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On Tuesday evening, March 16, 2021, a white gunman in Atlanta, Georgia,
killed eight people—six of whom were women of Asian descent
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—at three separate massage businesses in Atlanta. We mourn the lives
lost to this racist and gender-based violence, including Delaina Ashley
Yaun, Xiaoje Yan, Daoyou Feng, and Paul Andre Michels. Their lives had
meaning.
We condemn police statements regarding the murderer as simply having had
"a bad day," and suggestions that his "sex addiction" meant the
shootings had nothing to do with race. Such statements imply that a
racist killer is worthy of far more sympathy than the Asian women and
others who were killed. It is dehumanizing and disrespectful. We still
do not even know all of the victim's names.
These murders are a part of a disturbing trend of increasing violence
against people of Asian descent across the country. According to Stop
AAPI Hate
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, there have been almost 4,000 incidents of violence reported in the
past year. Sixty-eight percent of those reports were from Asian women
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. We know that these incidents are only a fraction of occurrences, as
many hate crimes go unreported.
We vehemently condemn anti-Asian violence and racist violence in all of
its forms. We note that this violence was intentional and
intersectional—racialized, gendered, and directed primarily at working
class women. We recognize that the root causes of this violence are
white supremacy and patriarchy. We also condemn media coverage that has
increased tensions between communities of color, and that has further
marginalized Asian and Asian American women and femmes.
The inflection point in this wave of violence can be traced directly to
former President Donald Trump's explicit calls to violence against
Asians, through his comments on "the Chinese virus" and "the kung-flu."
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Some perpetrators of violence against Asians have explicitly cited
former President Trump's calls as provoking their own actions.
These incidents fall into a pattern of racist scapegoating and misogyny
that has been endemic in American history—from the anti-Asian riots and
lynchings of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the 1982 murder
of Vincent Chin, the 1989 schoolyard massacre of five Southeast Asian
American children in Stockton, California to the post 9/11 scapegoating
of Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, South Asian, and Sikh people to the
2012 mass shooting of 6 Sikh Americans in a Wisconsin temple to the
brutal ICE raids that daily tear apart the lives of migrant, immigrant,
and refugee families.
Such violence has relied upon criss-crossing narratives, including the
300-year old narrative of Asians as strange, sickly, exotic, and
carriers of contagious diseases
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, the narrative of Asian women as subservient and hypersexual objects
for white men to use as they please, and the narrative of Asian
Americans as unneeding and undeserving of support. This combination has
led to many forms of violence, including street harassment, sexual
assault, and state-sanctioned police and military violence.
This particular act of racialized and gendered violence in Atlanta also
has roots in U.S. imperialism across Asia. The tragic killing of
Jennifer Laude, a transwoman sex worker in the Philippines at the hands
of a US military serviceman, is one example that highlighted the
particular dangers faced by transwomen. In all too many cases, American
military personnel who have perpetrated sexual violence against Asian
women have been shielded against prosecution by the law.
Many Asian women—whether migrant, refugee, immigrant, or U.S. born—work
in unprotected, low-wage service industries like nail salons and spas.
The criminalization of the sex trade has left many cisgender women—but
particularly transgender women—who work in these industries facing
unfathomable violence, often at the hands of police and law enforcement.
Shaming women for their work is not the way to end individual and
state-sanctioned hate violence against Asians and Asian Americans. It
blames the most vulnerable for social and economic conditions created by
policies set at home and abroad.
We believe that more police, counterterrorism units, and vigilante
groups will not provide a solution to such violence, because this
violence is rooted in systemic and structural racism. We strongly
advocate community-based solutions to build alternatives to the kinds of
militarization and criminalization that oppress Black communities,
Indigenous communities, Latinx communities, Asian and Pacific Islander
communities, and all communities of color.
We believe that the best solution to ensure the end of anti-Asian hate
violence is to build multiracial solidarity, promote the dignity of work
and the health of communities, support the organizing work of Asians and
Pacific Islanders working to serve those most in need in collaboration
with multiracial communities nationally and globally, and ultimately to
dismantle white supremacy and patriarchy.
We acknowledge the deep tradition of cross-racial solidarity that has
built community-based solutions, and that such work continues now. In
particular, we want to lift up many of the organizations
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that have been tirelessly doing this important work.
The violence of this past week underscores the importance of our
continued efforts to achieve racial equity in this country. We firmly
stand in solidarity with our Asian communities in their time of need,
and send light and love to all those affected by this senseless tragedy.
The Race Forward Team
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