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Saying Never Again to the Violence in Atlanta Means Saying No to More Policing
https://newrepublic.com/article/161792/atlanta-shooter-sex-worker-red-canary-songThis is the uncomfortable truth yet to be faced after the shootings: Massage businesses have long been subject to eliminationist sentiments, which manifest in community vigilantism, in police raids, and in airless policy debates disconnected from the reality of the women who do massage work. The extraordinary violence of last week, which took eight lives, including women workers’, is continuous with that status quo, one that would rather eradicate massage businesses than regard the workers there as worthy of rights, of dignity, of belonging.
And that mindset—that shared politics of elimination—is a product of the anti-Asian racism, misogyny, and xenophobia that communities are now mobilizing against across the United States. But their work can only ever get part of the way there in confronting those interlocking oppressions if that work does not also confront the oppression of people who engage in, or are believed to engage in, sex work and massage work, and repair the ways they have historically been excluded from community responses to violence. Sometimes they have even been blamed. This time may point to a new way.
There is no one cause here, just as there is no one reason someone may work at or be a customer at a massage business like those that the confessed shooter reportedly told investigators he targeted. If we take at face value that his motives are what law enforcement report, where did he get the idea that massage businesses were to blame for his “sex addiction,” a phrase with no consistent meaning? It’s an idea that could have come from his faith community or the evangelical “treatment” center he turned to. It could have come from self-described anti-trafficking groups like Street Grace. It could have come from growing up in a country that has long regarded all Asian immigrant women as sexual temptations for men, a racist idea woven into American anti-immigration law, into popular culture, and that has now been reinforced in statements shared by police.
Police are now, as they always are, being turned to for safety—and it is massage workers themselves who are among the loudest voices to challenge that, to demand something more. “We want people to step up,” Yves Tong Nguyen, an organizer with Red Canary Song, a grassroots collective of Asian and migrant massage workers, told me a few days after the shootings. They are one of the very few groups in the U.S. that provide outreach and mutual aid to massage workers, and in which massage workers are organizing for their own safety and rights. The violence in Atlanta put them in the national spotlight. If we want to address and prevent such violence, Red Canary Song members said in a statement, we cannot look to the police. “We understand the pain that motivates our Asian and Asian-American community members’ call for increased policing, but we nevertheless stand against it.”
And that mindset—that shared politics of elimination—is a product of the anti-Asian racism, misogyny, and xenophobia that communities are now mobilizing against across the United States. But their work can only ever get part of the way there in confronting those interlocking oppressions if that work does not also confront the oppression of people who engage in, or are believed to engage in, sex work and massage work, and repair the ways they have historically been excluded from community responses to violence. Sometimes they have even been blamed. This time may point to a new way.
There is no one cause here, just as there is no one reason someone may work at or be a customer at a massage business like those that the confessed shooter reportedly told investigators he targeted. If we take at face value that his motives are what law enforcement report, where did he get the idea that massage businesses were to blame for his “sex addiction,” a phrase with no consistent meaning? It’s an idea that could have come from his faith community or the evangelical “treatment” center he turned to. It could have come from self-described anti-trafficking groups like Street Grace. It could have come from growing up in a country that has long regarded all Asian immigrant women as sexual temptations for men, a racist idea woven into American anti-immigration law, into popular culture, and that has now been reinforced in statements shared by police.
Police are now, as they always are, being turned to for safety—and it is massage workers themselves who are among the loudest voices to challenge that, to demand something more. “We want people to step up,” Yves Tong Nguyen, an organizer with Red Canary Song, a grassroots collective of Asian and migrant massage workers, told me a few days after the shootings. They are one of the very few groups in the U.S. that provide outreach and mutual aid to massage workers, and in which massage workers are organizing for their own safety and rights. The violence in Atlanta put them in the national spotlight. If we want to address and prevent such violence, Red Canary Song members said in a statement, we cannot look to the police. “We understand the pain that motivates our Asian and Asian-American community members’ call for increased policing, but we nevertheless stand against it.”
18 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
Hence the article in the OP. 
