Waking up to the news that six Asian women were among the eight people killed in the Atlanta area on Tuesday was brutal. Browsing online indignation, condolences and conjectures was worrying and exhausting. America is a stationary bike, which repeats bad patterns and is not going anywhere quickly.
In the middle of the morning, the news it was already full of reports that the murder suspect had a “sex addiction”, which apparently was enough for local law enforcement to start discounting that the mass murder could be “racially motivated”. During a press conference, Captain Jay Baker, from the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office, also said the shooter had a “bad day” while discussing the attack. (BuzzFeed News later reported that Baker posted on Facebook a photo of a racist shirt blaming China for the pandemic.)
A sniper targeted three Asian companies and mainly killed Asian women. Whether the killer is going to admit a reason besides trying to eliminate the “temptation”, what is indisputable is that he has cruelly harmed Asian women. The Asian-American community is now forced to create this violence among us, on its own. Nobody feels safe; everyone is suffering. The murders are racist. Time course.
This latest mass shooting comes at a time of growing anti-Asian sentiment in the United States. Over the past year, as COVID-19 spread, hate crimes against the minority group have also steadily increased. According to Stop AAPI Hate, from March 2020 to the end of February 2021, there were at least 3,795 hate crimes reported against Americans of Asian origin. Last month, Asian seniors were the target of a series of attacks. These alarming trends are suspected to be linked to the prejudice of COVID-19, fueled by the constant comments of former President Donald Trump, calling the disease “Kung Flu” or “China Virus” and blaming China for the pandemic.
In addition, the latest Stop AAPI Hate report found that women reported being victims of a hate crime 2.3 times more than men.
Someone who knew the sniper told the New York Times that he regularly visited spas for sex. The source said the sniper denied going to these companies because of the workers’ race, but he did so because it seemed “safer than paying for sex elsewhere,” the report said. These denials of the sniper’s racial motivations, his friend and law enforcement are incredibly telling. Asian women are often two-dimensional fantasies, fantasies that have become so normalized that they have fed anime kitten tropes, specific genres dom / subporn and an entire sex work industry. Often, with this sexualization comes a very particular type of dehumanization.
I was privileged to exist as an Asian woman with some protection and I still feel a relatively acute racial trauma. But Monday’s attacks made me aware of how impactful the trauma was and made me question how protected I really am in this country. After the shooting, many Asian women across the Internet also reflected on the hypersexuality that is projected on us simply because we exist. Including the fetish stereotypes that follow us everywhere – docile, modest, obedient – and verbal harassment in racial epithets (“I have loved you for a long time”) from men who literally followed us in and out of bars. Being an Asian woman means moving through spaces with the constant anxiety that someone is about to make you their sex object or joke.
Melissa Borja, assistant professor in the American studies program for Asian / Pacific islands at the University of Michigan, who led research on anti-Asian racism related to COVID-19 last year, told BuzzFeed News that although the sniper’s alleged sex addiction do not carry an “inherent anti-Asian” feeling, popular culture has facilitated a particular sexualization of Asian women.
“Asian-American women are objects of desire, and this idea is reproduced in so many different ways, in so many different films and musicals. It is deeply rooted, ”she said. Borja once said that his son was approached by a white man “who asked for advice on finding an Asian woman for a mating relationship”.
“It depended on a view of Asian women as being less than human in ways that are really worrying to me,” she said. Borja also said that while there is an obsession with understanding the killer’s motive in national tragedies like this, she wants us to focus our concerns on the damage he has caused.
“We know that Asian-American women have been particularly affected by the past year and the anti-Asian racism that we see associated with the pandemic. The impact is very important and it was very impressive for me last night and today how sad they are, how angry they are, ”she said. “This morning I just spoke on the phone to my 71-year-old mother, who did not want to go out for the afternoon walk because I was afraid. This impact is perhaps more important than the killer’s intention. “
New York writer Christine Liwag Dixon, whose recent tweet about the fetishization she has experienced in her life has gone viral, she told BuzzFeed News that she often struggles to put into words what these cumulative experiences were like.
“When something like this happens, even as a writer, it is impossible to articulate because you are so overwhelmed and feeling so much,” she said. “This is nothing new. Asian women have been dealing with this for generations. “
For Liwag Dixon, fetishization started in primary school. “The children said, ‘I love you, you’ve loved me for a long time’ or asked if my vagina was tilted to the side.” In high school, when the film Memoirs of a Geisha left, she said teenagers were coming up to her asking, “Are you a geisha?”
Liwag Dixon’s mother is Filipino and her father is a white American, so she saw things “up close” as a child and between generations. “People always ask if my mom is a mail order bride,” she said. “They see an Asian woman and a white man and simply assume that the Asian woman is a gold digger. Guilt is almost always centered on the woman in the scenario, like, The woman is a gold digger. The woman is an opportunist. They are not saying how these Western men are abusing their own power. “
Justine Galo, 46, tweeted that people also made fun of her and her husband, who is white. “Some people see me with my husband and joke about the whole ‘mail order bride’ or ‘you got your GI’ thing.”
Galo told BuzzFeed News that after hearing about the attacks, years of feelings of “resentment and disrespect” came to her.
“I tried [racism] throughout my life, from an ex-boyfriend who dated a very shy woman he met in Korea and was so angry that I was not as accommodating as she was, ”she said. She said that he physically assaulted her, which made her feel “like a form of second-class Asian”.
Audrey Yap, a professor of feminist philosophy at the University of Victoria, was also required to answer to the segment. She told BuzzFeed News that she experiences gender violence in her personal life frequently.
“People sometimes seem to think that treating Asian women as exotic sexual objects is somewhat of a compliment to us, when in fact it is something that contributes to the violence against us,” she said. Yap recommends reading an academic article published in 2016 by Robin Zheng on the toxicities of “yellow fever”, a term used to describe the fetishization of Asians.
Yap also recognizes that she benefits from being an Asian woman of higher socioeconomic status – a privilege that the victims of the attacks did not have. But she also recalled that being a model minority does not mean that white America sees all of its humanity.
“I know that, for Asian women, I am overprivileged – I have a good job. I don’t have to depend on precarious work, ”said Yap. “But attacks like this definitely remind me that some people just see women like me through racialized and stereotyped lenses, and we can never really be complete people for them.”
Liwag Dixon’s viral tweet inspired multitudes of Twitter users to sympathize and connect the dots between the sniper who craved spas while blaming Asian women for their “sex addiction” and racism – which the Atlanta police and other media of news have failed to do so far. Making that connection is crucial to recognizing the invisible pain that settles in so many of our breasts that was unleashed this week.
Growing up, I learned to shrink because I internalized it as desirable. Later, I understood that I need to speak and take up space, because that is how I will survive in this country. All these conversations that women are having about micro-aggressions have also reminded me that I am not alone and that small racist particles contribute to an invisible disease that killed six Asian women this week.
Liwag Dixon said these conversations are not the ones she “wants” to have with other Asian American women, but they are necessary now.
“Seeing how many Asian women have experienced the same thing, there was a feeling of solidarity, but it is not the kind of solidarity that I want to see … It is not that type of experience that I want to be universal, but it is,” she said. “It is often the trauma that unites us.”
In the aftermath of this tragedy, Borja hopes to refocus the narrative on Asian women as leaders who demand change to combat anti-Asian hatred.
“It is important to talk about Asian American women … not just as victims, but also as people who are at the forefront of this work that calls for change,” she said. “It was then Kamala Harris and Mrs Grace Meng who presented the resolutions last year against anti-Asian hatred. It is the groups of Asian American women who are calling for changes at the state level. Most of the people involved in the Stop AAPI Hate are women. Women in general are leading the call for change at various levels. I think it is very important to remember that Asian American women are not only victims, but also those who lead the prosecution for justice. ”
These collective efforts, in the midst of a year of growing hatred, are a necessary force in the momentum that can, hopefully, begin to move these cycle patterns forward.
Additional reporting by Lauren Strapagiel. ●