A new website has launched to track incidents of anti-Asian racism in Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Stop COVID Racism, a newly launched joint effort from a coalition of community groups, collects incidences of racist and xenophobic harassment from across the country and plots them on a publicly available map.
Groups contributing to the project include the Chinese Canadian National Council (Toronto chapter), the Chinese Canadian National Council for Social Justice, the Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic, and the Civic Engagement Network Society of Canada.
“This project aims to validate the spectrum of experiences felt across Asian Canadian communities and seeks to use the documentation to inform future efforts for collective action against anti-Asian racism and xenophobia,” they wrote in a statement online.
Through a form on the site, which is available in English, French and both simplified and traditional Chinese, users can report incidents that happened to them or to another person, including the location time of the incident and where it occurred.
Types of incidents being tracked include verbal harassment, being denied service, workplace discrimination, being coughed or spat upon, or abuse of power by police, among others. Users can denote reason(s) they feel the target of the harassment was singled out, including their gender, orientation, spoken language and whether or not they were wearing a mask.
So far, the map has been populated with incidents of racism publicly reported on in the media, including MP Derek Sloan’s remarks about Dr. Theresa Tam and an assault on a young Indigenous woman, motivated by anti-Asian racism, in Vancouver.
To view the map or submit an incident visit covidracism.ca.
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