Harassment and attacks, some physical and violent, against Asian-Americans has been on the rise since covid. Trump has been blamed for inciting this by his use of terms like Chinese virus and Kung-flu. While that has clearly had an effect, the reality is deeper and darker; Trump's words were oxygen blown onto already smoldering embers.
To see why this is not about language and terms per-se but about the underlying racism that the words tapped int, consider the Chinese virus vs the British [covid] variant. If it was the simply language that was the cause of the rise in ethnically targeted violence, then one would expect to see a rise in violence against Brits; which of course there hasn't been. So it can't be the language but the interaction of the language with underlying attitudes. In other words racism.
As a footnote on language, it's also interesting that it's only some ethnic groups who we label as "Something-Americans", for example, Asian-Americans, Mexican-Americans, African-Americans. As a British ex-pat I'm not called a British-American even though I am a US citizen. It seems as though groups that have been and are still discriminated against have taken on this labeling heuristic to emphasize that they are actually American; those who have not suffered racial discrimination—Brits, Scandinavians, Germans (and isn't that interesting!) for example—have, luckily, no need to send that signal.
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