Hate is Hate
“He was at the end of his rope and fed up. Yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did.” This wasn’t a recap about some child throwing a temper tantrum or an explanation for an outburst by a colleague at work. No, it was the description given to the press by Jay Baker, the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Captain, about a terrorist who murdered eight people in a mass shooting Tuesday night. Six of them were Asian women.
Fortunately, backlash came. Why the officer showed such compassion for this mass terrorist may lie in some of his existing biases or racist tendencies. After all, last April he shared an image on Facebook of a shirt he purchased that read, “Covid 19 IMPORTED VIRUS FROM CHY-NA.”
According to police, the 21-year-old killer claimed his murdering spree was not racially motivated, but rather an act intended to eliminate his temptation of “sex addiction.” Baker said, “He apparently has an issue. What he considers a sex addiction. And sees these locations as something that allows him to go to these places, and it’s a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate.”
The fetishization of Asian women is racist. Trying to blame women for one’s “temptations” is misogynistic. Put that together, that mix of racism, sexism and motivated anger, and you have the perfect ingredients for this latest hate crime.
Raise Black Voices stands in solidarity with the Asian American community. “Cross-racial collaborations are not new, and it is troubling that we do not foreground them more because they give us a historical frame to understand our contemporary moment,” according to Lok Siu, UC Berkeley Asian American and Asian Diasporas Studies Associate Professor.
Frederick Douglass opposed Chinese exclusion. Malcolm X worked closely with human rights activist Yuri Kochiyama. Kochiyama said that we must “fight against racism and polarization, learn from each other’s struggle” and “also understand national liberation struggles — that ethnic groups need their own space… But there are enough issues that we all could work on.”
Across the country, Asian Americans have been the repeated targets of violence. Since the start of the pandemic, nearly 3,800 hate incidents against Asian Americans have been reported across the country, from verbal harassment to assault, according to Stop AAPI Hate. Asian American women reported nearly twice (68 percent) as many incidents as men. The frequency and spread of these attacks have been underreported and there has been an uptick since Covid-19 arrived on our shores. Former President Donald Trump’s rhetoric was yet more kindling, as he tried to pin blame elsewhere for the pandemic-related tragedies here at home by referring to the coronavirus as the “kung flu” or the “Chinese virus” to his supporters.
These derogatory names helped spark an inflammatory and xenophobic association between the coronavirus and Chinese people, and really anyone who looked like they could be of East Asian descent. And the aggression followed. In Texas, racist graffiti was sprayed on the walls of a ramen eatery. There are, dismayingly, too many stories to share of elderly Asian Americans being attacked, so I’ll just highlight the elderly Asian woman who was attacked in San Francisco and fought back.
We must do better and stand against the racism and hate that plague our country. Call on your local leaders within your school district, community, and workplace to take a stance against anti-Asian violence and hate in general. You can also volunteer to (safely) escort Asian American senior citizens.
We must all channel the strength of that courageous elderly woman. With the same bravery, tenacity and instinct it took her to defend herself, may we all help steer this country in the right direction. Together.
