Indiana University students protested against anti-Asian hate on March 24, 2021. | Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images

The events of the last year have been a breaking point for many Asian Americans.

For a long time, anti-Asian racism has been overlooked — but this past year, a wave of hate incidents and a devastating series of shootings in Georgia have made it much tougher to ignore.

“There’s a tendency to not believe that violence against Asian-Americans is real,” Angela Hsu, a lawyer based in Atlanta, recently told the New York Times. “It’s almost like you need something really, really jarring to make people believe that there is discrimination against Asian-Americans.”

That idea — that such severe pain needs to happen before anyone cares — is awful in itself, and it has been underscored by the way Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders