Before 2021, the most well-known incident of an anti-Asian hate crime was probably the killing of Vincent Chin in the 1980s.

More recently, on March 16, 2021, a man killed eight people at three massage businesses in the Atlanta area, seven of whom were Asian-American women: Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Yong Ae Yue, Delaina Ashley Yaun Gonzalez, Xiaojie Tan, and Daoyu Feng (the eighth victim was Paul Andre Michels).

On April 22, 2021, the U.S. Senate passed the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act. If it becomes law, this legislation does not increase penalties for hate crimes, as there already were federal criminal laws regarding certain hate crimes. The legislation instead increases the review and reporting of hate crimes.

In passing the law, the Senate cited the STOP AAPI Hate National Report, which described 3,795 incidents reported from March 2020 to February 2021. Most of the incidents were verbal harassment and shunning (the deliberate avoidance of Asian Americans). About 11 percent of the incidents involved physical assault and another 8.5 percent involved civil rights violations. Some of these might be considered hate crimes, but others might not be.

Most states have some type of hate-crime law, which generally increases penalties for crimes committed on the basis of race or another personal factor. As of early 2021, only three states do not have some type of hate-crime law: Arkansas, South Carolina, and Wyoming. The map below is by the U.S. Department of Justice (last checked April 2021).

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is the federal agency responsible for enforcing federal anti-discrimination laws in the workplace. The EEOC has reported that it received 1,225 charges by individuals alleging discrimination based on their Asian heritage in fiscal year 2013 and 1,213 such charges in fiscal year 2014 (I could not find statistics for other years online).