In addition to the recent police killings of Daunte Wright (20) in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, on April 11, 2021, just miles away from the Derek Chauvin trial taking place in downtown Minneapolis, and Adam Toledo (13) in Chicago on March 29, 2021, and the release of body cam footage on April 15, 2021, showing Toledo’s hands in the air before he is shot to death–we have now to contend with another mass shooting that took place in a Fed Ex facility in Indianapolis on April 15, 2021. Eight people–including four members of the local Sikh community–were shot and killed by a 19-year-old white man. At least seven more were injured.
References to the Oak Creek, Wisconsin, Gurdwara massacre on August 5, 2012, in which six Sikh worshipers were shot and killed by a 40-year-old avowed white supremacist, have already begun to appear in the reporting. When teaching this terrible event in my unit on post-9/11 racialization and violence, my students and I watch Valarie Kaur’s documentary Divided We Fall: Americans in the Aftermath (2008) about the murderous Islamophobic backlash that ended up “mistakenly” unleashing its fury on Sikhs across the country as well, while also reading Sunera Thobani’s article “Racial Violence and the Politics of National Belonging: The Wisconsin Shootings, Islamophobia and the War on Terrorized Bodies” (2012, full citation in the bibliography). Her incisive analysis of the foundational role that violence plays as a “race-making” practice and technology of the U.S. state and empire has always stuck with me: “it becomes impossible to think ‘race’ without simultaneously thinking of the violence that is the only condition of its possibility. In other words, ‘race’ is instantiated through violence, including its physical, sexual, psychic and epistemic forms” (282). The only. Opening fire at the Gurdwara becomes a spectacular display of the ways that “Such violence marks the Sikh body, and the larger Sikh community, as subject-able to such violence and, more importantly, to the racial subordination that such violence engenders, in the present moment, and hence, for the foreseeable future” (283).
The foreseen future is now. Again. This is not why I wanted to add a page on specific, high-profile incidents of anti-Asian violence to the Atlanta spa shootings section. There is a tremendous backlog of Asian American studies pages to complete. I do not need more acts of violence in the present to keep historicizing. Please stop.