SF State professor who teaches history made it as Stop AAPI Hate co-founder

Russell Jeung is used to teaching history. He’s spent the last 22 years as an Asian American studies professor at San Francisco State.

But over the past four years, he hasn’t just taught history — he has become a part of it.

Jeung is one of the founders of Stop AAPI Hate , one of the catalysts for the groundswell of activism after the nationwide rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans amid the COVID-19 pandemic and xenophobic rhetoric from politicians like former President Donald Trump .

Jeung’s activism garnered him nationwide accolades, highlighted by him, along with his two coalition co-founders — Cynthia Choi and Manjusha Kulkarni — being selected to Time Magazine’s list of 100 most influential people in 2021, where their names appeared with the likes of Billie Eilish, Lil Nas X and President Joe Biden.

Jeung, who last year left Stop AAPI Hate to return to teaching full time, said he has subsequently seen the movement grow and mature — for better or worse — as it charts its path without him.

“My hope for the Asian American community, as we deal with the same issues that others deal with, is that we could work in unity, even amongst our diverse approaches, towards racial justice,” Jeung told The Examiner.

How Russell Jeung learned to fight Asian American hate

Jeung, who was born and raised in the Richmond district and parents met at SF State, traced his interest in social causes to an Asian American studies course he took at Lowell High School in the early 1980s.

“That changed me,” he said. “I learned the issues that people faced in Chinatown and in the Tenderloin. My family would go to Chinatown a lot. I worked in a restaurant there and my dad worked in the Tenderloin. So seeing the conditions that immigrants and refugees faced made me recognize a lot of the contradictions in society, and I just felt the desire to change things.”

Jeung said he faced those “contradictions” as a high-school intern at the Pacific Stock Exchange. He observed that all the brokers were white men, while the cleaning staff were almost exclusively people of color.

“I just thought that stark labor segregation was so evident, even as a high schooler,” he said.

Jeung, a longtime community activist in addition to his work as an educator, said he felt a responsibility to be a leader for the Asian American community in 2020 amid an uptick in racist incidents against Asian Americans.

That March, Jeung, Choi — the executive director of the San Francisco-based Chinese for Affirmative Action — and Kulkarni — executive director of the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council — established the Stop AAPI Hate website to keep a database of the growing number of racist incidents because the state tracked only hate crimes, not all reported hate acts.

Within a week, the organization said it received 673 reports of verbal and physical attacks and other forms of harassment. By the end of the year, a total of 2,800 incidents were reported.

In March 2021 — the same month that 84-year-old Thai American Vicha Ratanapakdee was attacked and killed in San Francisco — the site received 2,800 reports, as many as it did in all of the previous year.

The group said it has received a total of more than 11,400 reports of hate acts against Asian Americans in its four years of existence.

“This moment was unprecedented in the sense that our experiences and perspectives were, for the first time, catapulted into mainstream conversations and put front and center on the national stage,” Kulkarni said.

The nonprofit’s name “Stop AAPI Hate” soon became a rallying cry and viral hashtag for the community.

“That’s a powerful motivating force: anger, fear for family and a desire to make things right. And so I think that the deaths of elders in the Bay Area, the Atlanta spa shootings early really both traumatized the community, but also roused them to the larger movement,” Jeung said.

Before the pandemic, Jeung said his mother used to ride Muni and walk everywhere in The City while she was in her 90s. But in 2020, when Jeung asked her about the increase in racist attacks, she told him, “Yeah, I guess I can only walk on Clement Street now.”

“That really saddened me because she was effectively facing de facto segregation,” he said. “Because of the violence she was being contained within a few blocks. Before, she had that freedom of movement, but the racism really isolated her.”

Where Stop AAPI Hate stands today

Coverage of the movement and hate crimes have declined in recent years, in San Francisco and across the country. Anti-Asian hate crimes decreased by 33% from 2021 to 2022, according to data released late last year by the FBI. In San Francisco, there were 88 hate crimes based on race investigated in 2021. That number dropped to 15 in 2022, rising to 23 last year.

But while hate crimes — which most advocates say usually are undercounted and don’t represent all reported incidents of hate — have decreased, polling shows that fears in Asian American communities remain heightened.

The Asian American Foundation found in a 2023 survey that half of Asian Americans said they don’t feel safe in the country, while almost 80% said they don’t fully feel they belong or are accepted.

The {span}Social Tracking of Asian Americans in the U.S.{/span} Index earlier this year found that 61% of Asian Americans said they felt hate towards them has increased in the past year, and 41% said they thought they were likely to be the victim of a physical attack in the next five years.

Asian American elders and their doctors told UCSF researchers that they were spending more time at home less time going outside, forgoing activities like exercise and seeing loved ones, because of fears for their safety.

A bilingual survey of Asian American voters released this year by the research center AAPI Data found that 79% of respondents said they wouldn’t vote for a candidate who disagreed with them on racism or discrimination, the most of any response option.

“About a decade ago, there used to be all this talk about whether Asian Americans are white-adjacent or honorary whites … and the pandemic and the hate crimes and hate incidents put an end to that kind of speculation,” AAPI Data founder Karthick Ramakrishnan said, who also noted that hate incidents against all ethnic groups, not just Asian Americans, increased after the pandemic as well.

Jeung’s own organization reported that one-fifth of Asian American reported being called racist slurs at least once in 2020. In 2023, that number grew to one-third of Asian Americans nationwide.

“The Stop AAPI Hate coalition is not a moment — we are part of a larger, continual movement that existed well before the pandemic and is still ongoing today. We are here to stay,” Kulkarni said.

Progress isn’t always linear

As part of his research at SF State, Jeung has studied historical social movements and seen the typical ebbs and flows they experience as they evolve. What starts as a movement with a singularly common goal, he said, grows into an entity with differing — and sometimes opposing — ideas on how to accomplish that objective.

Now, Jeung said he has watched those same trends he’s studied for years manifest in his own movement.

Jeung said some leaders are using Stop AAPI Hate to “mobilize people around fear and to pursue policies that aren’t really effective,”

“It’s saddening. I acknowledge how people could use the data in however ways they wanted. And I’m sad at how they used it for their own particular political agendas and policies,” he said.

He said politicians have mistakenly painted the Stop AAPI Hate movement’s primary motivations as centering on crime and public safety. Jeung argued that policies grappling with those issues do little to address the overlying disease, which is systemic racism.

“A lot of public safety efforts are Band-Aids where you try to arrest people after the crime has already been committed,” he said. “If you understand the source of the problems, then you could tackle the roots so that it doesn’t prevent it before it occurs in the first place … So for me, preventative models are just better public policy.”

Still, Jeung said the diversity of opinion of people involved in the movement is healthy. It shows the movement and community is growing.

But his objective for the movement advancing forward is for all those voices to become unified.

“That’s the greater maturity,” he said. “The evolution process we’ve seen in a lot of movements is the diverse approaches and the multiple leadership. But what would be an even greater maturation of the movement is if we can develop common agendas.”