Navigating Anti-Asian Racism in Europe. (An interview with Jiye Seong)

Jiye Seong is a strategy advisor at the Human Rights Foundation based in The Hague, Netherlands. Acutely aware of an increase in racism directed at Asians and Europeans of Asian descent since the beginning of the Covid Pandemic, Jiye co-founded Asian Voices Europe, a NGO established with the goal of combating anti-Asian racism in Europe. Despite depending entirely on volunteers, a lack of funding, and a series of bureaucratic roadblocks, Asian Voices Europe has succeeded in collecting data on racist incidents in Germany and the Netherlands, and plans to publish a guidebook on confronting and reporting racist incidents this summer. The group has also been mentioned in reports by Marie Claire, Buzzfeed and VICE World News.

Still, the topic of anti-Asian racism remains largely untouched by European news and media, while for many European residents of Asian descent it is part of daily life.

I met Jiye Seong via video call to discuss her experience in the Netherlands as well as the work she has done with Asian Voices Europe:

Hello Jiye Seong, President of Asian Voices Europe.

Yes, and we always say, ‘One of the co-founders,’ because we are a democratic organization.

To set up this issue, can you talk about your own experiences with racism in Europe?

I arrived in Europe in 2014, and I first went to study in France and then Belgium and then the Netherlands. I started my masters degree in 2016. Actually when I came to the Netherlands, that was when I really started experiencing racist incidents. I was surprised because this wasn’t how I remember the Netherlands from when I visited as a child. Probably the difference is that when I visited as a child I was with my step-father who is Dutch, and who is white. When I came later I was by myself.

When I talked about it with other students they were mostly Europeans and they didn’t really understand. I didn’t know any other Asians, so I just wrote about it. But [my anti-racism activism work] really started in May 2020 when I moved to The Hague, after the first time where I was almost attacked physically.

I was on my bike at night and coming back from the gym or something, and then two people on a scooter tried to hit me and they said, “Shi-nase” which means Chinese. That was really at the beginning of the CoronaVirus pandemic arriving in Europe. I thought this is probably not just my experience happening right now, because that morning I read an article about a Chinese Dutch student who was attacked. She was in her school’s dormitory where people were singing a “corona song” (which mocks Chinese people and was played on the radio at the time). When she asked the group to stop singing the song, they attacked her. So between these people who tried to hit me and reading the article that morning, it really clicked that this must be happening on a bigger level.

So I started a survey on a Korean Expats Facebook group, and I asked if people also experienced racism during the pandemic since it originated from Asia. We got 300+ responses from 180 people in 2–3 weeks. That’s when I realized it’s a much bigger problem than it seems. A lot of times when we experience those things individually we just think, ‘I just had a bad day,’ or ‘I just met a weird person,’ but with data we could see that’s not true.

People also talked about experiences not just during the pandemic but also from before. So we wanted to see what we could do to help people when they experience racism, because most people don’t come prepared when they come to Europe to think, ‘Hey I’m gonna deal with racism.’

Besides your own poll, is their data specifically from Europe that accurately demonstrates the scope of this issue?

That’s another issue that we face. For example on the European Union level, and also on the level of individual member states, there is no data or survey on racism experienced by Asians because in the censuses or surveys for racism or anti-discrimination there is no separate category for Asians.

For example, there is a group for Islamophobia, there is a group for anti-Roma sentiments, there is a group for anti-black sentiments, but then Asians probably fall under the general xenophobia group because we’re not identified as a separate group yet.

In Germany in particular, I’ve heard that there is not a lot of accessible data around racial issues because recording peoples’ racial information has largely been avoided since WWII. Is there a precedent for collecting data to illustrate racism or discrimination in this way?

Yes, there is. A useful initiative that we’ve referenced is called Afrozensus. It’s actually a German project launched by different German organizations that want to report the experiences of black Europeans. So that’s what we thought we could do in the future if we gain bigger momentum and more funding.

But for now even our survey is very limited because it’s based in the Netherlands and Germany — just those two countries.

There is another organization in Edinburgh and in London which is trying to collect this data for UK Asians.

Another part of your work has been petitioning the Dutch government? Do you think that on that level this issue is being taken seriously?

The first petition was not done by us [Asian Voices Europe], it was done in February to March by a few other Asians living in the Netherlands and it got almost 60,000 signatures but it was rejected by the Dutch government on the grounds that it wasn’t urgent enough.

So we [Asian Voices Europe] looked into this issue — one problem is there are very few politicians with Asian heritage in Europe. The same is true of the Netherlands and Germany, and in the European Union parliament I don’t think there is one currently. There was one before, I believe, in 2010 or something. So there is a lack of representation for Asian voices.

Do you feel, or is there evidence to show that the situation is comparatively better in either Germany or the Netherlands?

It’s hard to gauge. We rely on information from our communities and they tend to focus on bigger cities. I do think that in general we’ve had conversations that Germans tend to be less direct about discrimination because of their history with racism. But it hasn’t always been the case. So yeah, I can’t really say.

Who do you feel supported by?

As an organization we did receive a lot of support from different government agencies. We started a petition asking the European Union and the German government to start a hotline for reporting anti-Asian hate crimes, and after three days we got a response from the German Federal Anti-discrimination Agency. We were very surprised because usually government agencies aren’t the first to reply, and they were actually very helpful. They told us they don’t have the executive power to launch the project, but they put us in contact with different organizations. Ultimately, we found out it was a very bureaucratic process to go through. One that we would not be able to do as a small organization of volunteers.

But they also provided some legal advice to us about how to deal with racism in Germany.

What kind of advice did they give you?

So in April 2020 there was an incident in Berlin where a Korean couple was sitting in the subway and they were racially attacked and they called the attackers racist. They said, ‘You are racist,’ and this couple got sued for defamation.

So we asked the anti-discrimination agency if this had legal ground. And they responded to a few questions like this. They said, for example, in Germany you can’t say, ‘You are racist.’ You have to say, ‘You are behaving in a racist way.’ Otherwise they could sue you.

After this incident we launched a guidebook project — writing a legal guideline about how you can best respond to racism — because we want people to respond to racism without getting sued. We are being helped by pro-bono lawyers in the Netherlands who are offering legal counsel on the Dutch side of things.

Do you feel that on an individual level citizens are generally sympathetic to this cause?

Well I’m in my own bubble of university-educated, liberal, European friends, so people have been very supportive and I know some friends have donated money to our organization, and shared information about our causes. I work for two non-profits so they also support my work.

But I can talk about an experience where I realized that I really need to engage with Europeans about this:

I have a friend who is really from a remote, tiny town in the Netherlands — we started studying together in Masterig and I told them, ‘I was cycling to work and a guy in a truck yelled ching-chong-chun at me.’ I said this often enough because I just shared a lot of these experiences, and I could see that a lot of my classmates didn’t believe me. Not because they thought I was lying — but because they’d never seen this before. I was one of only two Asians in the whole group.

Then one day I was walking with that friend and he was saying, ‘Oh I heard this morning someone yelled some racist words at you,’ and then in that moment a guy passed us on a bike and yelled, ‘Chinatown,’ at me. I could see that my friend’s face changed — like oh, now I see that this really happens, that people are really this rude to you. Since then he has become more interested in reading about discrimination that happens in the Netherlands. I think people just need to hear about what’s happening.

Does Asian Voices Europe have an end goal?

Our end goal is to end racism…[laughs]. So it might take a while.

But our shorter term goals, if we are able to find funding, is to host workshops for newly arriving Asians — maybe students or younger expats and just tell them if you experience discrimnation in any form this is how you can react. This would include street harassment, but also at the workplace or at schools.

We’ve heard incidents of children being sung the ‘Hanky-panky Shanghai’ song which is this racist Dutch song which ends with kids splitting their eyes. We want to let people know that you have the right to report those things, to file an official complaint, or to talk to the student or to your teammates or whoever it is. And kind of teach them a very effective way that works, because there are certain ways [of speaking] that make a European audience more susceptible to listen than others, which is generally to be less emotional.

How inclusive is this movement? Have you considered working with West Asian groups for instance?

Yeah we are slowly expanding our reach. So we started out working mostly with Koreans, and now we’ve reached out more to other East Asian communities — so Japan, Taiwan, Mongolia, Tibet and also China. Now we have more Southeast Asian members, so we are also expanding to that group and recently we were discussing in a team group that West Asia is also Asia so maybe we should extend to this group.

When people say Asia in Europe they mostly think of East Asia and maybe India. But they forget that Asia is a very big continent, so they don’t think about West Asia or even Southeast Asia that much. That’s something that we also want to change, but we also don’t want to overstep and say we speak for West Asians when we don’t currently have West Asians in the group.

Finally, what is one thing that you think is important for readers to know?

I think it’s important for people to know that everybody and anybody can experience discrimination if they step out of their comfort zone, and that usually makes it easier for people to relate to other groups of people — if they’ve also been in a situation where they were treated unfairly.

For that we just need to talk to people who are different from us, or to travel. I would like to encourage people to meet people who are not like you.

[This interview has been edited for clarity.]