#StopAsianHate

March 18, 2021

      Months of escalating and unanswered attacks on Asian Americans culminated in the horrific targeted massacre of eight people on Tuesday night.  Six of the 8 people murdered were Asian women, who were gunned down in three separate locations in the greater Atlanta metro area.  The 21 year old gunman sought to deflect from the obvious racism by claiming that he had a “sex addiction,” and was seeking to eliminate the source of his temptation.  To add insult to injury, Captain Jay Baker of the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office downplayed the heinous crime by saying that the suspect “had a bad day” and “this is what he did,” (Source:  “Suspect, 21, charged in Atlanta slayings,” by Tim Craig, Sarah Pulliam Bailey, Paulina Firozi and Griff Witte, The Washington Post, 3/17/21).  Given that characterization, it was hardly surprising to learn that Captain Baker had shared racist anti-Asian posts on Facebook.  In the wake of the killings, even those we consider liberal or progressive murmured that they didn’t know the motive, giving credence to the fig leaf of Long’s “sex addiction” excuse, as if they have never heard of intersectionality.

     Asian women, like all women of color, have long been subjected to racialized sexual violence.  In the white supremacist hierarchy, white womanhood exists to be prized and possessed and women of color exist to be the repository of men’s fetishes and fantasies. Violence against women of color is barely considered a crime, as evidenced by the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women, or the rash of murders of Black and Latinx trans women.  

     Asian women have been fetishized and stereotyped as submissive and willing sex workers, (Source:  “Among Asian Americans, A somber sentiment:  We knew this was coming,” by Silvia Foster-Frau, Marian Liu, Hannah Knowles and Meryl Kornfield, The Washington Post, 3/17/21).  The origins of this pernicious racialized misogyny go back more than a century to the passage of The Page Act in 1875, which predated the Chinese Exclusion Act by 7 years. The Page Act, which prohibited the immigration of women being brought into this country for immoral purposes, was used to completely prevent Japanese and Chinese women from immigrating to the United States, on the presumption that they were all prostitutes.  The law was nothing less than the codification of the hypersexualization of Asian women, who were deemed a “danger to white males.”  

      As the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the Japanese Internment during World War II and the recent explosion of violence make painfully clear, Asian Americans have been cast in the role of perpetual foreigner, no matter how deep their roots in this country go.  Yet the racism and discrimination that they face has been erased and replaced with the “model minority” myth, a fiction foisted on a community by forces of the status quo in order to blunt calls for equality by Black and Brown people, (Source:  “Why we must talk about the Asian American story too,” by Brando Simeo Starkey, theundefeated.com, 11/3/16).

     White supremacy in this country takes many forms, and is hardly limited to anti-Black racism.  So, when you talk about the murders in Atlanta, don’t you dare say that you don’t know the motive.  A cursory look at history tells you what it is.

#StopAAPIHate