PHILIPPINE Senator and eight-division boxing champion Manny Pacquiao is daring those committing violence against the Asian American community to challenge him instead.
The 42-year-old people’s champ took to social media on Thursday, April 1, calling for an end to anti-Asian hate and racism by posting a photo of him in front of a collage of recent hate crime victims and suspects.
We have one color in our Blood! Stop discriminating. LOVE AND PEACE TO EVERYONE!! #StopAsianHate pic.twitter.com/RuLtXraCQQ
— Manny Pacquiao (@MannyPacquiao) April 1, 2021
The graphic, which was also translated in Tagalog, Chinese and Korean, bears the message to perpetrators: “Stop attacking Asians who can’t defend themselves! Fight me instead.”
“We have one color in our Blood! Stop discriminating. LOVE AND PEACE TO EVERYONE!!” he wrote in the accompanying tweet.
The Filipino victims included in the graphic are Jessica Dimalanta, a 19-year-old from the Bay Area who was shot in her right eye; Noel Quintana, a 61-year-old who was slashed from cheek to cheek on the New York subway; and Danny Yuchang, a 59-year-old travel agent who was punched during his lunch break in San Francisco.
It features a photo of Brandon Elliot, the suspect who attacked Vilma Kari, a Filipina on her way to church in New York on Monday, March 29. Elliot, a parolee who was previously convicted for killing his mother, was arrested two days after a video of the brutal attack went viral.
The collage also highlights Xiao Zhen Xie, a 75-year-old woman who was punched in San Francisco, but fought back by smacking her attacker with a wooden board. She plans to donate the nearly $1 million raised for her to organizations helping the community and combating hate.
Stop AAPI Hate, a national coalition that tracks anti-Asian American discrimination, reported that from March 19, 2020 to February 28, 2021, it has received 3,795 firsthand incidents of racism and discrimination from all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
Of that number, 503 incidents took place in the first two months of 2021 alone.
Just like 9/11. They hated Me Middle Eastern people. Muslims. Scapegoats. It started in China Covid19. Most of the frontlines are Filipino nurses medical staff. # Stop Asian hatred..