Civil Rights ATX: Combating Hate Violence in the AAPI Community

City of Austin, Office of Civil Rights

Approved by the Austin City Council in August 2020, the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) is a newly formed department which provides a centralized entity to enforce civil rights anti-discrimination ordinance and federal statutes. OCR provides education and outreach to the community, delivers feedback and recommendations to city management involving new and expanded initiatives and programs citywide and works extensively with local, state and federal partners and stakeholders to ensure that Austinites live free from discrimination and other civil rights violations. The Office of Civil Rights works strategically to promote visibility, transparency, accountability, and responsibility.

Combating Hate Violence in The AAPI Community

The Office of Civil Rights (OCR) is hosting an educational outreach workshop series to address hate, discrimination and violence toward the Asian American Pacific Islanders (AAPI) community. This AAPI initiative is in direct response to the increasing violence toward the AAPI community which has continued to escalate since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

According to a May 2021, report by the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum (NAPAWF) and Stop AAPI Hate, Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) and girls are prime targets of hate and discrimination against the AAPI community: 

The recent shootings across several Atlanta spas that claimed the lives of eight people, including six Asian American women, came on the heels of a staggering increase in hate incidents targeting the AAPI community. Hate incidents, which include both hate crimes and incidents of violence or discrimination, against AAPIs rose sharply over the past year, with over 6,600 reports collected by Stop AAPI Hate between March 2020 and March 2021. In particular, AAPI women and girls report these hate incidents 2.2 times as often as AAPI men; and AAPI non-binary people have also reported experiencing heightened incidents of hate.

In Texas, AAPI Stop Hate reports that Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese are the most heavily targeted ethnicities within the AAPI community for hate bias and discrimination, and that Texas ranks fourth in the number of hate and bias incidents – behind California, New York and Washington.

This series will educate participants on civil rights investigations from the civil and criminal perspectives and is geared toward helping to reduce the negative impacts of hate biases toward the AAPI community in Austin. 

The Office of Civil Rights and the Austin Police Department will provide education on how to identify civil rights violations; how to respond to hate bias and discrimination; and how to report civil rights violations when they occur. This community partnership is one of many ways the Office of Civil Rights will continue to focus on empowering communities to combat discrimination and hate biases wherever they occur. 

This event will offer translations for Chinese Mandarin, Vietnamese and Korean. If you have a language of choice outside of these provided translations, please list your preferred language on the registration form.