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

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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.