For my found poem I chose to focus on the rise of hate crimes against Asian Americans. Since the start of the COVID-19 Pandemic there has been a record high of 2,800 hate crime incidents against Asian Americans since December 2019. In 2019, Federal hate crime statistics showed that hate crimes involving Asian Americans were at their highest level in over a decade. I decided to focus my poem on this topic because I have seen videos and articles on social media of some of the attacks and the brutality that was involved in some of them. The attacks I have seen have made me angry and it makes me upset to see helpless elderly Asian people be attacked for no apparent reason. These violent attacks are a crisis in our country, and something needs to be done to stop them from rising.
I chose to begin my poem by highlighting the surge of attacks happening against Asian Americans.As I was reading the article, I found many ways Asian Americans have said they were attacked and put those ways in a descending order, so it catches the readers eyes. I also put 4 reported attacks that were in the article to really show that Asian Americans are going through a crisis and are fearing that they will be the next victim of a violent attack. Throughout the poem I also bolded and capitalized many words I thought were important and should be emphasized to show the reality of what’s happening in our country involving Asian Americans. I thought by ending with a quote from a victim of one of these hate crimes would bring out an emotional response from the reader.I was shocked while working on my poem, especially when I was reading about certain cases where Asian Americans are attacked at random and realizing this is happening to people of such old age who are doing nothing wrong. I realized that creating a “found poem” is much more time consuming than I thought. Now I understand why it took so long for Philip to write Zong!.
Hi Justin, I like how you structured your found poem! It is very creative. I definitely think the way you wrote your found poem is a great way to bring awareness to the horrible things that have been happening to people who identify as Asian. It’s very sad and disgusting how ignorant people can be. No one deserves to be treated the way people who identify as Asian are. It’s so unfair the fact that they’re getting blamed for something that isn’t their fault. It bothers me every time I see a new story about a hate crime against Asians. We need change! We need to do better!