People have suffered discrimination while losing their livelihoods. Let's put ourselves in the eyes and in the shoes of people who worked all their life to create something for their families, created these beautiful small businesses all over New York City, then suffered discrimination and then saw their business fall away because of fears that people had, fears stoked by misunderstanding and bias that caused everyday New Yorkers not to want to go to a Chinese restaurant. I remember going to Chinese restaurants in Chinatown and in Flushing, Queens, to make the point that there was no bias that should be accepted or perceived from one community to another, and what I heard last night was about the pain of a community that has lost his livelihood, not when most others did, but a month earlier, two months earlier than so many other small businesses in this city.
We have a lot to do. The city has done a lot to overcome bias and discrimination. We will overcome this. We need to embrace and uplift our Asian American brothers and sisters in this fight to bring back our city, but we also need to specially focus on the economic reality of those communities and make sure those small businesses come back and that we all go and make an extra effort to patronize them and help them back on their feet, because in many ways they suffered long before everybody else in this crisis.
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