Shannon Harper, assistant professor of sociology, has published a study, “Anti-Asian Hate Crime During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Exploring the Reproduction of Inequality,” in the American Journal of Criminal Justice. Harper’s co-authors are Angela Gover, professor of criminal justice at the University of Colorado-Denver, and Lynn Langton from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
COVID-19 emerged in Wuhan, China, in late 2019 and rapidly spread throughout the world, eventually reaching the United States. In the U.S., Asian Americans have reported a surge in racially motivated hate crimes involving physical violence and harassment. Throughout history, pandemic-related health crises have been associated with the stigmatization and “othering” of people of Asian descent. Othering occurs when a dominant group marginalizes a non-dominant group in some way.
In this paper, Harper and her c0-authors position anti-Asian hate crime during the COVID-19 pandemic historically and in relation to racist and xenophobic othering. They expand their scholarship by examining the pandemic-driven hate crime experiences of Asian Americans to more definitively define the concept of othering.