Yea so someone just came up to me and spat in my face on my morning walk. Thank god I’m vaccinated and had my mask on. How’s your day going? #StopAsianHate

Thank you so much all — I’m a little shaken but am OK. And let’s all watch out for each other. I left the area, near Marcus Garvey Park, very quickly, but I believe there was at least one bystander who saw the incident unfold. My experience today has convinced me to..

..finally get bystander intervention training so I can safely help others should I come across something like this happening to them.

An update, just in case it’s informational for anyone else out there. At the advice of some colleagues who said it was important for these incidents to be recorded in official statistics, I reported what happened. You can’t do this by phone, so two police officers came to my door

..who wrote up a police report. But bc I couldn’t make out exactly what the guy said to me — he hissed something, but it was unintelligible — it’s not being recorded as any sort of hate incident. And who knows, maybe this guy was just having a bad day.

But please also remember that these hate statistics are likely a gross undercount.