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| Sally Sha holds up a sign during a Stop Asian Hate rally at Discovery Green in downtown Houston, Texas on March 20, 2021. (Photo from Mark Felix / AFP) |
[Asia News Communication = Reporter Reakkana] MANILA— A gruesome attack perpetrated last month against a Filipino immigrant in New York City sparked outrage and horror in the Philippines, PhilStar reported. It’s the second assault on a Filipino immigrant in as many months and the latest in a string of anti-Asian hate crimes that have swept across the US — largely perceived to be the fallout of the racist language surrounding discussions of the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, while Filipinos decry anti-Asian racism abroad, academics and members of the Filipino Chinese community in the Philippines say anti-Chinese sentiment is on the rise at home. Dr. Jonathan Corpus Ong, associate professor of Global Digital Media at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, in an Internews report released earlier this year, said: "the Philippines was, unfortunately, no exception" to the "anti-China racist speech and conspiracy theory surged in the global context" in the wake of the pandemic.
In "Information Dystopia and Philippine Democracy," Ong said that what he called a "secondary contagion" of COVID-19, or the blaming of people of Chinese descent and Chinese culture for the virus, has also proliferated by Filipinos on social media. These views have consequences in the real world.
