Activist Amanda Nguyen on the Rise of Attacks on Asian Americans

Welcome to March! This month, in honor of women’s history month, we are featuring conversations with women and non-binary leaders who are working to address issues in their communities. This week, we’re speaking with Amanda Nguyen.

Amanda is the CEO and founder of RISE, a millennial-driven social change incubator for citizen lawmaking. Because of her work passing legislation for sexual assault survivors, she was nominated for a 2019 Nobel Peace Prize. More recently, Amanda has been working to mobilize a nationwide response to the surging attacks on Asian Americans.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, Asian Americans across the country have reported being targeted in 3,000 hate incidents. According to NYPD data, anti-Asian American hate crimes are up 1900% in the last year. And just weeks ago,, an 84-year-old Thai American man was murdered in San Francisco, a 91-year-old man was shoved to the ground in Oakland’s Chinatown, a 64-year-old Vietnamese woman was assaulted in San Jose and a Filipino American man was slashed in the face on a subway in New York City. These assaults are happening during a pandemic where Asian Americans have disproportionately lost their jobs or had their businesses boycotted.

In response to the recent attacks and to the relative silence of mainstream media, Amanda posted a now-viral video on Instagram naming the attacks and calling for media attention and public action.

Amanda joins us to talk about this wave of violence and what she’s doing about it.