity with movements for prison abolition and Indigenous decolonization are offered as alternative methods of seeking safety and collective liberation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".