submitted by Christopher Le
With the spike of Asian hate crimes, Justin Le decided to conduct an Asian Hate Crime protest in Orlando, Florida. He thought that it was relevant to do this now so that he can raise awareness of the crimes that are happening. Le got inspired to do this because of one person holding up a sign that said “Stop Asian Hate Crimes” in a busy intersection, alone. He sparked the idea of helping out, furthering the awareness of this unfortunate pandemic that is going on in the Asian community. Le noted that he was scared to let his elderly grandparents go grocery shopping because they were the most vulnerable to being attacked due to being Asian. Le saw how there was a continuing trend of many Asians being attacked, to the point of death. He knew that there had to be some change.
Justin Le is the Florida Chapter President of Teens United, with the help of Heart Rirao who is the Florida Chapter Vice President of Teens United. They first had to get a special event’s request by the city of Orlando to do this so that they are allowed to actually hold a protest rally. Next, they thought that the protest should be held at Bumby and Colonial because that was a really busy intersection of Orlando that would for sure get the most audience and attention. They then spread out the protest throughout the connections they have of different schools in the Orange County area. They contacted Timber Creek High School, West Orange High School, and Cypress Creek High School’s Asian Student Associations (ASA). I thought that it was important for me, as vice president of Timber Creek’s ASA, to advertise this event because it will address an issue that has been kept silent for too long. Yvonne Tsa, the president of Timber Creek’s ASA, encouraged all members to come. Vivian Nguyen, the secretary of Cypress Creek’s ASA, tried to help out by marketing the event through Instagram, Remind, and club meetings. She explained that it was important to get people since she thought that “the more people the better.” After spreading out the event, more than 20 people arrived at the event to help out the Asian American Pacific Islander Hate Protest on March 28th and April 3rd, 2021.
The event went great. The volunteers who wanted to participate in this event would hold signs of messages that addressed the Asian hate crime and angled it to the street so that cars could see it. We got a lot of supporters who thought that we were doing a good thing, such as repetitive honks from cars. Tracy Tran, a student at Timber Creek High School, explained how she got lots of honks and little waves when displaying her poster on Colonial Drive. Several people even decided to buy us packs of water with ice so that we can survive the hot day. However, there were conflicting times. An anonymous white man decided to come and verbally assault us. He said how there are no Asian hate crimes at all, that it was all made beliefs. Despite this, we did not let him disturb what we were doing. We let our passions of fighting the Asian hate crime take over us, not letting anything combat against us. There were many other collaborators such as Adrian Lee, from the University of Central Florida’s Asian Pacific American Coalition, and Duc-Thanh Nguyen, from the University of Central Florida’s ASA.
There were many things learned when doing this protest rally. We learned that there were a lot of bystanders, especially Asians, who would just pass by us and not honk for support even though we were fighting for them. This just shows how fairly mistreated Asians were. We have been going through discrimination and bias for most of our lives, from people misjudging us and assuming that we are all the typical nerdy Asians. This ruins our self-esteem and confidence, which makes us less likely to fight back. That is why not a lot of people, specifically Asians, helped this protest. Asians live in a culture where they are so guided by Asian stereotypes that they can’t have the freedom to express how they feel, which is a terrible bias. This protest had a meaningful impact in Orlando in the end, with many news reporters such as Radio 90.7 WMFE, 89.5 WMFV, and VoxPopuli. While this was a small event we did, the publicity we get will hopefully allow people to change their views on Asian Americans as human beings who deserve kindness and equality.
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