March 23, 2021
Last Tuesday’s murder spree in Atlanta, Georgia brings to the forefront the intersection of misogyny and anti-Asian racism in America. Most of the nine victims (eight dead, one gravely injured) were Asian women, women the shooter blames for his actions because their very existence was a sexual temptation to him.
This stereotype of the hypersexual but submissive Asian woman is not new, nor is it about an individual white man’s fantasies. Grounded in racism, it harms both women and men of Asian descent. White male desire fuels exploitation, discrimination, and endless harassment. It creates perceptions of an entire group of people as less than human. This white man treated his victims with no more regard than he might for a porn magazine he chose to burn.
Nor did he lash out randomly, even if he shot some of the victims because they were in the way vs. being his intended targets. This murderer planned his crimes and drove dozens of miles out of his way, passing other spas, numerous strip clubs, and various related businesses, in order to reach the spas that he knew employed Asian women. After murdering people in three such spas, he set off to drive hundreds of miles south, just to find more Asian women to murder.
The Officers of the National Women’s Caucus of the United States Green Party not only condemn this man’s actions but the entire system that dehumanizes Asian women. We repudiate those who seek to dismiss these murders as an individual act and those who make excuses for the shooter by attempting to explain that he “had a bad day” or deserves our sympathy. Instead, our sympathies go out to the families of the victims, to women blamed for male crimes (whether they be sex workers or just treated as such), and to the entire Asian-American community whose fears of racist violence towards them just got a lot worse.