The Atlanta Shooting and the Dehumanizing of Asian Women

[DonViejo]

To live through this period as an Asian-American is to feel trapped in an American tragedy while being denied the legitimacy of being an American.

By Jiayang Fan

March 19, 2021

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Daily Comment
The Atlanta Shooting and the Dehumanizing of Asian Women
To live through this period as an Asian-American is to feel trapped in an American tragedy while being denied the legitimacy of being an American.

By Jiayang Fan

March 19, 2021

A memorial for victims of a killing spree in Atlanta, on Tuesday night, that took the lives of eight people, six of whom were women of Asian descent.Photograph by Megan Varner / Getty
On Tuesday night, while eating at a restaurant in Harlem with a friend—my first social dinner in months—I received a text: “Just holding you close in my heart tonight.” It was from a Taiwanese-American friend and New York State Assembly member, Yuh-Line Niou. The last time we texted was in the spring, to organize a virtual town hall addressing the repercussions of racism during the pandemic. When I received Yuh-Line’s message, I thought she was referring to an alarming uptick in anti-Asian crimes in recent days, and I wanted to tell her how strange I’d felt, hours earlier, when I’d requested that my friend drive from the southern tip of Manhattan, where he lived, all the way up to Harlem to meet me for dinner, rather than meeting each other midway. I’d texted him apologetically, explaining that I no longer felt safe travelling alone after dark. “The anti-Asian hate is real,” I wrote. My friend was gracious and accommodating, but in texting those words I’d felt anxious, and anxious about my anxiety: Was I surrendering to an ill-founded paranoia? I knew Yuh-Line would understand how I was feeling. What I would not know for hours was that her loving text was a response to the deadliest crime against Asians in the United States in recent memory: a killing spree in Atlanta that took the lives of eight people, six of whom were women of Asian descent.

Earlier that day, as I was weighing the risks of going out after dark to see my friend, a twenty-one-year-old gunman named Robert Aaron Long drove to a strip mall in the northern Atlanta suburbs and entered Young’s Asian Massage parlor, where he killed four people, two of them Asian women. After leaving the massage parlor, Long shot a bystander multiple times before heading south, to the Buckhead neighborhood of Atlanta. Once there, he shot and killed four more Asian women, at a pair of spas situated across the street from each other. When he was apprehended, Long was en route to Florida, where he had planned to continue his shooting rampage.

The only thing worse than the feeling of paranoia is the sickening realization that it’s not paranoia after all. This past January, in San Francisco, an eighty-four-year-old Thai man died after being assaulted while on a walk; across the bay, in Oakland’s Chinatown, a seventy-five-year-old Asian man died after being assaulted and robbed. In both cases, law enforcement has been hesitant to connect the killings to racial bias, instead labelling them as incidents of “elder abuse.” Anti-Asian hate incidents—and hate crimes, more generally—have historically been underreported, but they appear to be on the rise in the U.S.: since last March, Stop A.A.P.I. Hate, a nonprofit organization that formed near the beginning of the pandemic to track discrimination against Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders, has received nearly thirty-eight hundred reports of incidents ranging from verbal harassment to physical assault. In a survey of several police departments, the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, at California State University, San Bernardino, tallied a hundred and twenty-two anti-Asian hate crimes across sixteen American cities in 2020, up from forty-nine in 2019. This increase in anti-Asian violence leading up to the Atlanta killings is not an aberration but, rather, a culmination of systemic and cultural inequities exacerbated by the pandemic—a global calamity for which Asians throughout the world have been maligned as the culprits.

So far, police have been reluctant to label Long’s mass murder a hate crime, even though six of his victims were Asian. After Long was charged with eight counts of murder, on Wednesday, he told investigators that he did not have a racial motive. Captain Jay Baker, the spokesman for the sheriff’s office in Cherokee County, where the first round of shootings took place, described Long’s actions as the result of “a really bad day”—the kind of “fed up” acting out that one might use to characterize a blowup at a soccer practice. “He apparently has an issue, what he considers a sex addiction,” Baker said, adding that Long viewed the massage parlors “as a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate.” It seems to escape Baker’s notice that a person willing to kill multiple people might not be the most perceptive authority about his own prejudices. (On Thursday night, it was announced that Baker had been removed as a spokesman on the case.)

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