“The indignity of being Asian in this country has been underreported,” the poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong writes in Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. Hong, 44, is the daughter of Korean immigrants and was raised in Los Angeles. Although she has written about race in her poetry, Minor Feelings is her first nonfiction book, a blend of memoir and cultural criticism. Her essays explore the painful and often invisible racial traumas that Asian Americans experience—traumas that have become impossible to ignore over the past year, as reports of anti-Asian racism and violence have increased.

Yesterday, a gunman killed eight people, six of whom were Asian women, at massage parlors in the Atlanta area. Hong told me by email that she was grateful to see an outpouring of sympathy from people outside the Asian American community, but also expressed the concern that police and commentators would downplay the significance of the event. “I’m already seeing media trying to whitewash this incident,” she wrote, “saying it’s not racially motivated, taking words of the police over the stories of these women.”

Earlier this year, several attacks on elderly Asians in the San Francisco Bay Area were captured on videos that went viral.  One victim, 84-year-old Vicha Ratanapakdee, died from his injuries. While authorities in many cases have not determined—or are reluctant to say—whether these attacks are racially motivated, the overall pattern of violence is stark. Since March 2020, about 3,800 racist incidents against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have been reported to the group Stop AAPI Hate. Last Thursday, President Joe Biden condemned “vicious hate crimes against Asian Americans, who have been attacked, harassed, blamed, and scapegoated”—marking a contrast with his predecessor, who referred to the COVID-19 pandemic as “the Chinese virus” and “kung flu.”

Hong’s work captures the peculiar spot that Asian Americans occupy in America’s racial hierarchy. The political scientist Claire Jean Kim has described this dynamic as “racial triangulation”: Neither Black nor white, Asians are simultaneously stereotyped as model minorities and perpetual foreigners, and thus used as a wedge between Black and white people. But with overt attacks apparently on the rise across the country, Americans of Asian descent are demanding attention to the racism they face.

I spoke with Hong in detail last week, before the Atlanta-area shootings. We discussed why reports of violence and hate have galvanized so many Asian Americans, across ethnicities, in the past year. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Morgan Ome: Racism toward Asian Americans is not new. But recently, it feels as though more Asian Americans have been speaking up and protesting. Why?

Cathy Park Hong: A few years ago, David Dao, a Vietnamese doctor, was assaulted and dragged from a United Airlines flight. I remember the media did not talk about his identity. The story was just about him being a middle-class man who was dragged out of the airplane. Whereas when I saw that, I thought, I bet he wouldn’t have been treated that way if he were white. But no one was saying that. A lot has changed between then and now. It’s hard to say exactly what the reasons are. Part of it is because of Donald Trump. There has been a real retrenchment of identities, and people have been much more upfront in talking about race and structural racial inequities in this country. And that has resulted in a lot of Asian Americans speaking up.

When Black Lives Matter [gained force] in 2014—after Ferguson—I saw an increase in Asian American organizing and allyship. And last summer, people really internalized the Black Lives Matter protests and the conversation about social justice. Now, because of the anti-Asian racism that’s been happening, Asian Americans have been more moved to vocalize and organize—from writing commentaries in The New York Times to organizing groups to escort the elderly in Oakland’s Chinatown.