Andrew Yang addresses recent hate crimes in Atlanta | NAN event with Rev. Al Sharpton

Thank you to Reverend Sharpton and the National Action Network for bringing us together today. It's been a heartbreaking and devastating time in the Asian American community. Some of you know I spent weeks campaigning in Atlanta in Georgia for Reverend Warnock and John Ossoff. I met so many people in the Asian American community in Atlanta. They're such wonderful parents and brothers and sisters who just wanted a decent life for themselves and their children. And seeing these eight people lose their lives, six of them Asian women who their families will never see again, it's heartbreaking. I've been Asian all my life and I remember vividly growing up with this constant sense of invisibility, mockery, disdain, a sense that you cannot be American if you have an Asian face. But this has metastasized into something new and deadly and virulent and hateful. It's infuriating when the authorities question a 21 year old madman as to his motivations when we can see clear as day that if you go into an Asian business in an Asian community, you know exactly who you will find behind those doors and in this case the people whose lives you will end. We're here to talk about solidarity and I'm so grateful to Reverend Sharpton because the black community has suffered from something that I believe that many Asians are experiencing for the first time again as the sense of our place in America has always been questioned but now it is something different. It is dehumanization. I believe that this young man did not see his victims as human beings. I believe that the person who punched the Chinese restaurant worker for no other reason than his race, the person who shoved the middle-aged Asian woman to the ground brutally and flushing, disfiguring her, the person who poured acid on the face of the elderly Asian woman in downtown Manhattan. I don't believe that they saw their victims as human beings and this process that Reverend Sharpton and National Action Network have been working on for decades is what we need more than ever is a process of humanity. It's a process of seeing that Asian Americans are human beings. Asian Americans are just as American as anyone else and we have to start in our own lives. There are many things that our government should be doing differently. We should be categorizing these incidents as hate crimes which we clearly know that they are. We should be fully funding the Asian Hate Crimes Task Force right here in New York. This is not something that volunteers can address. We need to build bonds of connection and trust with the Asian American community because as terrible as the statistics are, they understate the magnitude of the problem. There are dozens, hundreds of incidents that we have never never heard from the victims on and I know this because I've talked to some of those victims but the biggest thing we can do is really in our own lives to humanize each other and Jumaane Williams is here today. I'm going to take a page from his book which is just to try and greet someone in your own life that you would not greet otherwise. If you can do that then they will see you as human. You will see them as human and in that way we can rebuild our community and try to put these incidents, put these incidents behind us instead of in front of us. Thank you Reverend Sharpton. Thank you National Action Network and thank you my fellow candidates. Appreciate it. Thank you Mr. Yang.