One Year After the Atlanta Shooting, Anti-Asian Attacks Are Still Proliferating. Has Anyone Noticed?

[cinematicdiversions]

https://jezebel.com/one-year-after-the-atlanta-shooting-anti-asian-attacks-1848661647

Exactly one year ago, on March 16, a white man killed eight people—six of whom were Asian women—at three different Asian-run massage parlors in Atlanta. His victims were Xiaojie “Emily” Tan, 49; Daoyou Feng, 44; Delaina Yaun, 33; Paul Michels, 54; Suncha Kim, 69; Soon Chung Park, 74; Hyun Jung Grant, 51; and Yong Ae Yue, 63.

Shortly after the attack, local police publicly expressed doubt that the incident was a hate crime against Asian Americans, noting that the shooter, Robert Aaron Long, had told police he had a “sex addiction” and carried out the attack because he saw Asian women massage workers as a sexual “temptation.” Police, in other words, seemed to take the young, white, male shooter at his word and believed that Long’s admission that he had been motivated by gender and sexuality meant the attack couldn’t possibly stem from anti-Asian hate.

Rhacel Salazar Parrenas, a professor of gender studies and Asian American studies at the University of Southern California, says the anniversary of Atlanta is made all the more difficult by “public silence.” Parrenas tells Jezebel it’s as if the shooting was “forgotten overnight,” despite continued—if not escalated—violence specifically targeting Asian women recently. “It’s a reminder of this unique racialization of Asians, and Asian women in particular, as expendable foreigners in this country,” she said. This racialization was certainly heightened by the onset of the covid pandemic, nicknamed the “China virus” by the former president, and inspiring a wave of anti-Asian, racist attacks.

The anniversary of the Atlanta shooting comes a week after a New York man assaulted and punched a 67-year-old Asian woman 125 times outside her apartment building. Earlier this year, in the span of one month, an Asian-American woman named Michelle Go was pushed to her death onto subway tracks, and another, Christina Yuna Lee, was stalked and stabbed 40 times by a man who followed her into her Chinatown apartment. The continuing attacks on Asian communities, which faced an almost exponential surge in racist harassment and violence amid the pandemic, have particularly targeted Asian women, who accounted for nearly 70% of reported anti-Asian hate incidents last year.

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Attacks against Asian woman and elderly seem to be on the rise in our cities, yet we choose too often to ignore it and refuse too often to label it as the hate crimes they truly are.

[Tomconroy]

1. Yes. I've noticed.

[chowder66]

2. Yes. I've noticed and I retweet on twitter, articles and orgs that are bringing attention to it.

[DFW]

3. Luckily, nothing like that going on here

I live in the Düsseldorf area, and Düsseldorf is a major business and cultural center for Japan in Europe. Parts of town could almost be taken for small Tokyo neighborhoods. There are Japanese restaurants, book shops, porcelain shops, travel agencies, ramen snack holes-in-the-wall, and of course the obligatory Mitsukoshi and Hotel Nikko. It is a given here that the longest street intersection in the world is in Düsseldorf, with one side of the street in Germany and the other in Japan. Every year, we have Japan Week with street festivals, etc.

Nothing so much as Asia(n) bashing has cropped up here. We have a hard time figuring out what even causes such an ugly mentality. With a sister-in-law from Japan for the last forty years, I have to say that I find it unfathomable, too.