AURORA | Aurora City Council members may approve a resolution condemning hate crimes and anti-Asian sentiments, which have increased amid the COIVD-19 pandemic, at Monday’s meeting.
Councilwoman Crystal Murillo sponsored the resolution, which wouldn’t create law, but rather send a unified message from the elected body to the community.
“We have been hearing more and more reports from our friends and community members about harassment that they’re getting while they’re out in public,” Harry Budisidharta, executive director of the Asian Pacific Development Center in Aurora, told the Sentinel last month. “It ranges from spitting, to shoving, to yelling of racial slurs, to people backing away and looking visibly afraid.”
Murillo’s resolution highlights the use of anti-Asian terminology tied to the coronavirus because it originated in the Wuhan region of China.
“Chinese Virus,” “Wuhan Virus” and “Kung-flu” have “perpetuated anti-Asian stigma,” the resolution says.
Most notably, President Donald Trump has referred to COVID-19 as “the Chinese Virus” during news briefings. His administration has sought to lay blame for the virus pandemic on China. His own administration has issued conflicting reports on the possibility that the virus was generated in a Wuhan lab and inadvertently released. U.S. intelligence officials have repeatedly said publicly there is no evidence that occurred, according to numerous reports by the Associated Press and other credible news media. The Trump Administration story has now evolved to focus on whether the Chinese government hid the severity of the virus so to hoard medical supplies.
In mid-March he said that he doesn’t think calling COVID-19 the “Chinese virus” — or the “kung-flu,” as one administration official reportedly called it — puts Asian Americans at risk of retaliation despite growing reports they are facing virus-related discrimination.
Asked why he keeps calling the coronavirus the “Chinese virus” when scientists say the disease doesn’t respect borders and is not caused by ethnicity, Trump told reporters at the White House that he doesn’t consider it a racist remark.
“It’s not racist at all,” Trump said, adding that he calls it the “Chinese virus” because he wants to be accurate. He indicated his terminology was a warranted pushback to Chinese officials who have been suggesting the U.S. military might have introduced the virus to Wuhan, the Chinese city where it was first reported in late 2019.
There have been nearly 68,000 deaths in the U.S. linked to the virus. Colorado has marked 842 COVID-19-related deaths as of Monday morning. There have been 202 virus-related deaths in the Aurora area, according to Tri-County Health.
As of April 14, Aurora police hadn’t received any documented reports of bias-motivated hate crimes against Asians or Asian-Americans.
There was one documented report Feb. 16 in Denver when an Asian man told officers another man yelled slurs at him through his car window. It was the first documented instance of a hate crime against a person who identified as Asian in the state’s capital city in more than a year, according to a spokesman for the Denver Police Department.
— Quincy Snowdon and the Associated Press contributed to this report