Ooh, I’m so glad we’ll have your nuanced views on race relations in this thread.
Oh, great, now you’ve done it!
Anyway, it’s a weird argument to say we shouldn’t hold this up to highlight anti-Asian racist violence because it’s not COVID-related anti-Asian racism, it’s just regular old anti-Asian racism.
Even if this particular shooter wasn’t shooting them because they’re Asian (doubtful), I would agree with others that there’s a general sexualization of Asian women, especially in massage parlors. And, I would further argue that the ones that provide those extra services are allowed to keep operating because the mostly-white police force and sheriffs don’t give a shit about the women working there, who may even be victims of sex trafficking. I have zero doubt that if those massage parlors that had extra services were using young white women, they would be shut down immediately. So, it’s all of an anti-Asian racist piece.
That is definitely not what I meant, but I can understand your confusion, because I myself am confused by what I mean. My primary motivation for starting this thread was to get some additional perspective in order to help sort out my thoughts on this. I’m not saying that the issue shouldn’t be addressed, just that another incident might be better as a poster child (it’s not as if there aren’t a lot to choose from).
Certainly if this does work as a flash point to expand awareness of violence against Asians I’m all in favor of it. Whatever works. It just seems that it may be dangerous to centralize a movement against racist violence around an incident that is not a clear exemplar of the issue at hand. Particularly since at first it seemed to be a clear exemplar.
When the news first hit I think the assumption was that it was directly about race. Six Asian women killed in mass shooting in the age of Corona based anti-Asian sentiment nuff said. Then it came out that he was more anti-prostitute than anti Asian. Turns out the original speculattion was just fake news. But of course we in the woke community make the connection that assuming Asian massage parlor = prostitution is itself racist. But most people aren’t going to make that final connection. All they are going to remember is it looked like it was racist at first but that actually got debunked in the police report. So all the people who say it was racist are just ignoring the subsequent facts.
Yes the Conservative Fox spin machine is going to twist the facts of any story into a pretzel that matches their narrative, but that is not who I am worried about. I’m worried about more middle of the road non-fox viewers who watch legitimate news sources but just aren’t as well versed in the more subtle effects of endemic racism that doesn’t walk around in a white hood.
ETA: the above is somewhat of a devil’s advocate position since I am still of two minds about this. But since the “yeah they should do it” portion of my thinking has already been covered by other posters I’m concentrating in this post mostly on trying to articulate the “no they shouldn’t” side of my thinking.
I think Democrats were planning to confront the issue of anti-Asian hate crimes, and if they weren’t, somebody needed to. Whether or not this killer was specifically motivated by race doesn’t matter, IMO; it’s almost certainly a crime of bias, even if it’s indirect.
Horatius, very well put. You can’t start a fire and then say I’m not to blame when it burns down the next door neighbor.
Trump lit the anti Asian fire. Maybe you can’t draw a line between Kung Flu and the shooting, but it’s pretty obvious to see the connection. It’s really dubious to try and claim race isn’t part of it. And it’s right wing propaganda to never let a tragedy go to waste when one can use instead use it for a culture war.
There have been multiple acts of violence against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders that have only increased since trumpy went on his racist rampage to try divert blame for doing jack shit about covid. Trying to discredit using the latest and most egrarious violent mass murder against Asian Americans as cheap political theater, is really disgusting and cheap political theater.
OK, first of all you have some factual errors. For one, not all 8 of the murder victims were massage parlor workers. At least one - Delania Yaun - was a customer and not an employee, who was there with her husband who was also a customer (he survived). Paul Andre Michels was an employee of Young’s Asian Massage, but not as a massage therapist but maintenance/handyman and was a White man. Elcias Hernandez-Ortiz was also shot there, he is a Hispanic man, and for now the only survivor (very seriously injured with head, lung, and stomach injuries).
So, although the majority of victims were Asian woman, and probably employees, at least two customers were also shot and/or killed as well as the owner of Young’s Asian Massage. I realize this is all a bit nuanced but the situation is more complicated than the “barge in and shoot Asian ho’s” narrative that some people seem to want to distill this down to.
Second, it is possible to “jump to” expressing concern and horror about nine people in three locations being shot dead by a (clearly) seriously disturbed young man with out it being about politics, or political party. Frankly, if Republicans aren’t equally disturbed and upset it says something very bad about them. The fact that some are trying to make literally everything - murders, winter storms leading to state-wide power grid collapse, you name it - political also reveals what sort of creature they are.
There have been increasing number of reports of assaults and crimes against people of Asian descent in this country for over a year now. That is not politics, that is fact. It SHOULD be in the national spotlight.
Why fuck should we believe what a deranged 21 year old who thinks it’s a good idea to shoot unarmed people in head has to say? Sure, interview the guy, but anyone who thinks having a “sex addiction” justifies killing anyone is not functioning as an adult should and is an unreliable narrator.
He very much did target Asians in Asian-owned businesses, as opposed to White women streetwalkers or Black women in strip clubs or any other fill in the blank descriptor. His victims were not randomly chosen (although the White and Hispanic male victims were probably just in the wrong place at the wrong time, standing next to his intended victims). He was not in those spas by accident.
The notion that race, sex, and possible employment were not factors here is absolutely ludicrous.
Yes, because it’s an example of violence against Asians (as opposed to violent Asians, which is also how your phrasing could be interpreted - might want to word things more clearly next time). What, is the murder of an Asian woman somehow less a crime if it’s because she’s perceived as a sex worker (even if she isn’t) than a plague vector? WTH?
People who are so oblivious and stupid as to not see there was a racial element in this crime, who think “anti-asian sentiment is just a Democratic hoax” are living in a different universe than I am and frankly I have not yet figured out a way to engage in a meaningful way with people so detached from factual reality. I am not going to exhaust myself trying bring them back to reality at this point. If they can’t behave due to either living in a false-reality bubble or because they’re racist/sexist scum themselves I suggest we apply the law to restrain them, or in extreme cases remove them from civilized society. The first step is to keep the violent people from hurting and killing other people, after that we can try to talk sense into them, if that is even possible.
Yes, I think you’re missing a few things here
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It’s time to stop pandering to extremist Republicans by basing our actions on how they’re going to react. Decent human beings regardless of party will be horrified by this mass killing and recognize that there were element of racial and gender hatred. People who don’t react that way are part of the problem, even if otherwise they are “nice people”.
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This is an example of anti-Asian violence.
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This is an example of anti-woman violence
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This is yet another example of an entitled White man feeling justified in killing other people because HE has a problem. I rush to add that I do not think this represents a majority of White men, but when most mass shootings over the past decade have been perpetrated by “lone wolf” White guys I’d say it’s high time the White community engage in some self-policing, take the blinders off their own eyes, and deal with the rot within their group. Just like for decades every other racial/ethnic/religious group has been tasked with dealing with violence, crime, poverty, drug-use, etc. within their ranks.
- I’m tired of hearing “it’s too nuanced” as an excuse to not address something in the public forum. Maybe if we stopped dumbing down everything down this nation would act like adults instead of spoiled toddlers.
YE∫!
Hrd t typ4 whi]e appplau6ing…
Good points. I would like to add
- This is an example of there being too many guns in our society.
“Include,” sure. I think the problem comes when you try to use it as The Example. People are notoriously prone to wanting to base major policy decisions on individual incidents rather than trends and data.
I’m glad you added and his ilk because this is yet another case of Trump being the symptom, not the cause – he simply saw which way the parade was going and ran to get in front of the crowd. Balbir Singh Sodhi would have loved to be merely harangued at a meeting, unpleasant as that is.
Police arrested Roque the next day, initially unaware of the later shooting incidents. He reportedly shouted slogans including “I am a patriot!” and “I stand for America all the way!” during his arrest.
Sound familiar?
Of course, there is a trend, the data supports it, and multi variable data is messy.
Intersectionality, explained: meet Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term - Vox.
Crenshaw argues in her paper that by treating black women as purely women or purely black, the courts, as they did in 1976, have repeatedly ignored specific challenges that face black women as a group.
O Childe, wouldn’t it be fine if we could magically (annonnymusslee) survey all of the Asian-Americans alive today and ask them which specific American Ethnic/Religious group they live most in fear of being violently, viciously randomly attacked by, the dreaded White, Christian monsters that all Good Dopers know are lurking around each and every corner, or perhaps some other group, maybe a fellow downtrodden minority, one whose members have been caught on video savagely beating, robbing and murdering random Asian Americans without reason or mercy dozens of times in just the past few months alone…?
If it was that, it’s still a problem with racism against Asians.
And racism often doesn’t come in neat separate clumps. People who believe that members of group X are all lazy, or all devious, or all money-mad, or whatever are likely to believe other negative things about group X as well. What’s been assimilated into their heads may be less ‘group X does this specific bad thing’ and more ‘group X is bad!’ and then specific stereotypes accumulate around the general sense of badness.
– and what @Horatius said.
Is that information out there one way or the other?
But in any case: if he was patronizing those specific places, and they all primarily had Asian workers: was he selecting them because they had Asian workers? If so, that’s very likely racism in itself; possibly not if it was, say, just because they were cheaper, but definitely so if it was because he thought of Asians as fair game for no-committment sex but thought of white women as at least relatively off limits.
– and what @Dangerosa said. And what @amarinth said.
Rosa Parks was challenging an actual formal legal system. She needed to present a specific legal case in a specific court system. It’s true that she lost the case and won the argument; but this still isn’t the same situation.
Who’s doing that?
It seems to me that most of the outcry is focused on its being an example. If this had been the only case of violent expression of anti-Asian prejudice in the last hundred years, I expect it would be getting an entirely different reception.
What do we have to do, wait until someone slaughters only Asian-Americans and then professes hatred for them? We’ve seen the stats for increased attacks on A-As. We’ve seen the orange galoot refer to the Kung Flu and the China Virus. We’ve heard right-wingers ridicule Nancy Pelosi for encouraging tourism in Chinatown (which, by the way, is NOT in China) just before the virus took hold. No, now we have to wait for the perfect crime to occur that precisely matches some unattainable criteria that the right wing sets as justification for concern about attacks on A-As.
Fuck that shit. Even if the motivation for the Atlanta killings was not demonstrably about race, what does it matter? We still have plenty of evidence of anti-Asian hate crimes. There’s enough reason to be concerned about this issue and bringing it to the forefront.
While not untrue, I don’t really see what that had to do with the argument I was making there. Perhaps I didn’t make my argument as clearly as I thought. I was discussing why they used Rosa Parks rather than Claudette Colvin as “the black woman who refused to give her seat” in their rhetoric.
They were strategic in using the most unimpeachable example possible, knowing that Colvin being a pregnant teen would have made the focus about that instead of what she did. The same can be argued to be true here, too. If this guy wasn’t going after Asians because they were Asian, it makes it harder to keep the conversation focused on the violence Asian people face.
Again, there are other examples where things are more straightforward, including an incident that occurred not long before this one. So I don’t see why it’s not better to use those to illustrate that particular point.
And, again, I’m not saying to not discuss this incident at all, or not mention that anti-Asian sentiment could have played a part. I’m saying that, unless we find out this was specifically an attack on Asians, it would make more rhetorical sense not to make it the focus of the conversation about violence Asian-Americans face.
I am open to an argument that I am wrong. Yours just didn’t seem to be addressing what I was trying to say. Perhaps it was I who misunderstood you.
What I was trying to say was that I don’t think the Rosa Parks situation, which was addressing a specific actual law, is relevant to a situation in which multiple prejudices are likely to be involved. There isn’t any law saying it’s OK to murder Asians, so we don’t need a test case involving a Perfectly Innocent Asian with which to challenge that nonexistent law.
Since part of the discrimination Asian women are facing is assumptions about sexual behavior, refusing to address this case as part of the overall issue because it involves perceptions of prostitution strikes me as the reverse of useful.
It’s an example of a white man killing people whom he, along with many others, including the occupant of the White House over the previous four years, has dehumanized.
Yes, this.
Predictably, many not-very-nice people on FoxNews and similar outlets are very happy to talk about the idea that We Shouldn’t Talk About This incident because it’s not–according to them–a pure-enough case of race-hatred. And one can see why they are doing this. It’s not just that they aren’t nice people (though they aren’t)–it’s that several of them are on tape defending Trump when Trump said “Kung Flu” etc. Any discussion that includes the idea that such choices encourage racist violence, threatens to implicate them in that encouragement. And that must be avoided at all costs.
Always, always, always, the right makes use of The Tone Argument and its variants, to (they hope) derail conversations they find inconvenient. We’d gladly talk about anti-Asian violence, if only you’d give us an example we’ve approved, and talk about that example in the exact words that we require you to talk about it! But you won’t, so we can’t talk about anti-Asian violence, and you should be ashamed of talking about it yourselves!!!1!!!
Sickening, they are, and massively disingenuous, they are.
It’s a form of concern trolling. “Oh, yes, I recognize that in principle, there is statistical evidence of racism, but in this particular case, we can’t prove it was racism, so we shouldn’t tout this as The Example!”
They act like they’re just waiting for The Perfect Case of Racism to occur so they can swing into action and defeat racism, but of course, the perfect case never quite happens.