Thursday, March 18, 2021

Hate Metastasizes

 Just last month, I wrote about the alarming uptick in attacks on individuals of Asian and Pacific Islander descent.  I saw a call for amplification of this news, and decided to use my small platform to call for solidarity with a community that has always shown kindness to me.

This week, the horror metastasized with the murder of eight persons, six of them Asian women, in two mass shootings in Georgia.  While two white persons and a Latino man were shot, the murderer specifically targeted women of Asian descent.  The attack was a perfect synergy misogyny and racism, perpetrated by a creep who simultaneously sexualized these women and blamed them for his sexualization of them, referring to them as a 'temptation', causing him to succumb to sexual addiction.  

Sexual addiction is not real.  Two nights ago, I listened to a lecture by a neurobiologist specializing in addiction studies.  Sexual addiction is not a thing, it is a term made up to help creeps weasel out of culpability for behaviors that normal, healthy people wouldn't even consider bad.  This shooter cited the bullshit sin of sexual incontinence as the cause of his real sin of mass murder.  Right-wingers have a tendency to fetishize women of Asian descent, simultaneously viewing them as submissive, sexually permissive, and family oriented, a perfect storm of various bigotries.  The coverage of the attacks also takes as granted the proposition that the victims were engaged in sex work, which plays to stereotypes as well... not that sex workers should face violence in any way.

To compound the heinousness of this mass murder, the county sheriff who was spokesman for his department, claimed that the shooter had 'had a bad day', a cack-handed attempt to garner sympathy for a monster.  It subsequently turned out that he amplified anti-Asian messages on social media.  In the aftermath of the mass murder, I've also seen a proliferation of trolls on blog comment fields and Twitter feeds who are trying to deny a racist angle to this crime, for instance, the Twitter feed of actress and activist Olivia Munn is full of trolls trying to deny that the crime was racially motivated.

The Georgia shootings represent the full horror of this year-long uptick in attacks against Asian-and-Pacific Islander Americans, but the reality is that assaults have become a common occurrence, with well over two-thousand assaults taking place between March and December of last year.  In my neck of the woods, an elderly Korean-American woman was assaulted in White Plains, NY, about ten miles north of my beloved Yonkers.  

This rash of violent attacks has me sickened, and I wish to reiterate my support for the Asian and Pacific Islander communities.  At least President Biden seems to be willing to combat this scourge of violence.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

A subtle but real indication of how ingrained anti-Asian bias is: CNN had an article with a headline promising information about the victims. It was a lengthy portrait of a white victim, a small bit about a Hispanic victim, and a mention of the names of a couple of the Asian women who were killed. Like CNN couldn't be bothered to dig for information about Asian victims, or give their lives the same context as a white victim.

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

It's so creepy, Gene, they are trying to portray a murderer as a sick individual preyed upon by perfidious women.

Yeah, Anon, the South Korean media had more information about the victims, one would think that CNN could reach out to them for assistance to cover this properly.