Eight people were killed in Atlanta last Tuesday. Explanations abound, including the version of the perpetrator, which many refuse to accept. Eros, renamed and reviled as an addiction to sex, inspired a murderous atrocity. Is that just a beard for anti-Asian violence?
Unraveling the suspect’s motive is not easy when race and sex compete to dominate the narrative. Six of the dead are women of Asian descent, but the gunman told police he was not motivated by racial prejudice.
Did the suspect visit Asian spas because he had a problem with Asians, or is the United States more Asian than we think? Certainly, our presence in all aspects of American life increases the likelihood that people of all backgrounds will regularly interact with Asian America. His visits to spas run by Asians could be normal if he were less violent or less white. In the United States, interactions and relationships involving Asian women and non-Asian men sometimes attract lewd attention. It is happening as we speak, inspiring clickbait, rolling our eyes, perhaps even a home industry of analysis and prosecution. One accusation that is circulating is that the murderer, 21 years old and white, denies the racial issue. I think that is not the main point.
Its purpose was primarily sexual, not racial purity. According to the police and a former roommate, he talked about pornography and the end of temptation. Its language, apocalyptic but banal, gives a familiar tone.
Despite my Asian background, I find his rejection of racism strangely credible. Like many people, I experienced prejudice and ethnic profiles, but I was also a sex worker and found more prejudice, more name calling, more fear, anger and hostility towards my sex work than towards my race. And because I am also a writer, the author of novels about a call girl, there is hate mail. The most memorable outbursts were strange letters of denunciation from Asian-American readers, exposing the weakness of identity politics.
US Army veterans Latrelle Rolling and Jessica Lang pray at Young’s Asian Massage, where four people were killed in Acworth, Georgia.
(Curtis Compton / Atlanta Journal-Constitution via Tribune News Service)
White supremacy has recently been defined as America’s “original sin” – a confusing term that reminds St. Augustine of reading Genesis so that we don’t have to. Original sin traditionally reeks of sexual knowledge and desire. Now it has been laicized and racialized – a moral stain that erases all others.
Asian identity is not well defined in a country where race is understood to be black or white, but after a wave of attacks against Asians caused by the pandemic and the former president, it has become a unifying force within and outside the community. The black mayor of Atlanta, a white president and a multi-ethnic vice president with a South Asian name tried to unite us in the face of another incomprehensible mass shooting, focusing on the increase of these crimes of prejudice last year. The flags were reduced to half a mast.
There are common conventions and ways of dealing with racial violence, and sometimes they transcend party lines. For most public figures, there is a hygiene manual on race, bloodshed and armed violence. The impact of sexual suffering is more difficult to discuss – and not just because of Puritanism. Sexuality is surprising, unpredictable; part of being an adult is pretending you didn’t understand sex. Sometimes there is more shame in sex than in running.
Race is public and sex is private, but the Atlanta shootings changed that deal. Racialized feelings are beginning to look more like a taboo than sexual obsessions. The murder of an Asian American is described as a hate crime, while the murder of a sex worker is seen as a mental health problem. The scarlet OR downgrades the letter A scarlet by Nathaniel Hawthorne to venial sin, now representing addiction (male) instead of adultery (female). Racism is stigmatized, while sex is pathologized. This new chapter in American life requires a closer look.
“Sex addiction” is seen by many as empty psychology, an idiotic metaphor at best, dangerously turned into a weapon on “a really bad day”. Christ ”for this nebulous condition, in essence a medicalization of Christian morality. For me, the sex addiction doctrine is the erotic equivalent of racial science. And yet, the killer’s belief is probably sincere: news reports portray his visits to the spa as a relapse of an addict, as if sexual contact were a chemical that destroys the liver. He may have been confused by the normal appetite in 21-year-old men.
Robert Aaron Long has something in common with serial killer Ted Bundy (who blamed pornography for his own violence), and his religious faith should not be ignored. He brings to mind Peter Sutcliffe, known as the Yorkshire Ripper, who thought that murdering sex workers was doing God’s will. We must take the rejection of racial motives more seriously and reconsider our own assumptions.
Traditional Americans, including many Asian Americans, are quick to blame racism, but are not ready to discuss an older hatred – what my French friends call “la putophobie” (a term more pleasing to the eye than the complex clumsy “prostitute”). It is the last acceptable form of hate speech, someone once told me, and it persists in minority communities where being a good immigrant is mistaken for sexual virtue. Speculation about the spas where the massacre took place is fueled by prejudice. Amplified by so-called anti-trafficking voices, this prejudice is dangerously toxic.
Fueled by religious fanaticism and unlawful forms of feminism, punitive laws and tabloid headlines, this prejudice breeds self-loathing in young men who should be learning how to nurture, not extinguish, the varieties of human connection. Will the US flag, raised at half-mast by our dead in Atlanta, make any difference? Hope so.
Quan, author of three novels, including “A Manhattan Call Girl’s Diary”, is a regular guest at RTHK Radio 3 in Hong Kong.