Following the shooting in Atlanta earlier in the week that left eight people need after a gunman entered three separate massage parlors and predominantly shot Asian women, actress Olivia Munn has been doing her part to raise the alarm that this event was not an isolated incident and is part of a larger problem of increased anti-Asian violence. During an interview on Thursday morning, Munn explained how the coronavirus pandemic has been a catalyst for racial violence against Asian-Americans for over a year now, and as the shooting in Atlanta has shown, the situation is not improving. Via TODAY:
I think the thing that we need everyone to know is that the pandemic was weaponized against Asian Americans and we have a target on our backs. And it feels like it’s open season on us. And we need help and we need people to care about what is happening to us. You look at what happened in Atlanta. This doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
Munn’s statement echoes her previous appearance on MSNBC where she ramped up her message that the Asian community desperately needs their fellow Americans to do something to stop the violence. “We are living in a country that is attacking us simply for being us. And we really don’t know what we have to do to get help,” Munn told Nicole Wallace. “We need more people to care about us.”
“Right now there is a mental health crisis with Asian Americans. We are being targeted, we are living in a country that is attacking us simply just for being us.”@Oliviamunn speaks with @NicolleDWallace on @MSNBC about the rise in Asian-American hate crimes across the U.S. pic.twitter.com/dVJm1xOUgL
— MSNBC Public Relations (@MSNBCPR) March 17, 2021
The actress has also been vocal on social media following the Atlanta shooting:
https://www.instagram.com/p/CMiilsRgaTB/
While it would seem that the shooting was rooted in anti-Asian violence, Munn has every reason to be frustrated with how the country is responding to the deadly event. The Atlanta sheriff’s department has been hesitant to describe the shooting as a hate crime and even went so far as to say the shooter had a “bad day,” which did prompt considerable backlash. That backlash only intensified as it was later revealed that the spokesman who downplayed the shooting had posting images on Facebook that called the pandemic the “China virus,” which is the same rhetoric that former president Donald Trump has continued to used since the coronavirus arrived in America last March. According to the New York Times, there have been nearly 3,800 hate incidents against Asian Americans since that time.