Isolated and overburdened, Asian American educators struggle: media

NEW YORK - According to recent data from Stop AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) Hate, one in five Asian Americans experienced a hate incident in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, reported news portal Edsurge early this week.

EdSurge Research has spent the last year gathering stories from Asian American K-12 educators working during a time when violence against Asian Americans was at an all-time high.

"By and large, the 80 Asian American K-12 educators we interviewed cited these incidents, and the silence of their colleagues and school leaders, as deeply frustrating and traumatizing for them," said the report.

"For many, it brought up long-repressed experiences with racism," it noted. "They had to take on the emotional labor of explaining how microaggressions, insensitive comments and non-responses were racist."

They had to decide whether it was worth the risk to their jobs and their mental energy to talk about racism in the news, to call out interpersonal racism or to suppress their emotions for the sake of everyone else, it said.

"Finally, many teachers took on programming, curriculum development and professional development by themselves. This was an additional tax to their mental health," it added.