Online threats against Americans of South Asian descent surged since the presidential tickets solidified with Vice President Kamala Harris, who is of Black and Indian descent, as the Democratic nominee and Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance, whose wife Usha Vance is Indian American, per a new report.
Why it matters: Research has shown a correlation between hate online and offline, said Stop AAPI Hate co-founder Manjusha Kulkarni, who pointed to past studies that show 43% of South Asian adults experienced a hate act in 2023 because of their race, ethnicity or nationality.
- Stop AAPIHate partnered with the tech startup Moonshot on the report released today, which shows that from January 2023 to August 2024, anti-South Asian slurs in violent, extremist online spaces in the U.S. doubled.
- “It’s disturbingly high, the number of incidents our community members experience,” she told Axios. “Because so much of our world is online, that is real-world hate.”
- Data from Moonshot shows that anti-South Asian hate online, including slurs, slogans and phrases, peaked in August after Usha Vance’s appearance at the RNC and Harris’ nominee announcement, jumping 36% in August 2024 compared to June.
- Threats of violence also increased, with 973 anti-Asian threats recorded in August alone, the report said.
The big picture: Hate crimes against Americans of South Asian descent, the largest Asian-alone community in the United States, have been documented for centuries, but they became part of a national conversation after the 9/11 terror attacks when many Sikh Americans were mistakenly targeted as Muslim.
- In 2012, a mass shooting by a white supremacist gunman at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, killed seven.
- Hate crimes against all Asian American communities have been on the rise since the pandemic, with 1 in 3 Asian American adults reported being the subject of a hate act last year.
- The Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, recently shared with Axios new data that showed 2023 hate crimes overall hit records across 10 of the nation’s largest cities, rising 16%.
