Korean American Republican congresswomen Young Kim and Michelle Park Steel have revoked their endorsements of Sery Kim, a Texas GOP congressional candidate who stirred up controversy over her comment about Chinese immigrants.
The move came as a movement in the U.S. to counter anti-Asian hate has been picking up momentum The movement to support members of the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community follows a series of racially based crimes, especially last month’s shootings at three spas in Atlanta that killed eight people, including four women of Korean descent.
Multiple U.S. media outlets reported that Young Kim and Steel issued a joint statement to say they cannot continue to support Sery Kim, who is running to represent Texas’ sixth Congressional District.
“As the first Korean American Republican women to serve in Congress, we want to empower and lift up fellow members of the AAPI community who want to serve their communities,” the lawmakers said in the statement CNN reported on Saturday. “We talked with Sery Kim yesterday concerning her hurtful and untrue comments about Chinese immigrants, and made clear that her comments were unacceptable.”
Sery Kim is currently mired in controversy after she answered a question about U.S. immigration during a forum on Wednesday. “I don’t want them here at all,” she said, referring to Chinese immigrants.
“They steal our intellectual property, give us the coronavirus, and they don’t hold themselves accountable,” she said. “And quite frankly, I can say that because I’m Korean.” The candidate also lashed out at China, claiming that the coronavirus was created at a lab in Wuhan, according to a YouTube video recording of the event uploaded by Kim’s election camp.
Sery Kim is a Korean American who served as an assistant administrator for the Small Business Administration under former President Donald Trump.
After the congresswomen revoked their endorsement, Sery Kim said her comments were directed at the Communist Party of China, not at Chinese Americans, and that she stands by her remarks at the forum, according to CNN.
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| Congresswomen Young Kim, left, and Michelle Park Steel |
“She has not publicly shown remorse, and her words were contrary to what we stand for,” the congresswoman said in the statement. “We cannot in good conscience continue to support her candidacy. We will continue to speak out in support of our AAPI community.”
The issue of anti-Asian hate and efforts to counter that are on rising in the U.S., as some attribute the COVID-19 pandemic to China after the disease was first reported in the city of Wuhan, with this sentiment in some cases resulting in violent physical attacks on Asian Americans.
It was reported that a Korean American-owned convenience store in Charlotte, North Carolina, was trashed on Tuesday by a man wielding a metal pole and shouting racial slurs. In Tacoma, Washington, a 15-year-old who is under arrest for assaulting a Korean American couple after his attack in November was caught on a cellphone video that was circulated on social media.
According to the Stop AAPI Hate center, it received reports of 3,795 hate incidents from March 19, 2020, to Feb. 28, 2021. Chinese were the largest group affected, with 42.2 percent reporting having experienced hate, followed by Koreans with 14.8 percent and Vietnamese with 8.5 percent.
A separate study by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University Santa Barbara showed that anti-Asian hate crimes jumped 149 percent from 2019 to 2020 in 16 of the largest U.S. cities, while hate crimes overall dropped by 7 percent.
