- Eight people were shot and killed on Tuesday at three spas just north of Atlanta; six of the victims were Asian women. The killings occurred amid increasing reports of anti-Asian violence, particularly against Asian women. [Vox / Rachel Ramirez]
- The suspect, a 21-year-old man named Robert Aaron Long, is in police custody and has been charged with murder. He claimed the shooting was not racially motivated, instead saying he had a sex addiction and was motivated by a desire to eliminate “temptations.” Police said it is too early to decide if the shooting was a hate crime. [Atlanta Journal-Constitution / Alexis Stevens and Shaddi Abusaid]
- There is a long, racist, misogynist history of fetishization of Asian women that has been used to justify violence and harm. On Twitter, many Asian women and nonbinary people discussed how white supremacist violence is the foundation of hypersexualization. [AsAmNews / Akemi Tamanaha]
- The suspect was apprehended with a 9mm firearm in a car on his way to Florida, where, according to police, he planned to enact more violence related to the porn industry in the state. [NPR / Bill Chappell]
- The South Korean Consulate said four of the eight victims are ethnic Koreans. [NYT / Richard Faucette and Neil Vigdor]
- In Georgia, Asian Americans have been reporting increasing harassment and abuse since the beginning of the pandemic, with many being called racial slurs used by former President Trump, who promoted anti-Asian racism regarding the coronavirus. [Washington Post / Andrea Salcedo and Paulina Firozi]
- Nationally, Stop AAPI Hate reported over 3,800 incidents of anti-Asian hate in the year since the pandemic hit the US. Sixty-eight percent of those incidents were targeted at women, underscoring the role misogyny often plays in anti-Asian hate. [NBC News / Kimmy Yam]
- But anti-Asian hate has a long history in the US, and goes much deeper than Trump or the pandemic. Asians have been legally targeted in the US through policies like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the World War II-era internment of Japanese Americans. They have been victims of the harmful “forever foreigner” trope, particularly on social class lines and based on ethnicity, such as racism toward South Asians after 9/11. [Vox / Li Zhou]
- Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA), the chair of the Congressional Asian American Pacific Caucus, said she met with the Justice Department to discuss hate crimes against Asian Americans. The caucus, and Democrats, are pushing for stronger hate crime laws, gun control bills, and a national day against Asian American hate. [USA Today / Nicholas Wu]
- HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
Yesterday, at the news conference about the killings, the sheriff’s captain who was acting as a spokesman about the case, Jay Baker, told reporters that Long was “pretty much fed up and kind of at the end of his rope. Yesterday was a really bad day for him, and this is what he did.” The spokesman went on to say that the suspect “apparently has an issue, what he considers a sex addiction,” that had spurred him to murder, and that it was too early to tell if the incident was a “hate crime.” Long told law enforcement officers that the murders were “not racially motivated.” He was, he said, trying to “help” other people with sex addictions. Journalists quickly discovered that Baker had posted on Facebook a picture of a shirt calling COVID-19 an “IMPORTED VIRUS FROM CHY-NA.” As Baker’s Facebook post indicated, the short-term history behind the shooting is the former president’s attacks on China, in which he drew out the pronunciation of the name to make it sound like a schoolyard insult. The story behind Trump’s attacks on China was his desperate determination to be reelected in 2020. In 2018, the former president placed tariffs on Chinese goods to illustrate his commitment to make the U.S. “a much stronger, much richer nation.” The tariffs led to a trade war with China and, rather than building a much stronger nation, resulted in a dramatic fall in agricultural exports. Agricultural exports to China fell from $15.8 billion in 2017 to $5.9 billion in 2018. To combat the growing unrest in the agricultural regions of the country, where farm bankruptcies grew by nearly 20% in 2019, Trump paid off farmers hurt by the tariff with subsidies, which made up more than one third of U.S. farm income in 2020. In June 2019, he also begged Chinese President Xi Jinping to help him win the 2020 election. He told him that farmers were important to his election prospects, and begged Xi to buy more soybeans and wheat from U.S. farmers. In January 2020, Trump and Chinese Vice Premier Liu He signed a deal that cut some U.S. tariffs in exchange for Chinese promises to buy more agricultural products, as well as some other adjustments between the two countries. On January 22, Trump tweeted: ““One of the many great things about our just signed giant Trade Deal with China is that it will bring both the USA & China closer together in so many other ways. Terrific working with President Xi, a man who truly loves his country. Much more to come!” But, of course, the novel coronavirus was beginning to ravage the world. On January 24, Trump tweeted: “China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!” Shortly after the U.S. shut down to combat the pandemic in mid-March, Trump began to turn on China. On March 22, after 33,000 Americans had tested positive for the virus and 421 had died of it, Trump seemed to think better of his praise for Xi. He insisted that China had not told him about the deadly nature of the virus, and began to call it the “Chinese virus,” or the “Chy-na virus.” In this context, the suggestion of a police spokesman who had posted pictures celebrating a shirt that called Covid-19 the “VIRUS IMPORTED FROM CHY-NA” that a gunman had killed six women of Asian descent because he had had “a really bad day,” along with the officer’s apparent acceptance of Long’s statement that the killings were not racially motivated, outraged observers. That seemingly cavalier dismissal of the dead while accepting the words of the white murderer seemed to personify an American history that has discriminated against Asians since the California legislature slapped a Foreign Miners’ Tax on Chinese miners in 1850, just a year after they began to arrive in California. Discriminatory laws and violence from their white neighbors plagued Chinese, Japanese, Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders, Koreans, Vietnamese, and all Asian immigrants as they moved to the U.S.
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