Time to say no to anti-Asian hate and violence



This past week a young White man entered three spas in the Atlanta area, killing eight, six of whom were Asian-Americans. Their deaths are only the most recent and the most widely publicized acts of violence against Asian-Americans over the past year. Since the pandemic began a little over a year ago, and because it originated in China, people of Asian descent have been blamed and targeted for violence. Unfortunately, anti-Asian racism and violence are not new. It has been with us for a very long time. We've simply ignored it. In part that is due to the idea that immigrants who are Asians are seen as model immigrants and even classified as honorary Whites. How can there be anti-Asian racism, as one congressman declared at a hearing in recent days, because Asians are so successful?

Once again, we find it easy to turn a blind idea to what is happening. As a result, people who are being attacked remain invisible. One who has helped open my eyes to this invisibility experienced by Asian Americans is my friend Grace Ji-Sun Kim (Professor of Theology at Earlham School of Theology). Grace wrote a straightforward, informative, and challenging post for The Christian Century. Here are the opening paragraphs, that speak to what she calls a "kind of ferocious anger" that has emerged within the Asian-American community.            
Delaina Yaun, the mother of a 13-year-old son and an 8-month-old daughter, had a date with her husband Tuesday afternoon at a spa outside Atlanta, Young’s Asian Massage. Soon after they arrived, Yaun was shot dead. So were Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, and Paul Andre Michels. A gunman had attacked the business. In total, he killed eight people at three spas and critically injured another. Soon C. Park, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Yong A. Yue were also killed. Six of the victims were of Asian descent. Seven were women. 
The Atlanta killing spree has provoked something enormous, something untamed from within the Asian American community: a kind of ferocious anger, exasperation, horror, and desperation that have long been dormant in our collective consciousness. The feelings we hadn’t given ourselves the space to feel—the capacity to grieve our people and reckon with our experiences as Asian Americans—have now inevitably, painfully surfaced. And it’s about time. [I invite you to continue reading at the Christian Century]

I want to pick up on something Grace writes later in the article: She speaks to the way in which the police, the media, and much of America quickly moved from a narrative of anti-Asian bigotry and violence to an alternative explanation. You see, the assailant, in his confession, claimed that he didn't target these spas because they were owned and operated by Asian women, but because they were a temptation to him, as he has a sexual addiction. Thus, no hate involved, and we can go back to putting our heads in the sand and Asian-Americans remain invisible. As Grace points out in the essay, Asian-Americans are beginning to step out and tell their stories. They are pushing against the narrative, both that they are to blame for the pandemic, and that they can be ignored by the wider society.

Grace closes her essay with these words that I wish to leave with you:

If you aren’t Asian American, please listen to our stories of discrimination, suffering, marginalization, racism, and racialization. Please hear our pain when we say that the shootings in Atlanta feel like a hate crime against our community. Please know that misogyny and the fetishizing of Asian women are deeply connected with racism and colonialism. Please fight against anti-Asian hatred so it will stop demoralizing us, demonizing us, and killing us. ["The Atlanta shootings have awakened a ferocious anger and grief among Asian Americans"]

May we, who are not part of the Asian-American community, have ears to hear and hearts to respond to these cries for justice.  #StopAsianHate

 

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