Allies can help by watching for anything unusual happening in the neighborhood, by pushing back against stereotypes of Asians as wealthy people, and by pushing back against both denial and shame.
Presenter: KEPW’s Underground Echo follows up after the Asian American Pacific Islander and Allies Public Safety Forum. Your host, Echo:
Echo: Are we safe here? In Eugene, Oregon, what began as local isolated reports—a theft here, a burglary there—has now revealed itself as a coordinated pattern. Homes of Asian business owners specifically targeted, not by chance, not by coincidence, but by design. Asian Americans have been both hypervisible and unseen, mythologized as the model minority, then treated like perpetual foreigners. It’s the paradox of presence without belonging. And when crime touches that tension, it reveals every fracture beneath the surface.
[00:00:46] So when we talk about break-ins, we are also talking about exclusion acts, internment camps, scapegoating, and silence that stretch from the 1800s to now. We are talking about how quickly The Other becomes the target and how slowly the justice system tends to respond…