COVID and the rise of anti-Asian sentiment | with Lucy Sheen

Foreign.

You'Re very welcome to episode 79 of the Shortlist. My name is Johnny Campbell. I'm your host for the Shortlist Live show and podcast and CEO and co founder of Social Talent. If you're listening to this live, you're very welcome. We welcome all chat contributions comments which you can post on YouTube or LinkedIn directly. If you're listening to the podcast, any references to articles or notes we make we will post in the show. Notes. You can find out more about the show by going to socialtalent.com the shortlist, where you'll see a list of all our previous 78 shows and a list of our upcoming shows and you can find links to all those recordings. But for today with Show 79, we're going to be talking about COVID and the rise of Anti Asian Sentiment as the world kind of grappled with the onset of the pandemic in early 20, it also quite disappointingly saw an increase in anti Asian sentiment associated with this. And from the disproportionate representation of Southeast Asians on news stories regarding Covid to growing reports of verbal and physical abuse and even xenophobic scapegoating from political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic, it seemed like the virus almost afforded people's excuse of justification for outright racism. And Covid has shone a lot greater light on many issues in society. And this rise in kind of anti Asian rhetoric is one that we believe here in. The show deserves a lot more attention as of course has a massive impact on hiring and talent. Joining us on the show today to discuss this topic is Lucy Sheen. Lucy is an accomplished actor, playwright, digital artist and activist who recently contributed to the We Are Not Virus production with her piece entitled I Am Not a Virus, which I strongly recommend everyone watch. Lucy's here to talk with us about the dangers of lazy stereotyping, how historical attitudes have shaped this current upsurge in discrimination and and what can be done to push the needle when it comes to improving and expanding Asian representation. Lucy, you're very welcome to the show. Wonder if you wouldn't mind sharing with our guests a little bit about your professional experience and, you know, how you became involved in advocating for this topic.

Hi. Thank you very much for having me. Yes, as you said, I'm an actor, writer and activist. I suppose in some senses I got into active activism, if that's the thing, quite late on in my career, which was sprung by a now, I suppose, notorious production that was done by the RSC called the Orphan of Zhao, a 17 strong cast a play that is often referred to by academics and others as the Chinese hamlet. Amongst 17 strong casts, there were only three British East Asian actors. And I think that was the straw that broke the British East Asian actors and artists back. And from that, because that campaign went global, we the people that were also like minded, we realized that in terms of being a British minority, how we were perceived, represented, engaged with within our own industry was pretty appalling and hasn't really. Well, hadn't at that point really changed since I had gone to drama school and graduated in the late 70s to whenever that was 2013, which is pretty horrific. Which is I suppose what started my, my very vocal reaction and sort of advocacy and activism with regard to how people like myself are seen and represented in our culture.

I want to tap into that representation and that culture piece because we talked a couple of weeks ago with Susan Village from NBC Universal where we initially dabbled in that topic of the role of mass media and its influence on wider society and culture. And you know, I guess an example you gave there where you have a play proportion to represent a certain culture where actually in truth only being delivered by individuals, extreme minority of individuals even representing that culture just is evidence of the challenge that's there and has been there for a long time. But I want to focus on maybe the last couple of years in particular because rather than getting better, you could argue it's accelerated and got worse. And I want to point to an article that was published recently on iNews Lucy which had the title of Anti Asian hate speech online rises by and this is not incorrect 1,662%. That's 1,662% during COVID pandemic new study finds. That's by Isabel Chapirka on I News. We'll share the article live and in the show notes there. This is a kind of rather depressing piece, but it feels unfortunately true and it shows evidence. When they examined, you know, millions of online conversations on the platforms we're all very familiar with and they found this explosion of ethnicity based hate speech particularly peaking in March as the pandemic. March 2020 as the pandemic began to spread. And then it links it to, let's say in the UK's context, an increase in anti Asian hate crimes in London of 80% a couple of months after that. It makes this link between, you know, what happens online and this hate speech and then how it translates into the real world in a negative way. Can you share me your thoughts on this or your personal experiences if you have them relating to what this article claims has happened since the pandemic broke out.

I mean thinking in broad brushstrokes, the article is, is, is, is very true. I mean I suppose for anybody of east or Southeast Asian heritage it's not a surprise and the not wanting to be disingenuous but the shock horror of, you know, sort of an explosion of anti Asian feeling. Well for us that anti Asian feeling has never gone away. I mean, I think it dips like many things. There is a plateauing but throughout my lifetime here, which is 50 years plus, that kind of hatred, racism, violence has, has always been part of my, particularly in my younger years. So you're talking about 60s and 70s attitudes were very different. The makeup of Britain was particularly very different in terms of the numbers of people, non white faces that you actually saw and particularly faces of East Asian features. So that's never gone away. So for us that's no surprise. I suppose what was the shocker was how quickly that that sort of hate speech and, and violence sort of surged and I think off the back of, I'm going to mention it, Brexit and the likes of Farage and that type of sentiment that you know, sort of whipping up of xenophobia which is always a knee, I think a knee jerk reaction to concerns of foreigners or being overrun. And it is the, the, the thought process that allows you to kind of like introduce immigration and, and draconian border controls in a need to kind of like curtail that mobility of I think foreignness. Which is kind of like quite odd considering that you know, up until that point we had been part of the eu, we had flee, you know, movement across Europe which everybody wanted and, and now most people I think are really regressing that we don't have. But hey. So I think that goes hand in hand and it was no surprise but a shock of the, the, the, the level on the vitriol and the actual, I suppose heat that was behind that. I mean before we went into lockdown I was rehearsing a show in, in the city and I basically got told to f off home and take my effing disease with me. And the guy who did it to me whispered in my ear. So he, which was a shocker, he made a choice to do that because there are other people on the bus because he knew, I think that if he said something like that somebody may have commented or I would like to think that somebody would have commented. And that was in February. So that was already bubbling I think along with, you know, sort of, as I've said, the whip up in, you know, sort of so called nationalism, Brexit, Brexitism and all the rest of that. So that was already building. The article also, you know, sort of also refers to, I think it's Liam Hackett saying that a lot of the terms that were being used were new. I would beg to differ. They may have been couched in a very different way, but disease and, and associating that with people of East Asian heritage has been something that's been around since the 1800s. That's not new. It has always been laid upon people from east east and Southeast Asia that we are somehow diseased and less than desirable. The men are emasculated and you know, sort of fiends and, and run opium dens and women are oriental, super sexualized, hypersexualized and therefore, you know, sort of also at one point wanting to be desired, but also to be, to be shunned. So this is nothing new for us. This is a continuation of something which is, which is very old. So I think it maybe is a shocker to the, the wider community in Britain to wake up and realize that this is, you know, sort of a problem. This is yet another that has suffered to a certain extent in silence because we have been ignored and not. And it's easy for us to be ignored because we have never fully, I don't think, been accepted. That is partly, I think we have to take some responsibility for that as much as the wider society.