Public Discourse

 

Profiles of the victims

  • [Removed, pending consent from all the families for the victims’ names to be released.]

Commentary in Ohio

Commentary in the national public sphere

  • Ahn, Christine, Terry K. Park, and Kathleen Richards. “Anti-Asian Violence in America Is Rooted in US Empire.” Nation, March 19, 2021.
    • “Yet such hawkish rhetoric against China—which was initially spread by Donald Trump and other Republicans around the coronavirus—has directly contributed to rising anti-Asian violence across the country. In fact, it’s reflective of a long history of US foreign policy in Asia centered on domination and violence, fueled by racism. Belittling and dehumanizing Asians has helped justify endless wars and the expansion of US militarism. And this has deadly consequences for Asians and Asian Americans, especially women.”
  • Alba, Davey. “How Anti-Asian Activity Online Set the Stage for Real-World Violence.” New York Times, March 19, 2021.
  • Baldoz, Rick. “The ‘bad day’ Defense after the Atlanta Shooting Reinforced the Idea of White Victimhood.” Washington Post, March 26, 2021.
    • “White vigilantes have long sought to rationalize or absolve their violent acts by claiming that they were carried out in self-defense against disfavored groups, usually racial minorities or immigrants, whose presence was viewed as a threat to the social order. This rhetorical strategy casts White perpetrators as victims themselves by claiming that they were driven to violence as a response to the alleged misdeeds of unwelcome outsiders endangering the White community through malicious behavior — stealing jobs, spreading disease, promoting sexual deviancy or engaging in unfair economic competition.”
  • Basler, Cassandra. “Virus Of Hate: ‘We Are Not Your Fetish’—Combating Anti-Asian Racism And Sexism.” WSHU, March 26, 2021.
    • Cites Grace Kao: “She points to websites for people that only want to date women of Asian descent and genres of pornography. It’s part of the reason some people who attended vigils for the Atlanta victims in cities across the country have carried signs that say ‘I am not your fetish.’”
  • Basu, Sutapa, Connie So, and Velma Veloria. “Stand up Against Anti-Asian Hatred, Misogyny and Violence.” Seattle Times, March 19, 2021.
    • “We are immigrant Asian American women who grew up in this society. We personally know the damaging, and all too often deadly, impact of stereotypes. Imaged variously and repeatedly as sexual temptresses, exotic, dragon ladies, servile domestics, or wartime prostitutes, we are consistently portrayed as subservient and secondary objects.”
  • Cai, Weiyi, Audra D. S. Burch, and Jugal K. Patel. “Swelling Anti-Asian Violence: Who Is Being Attacked Where.” New York Times, April 3, 2021.
  • Chai, May-lee. “How Asian Women Are Relentlessly Objectified in American Culture.” Los Angeles Times, May 17, 2021.
    • “The fact that Asian women are punished for the ways white supremacy hypersexualizes our bodies is not unfamiliar to me. I was 13 or 14 years old when white veterans first started coming up to me to tell me stories of the sex workers in Asia.”
  • Chang, Ailsa. “A Sociologist’s View on the Hyper-Sexualization of Asian Women in American Society.” NPR, March 19, 2021.
    • Interview with Nancy Wang Yuen. “I actually think that Black Lives Matter is part of it, that because our society is finally having a racial reckoning, that they’re becoming aware that racism exists. And now we’re able to nuance race and nuance race intersecting with sexism, that all of this is America coming to a greater understanding of all the layers of bigotry and discrimination that the various groups of color have experienced in this country.”
  • Chuang, Angie. “Two Stereotypes that Diminish the Humanity of the Atlanta Shooting Victims—and All Asian Americans.” The Conversation, March 26, 2021.
    • “This second [less affluent] Asian America is less likely to work from home or have access to power. That, combined with perceptions that they are not fully American, may make them more vulnerable to attacks like the 3,800 documented hate incidents against Asian Americans since the pandemic started.”
  • Chee, Alexander. “Anti-Asian Violence Must Be a Bigger Part of America’s Racial Discourse.” GEN, March 16, 2021.
    • Cathy Park Hong on her book Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (2020), “What’s most important is that we need to really listen to each other and hear each other’s stories. A lot of the fractious divides have to do with the fact that we don’t know each other because everything that we’ve heard about each other has been through white people. Some Asian Americans think Black people are criminals, or they’re lazy, or these horrible, horrible stereotypes — that’s because white supremacy first established that idea. Some Black and Brown people think that Asians are submissive, or are diseased, or they’re the model minority, or whatever. That perception also came from white people. Our stories are still filtered through whiteness. No one knows us.”
  • Chen, Karissa. “The Atlanta suspect said he chose victims to ‘eliminate temptation.’ Why did we buy that?” NBC News, March 19, 2021.
    • “That is the state of being an Asian woman in America: Your existence is constantly dehumanized, sexualized and objectified; for many, you are merely a colonizer’s fantasy. The source of this stereotype is a complex one, simultaneously rooted in Western imperialism, white supremacy and the anti-immigration and anti-miscegenation laws of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.”
  • Cheng, Anne Anlin. “The Dehumanizing Logic of All the ‘Happy Ending’ Jokes.” Atlantic, March 23, 2021.
    • “it is a grave mistake not to understand that ‘mild’ and ‘violent’ racist sexism are on the same continuum. Here’s the thing that many people find hard to accept: Hatred does not preclude desire. Hatred legitimizes the violent expression of desire.”
  • Dewan, Shaila. “How Racism and Sexism Intertwine to Torment Asian-American Women.” New York Times, March 18, 2021.
    • Quotes Sung Yeon Choimorrow, Kyeyoung Park, Ellen Wu, and Helen Zia. “Many women who were in the sex trade were brought to the United States as brides, and some of them who were later separated or divorced from their husbands started massage parlors, a history that likely helped shape a perception of all Asian-run spas as illicit and the women who work in them as sex workers, Dr. Park said.”
  • Dhingra, Pawan. “The Most Effective Way to Fight Back Against Anti-Asian Hate.” CNN, March 21, 2021.
    • “In order to effect lasting and meaningful change, we need an educational campaign starting in K-12 schools that reveals the strength and complexity of Asian Americans—just like any humans. People’s lives depend on it.”
  • Dhingra, Pawan. “Racism is Behind Anti-Asian American Violence, Even When It’s Not a Hate Crime.” The Conversation, March 19, 2021.
    • “The presupposed connection between Asian women and sex dates back almost 150 years: In 1875, Congress passed the Page Act, which effectively barred Chinese women from immigrating, because it was impossible to tell if they were traveling ‘for lewd and immoral purposes,’ including ‘for purposes of prostitution.’ The assumption that all Chinese women were of questionable moral character placed the burden on the women themselves to somehow prove they were not prostitutes before being allowed to immigrate.”
  • Dyson, Michael Eric. “Why Don’t We Treat Asian American History the Way we Treat Black History?” Washington Post, March 26, 2021.
    • “By contrast [with Black history], Asian American history is often footnoted or compartmentalized, recounted and analyzed as a subplot in the bigger narrative.”
  • Fan, Jiayang. “The Atlanta Shooting and the Dehumanizing of Asian Women.” New Yorker, March 19, 2021.
    • “The incendiary rhetoric of a racist former President combined with the desperation stoked by an unprecedented pandemic has underscored the precariousness of a minority’s provisional existence in the U.S. To live through this period as an Asian-American is to feel defenseless against a virus as well as a virulent strain of scapegoating.”
  • Flora, Noah. “The General, the Mistress, and the Love Stories That Blind Us.” Nation, April 5, 2021.
    • Interview with Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez about her book Empire’s Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper. “The kind of no-brainer understandings about how inter-state relations between the US and Asia-Pacific are gendered and sexualized in particular ways, and the way that Asian women are its currency—that is why something like Atlanta makes sense to somebody who is wielding the gun. It’s been played out so many times before. We see it with the 2014 murder of Jennifer Laude by a US Marine in the Philippines, the way that Pacific islands and Asian lands are rendered pleasure destinations or nuclear targets—both sides of the same coin—and how Asian women are generally just understood to be available to all, but especially to white men. These are not isolated, individualized hate crimes. Rather, it’s an integral part of a white supremacist, misogynist racial system. That’s how we have to understand the moment in Atlanta.”
  • Gupta, Alisha Haridasani. “Tales of Racism and Sexism, From 3 Leading Asian-American Women.” New York Times, March 19, 2021.
    • Interview with Tina Tchen, Min Jin Lee, and Sung Yeon Choimorrow. “There’s been so much of just swallowing the assault, all this repression, and we carry it forward, saying, ‘Oh, it’s not a big deal, it’ll be OK.’ But now people are saying: ‘No more. We are first among equals. This is not OK.’”
  • Hallerman, Tamar. “Asians Have Long, Complex History Navigating Georgia’s Racial Divides.” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, March 26, 2021. Cites Leslie Bow, Daniel Aaron Bronstein, Stephanie Hinnershitz, Grace Ko, Helen Kim Ho, Khyati Joshi, Raymond Rufo, Chris Suh.
    • “Some say they have long felt trapped in a gray area, alternately ignored, targeted and lauded for being a ‘model minority.’ That they are not fully accepted as American — even if they’re citizens or have spent their entire lives here — and at the mercy of shifting political winds and the whims of the white majority.”
  • Ho, Jennifer. “To Be an Asian Woman in America.” CNN, March 17, 2021.
    • “To be an Asian woman in America means you can’t just be what you are: a fully enfranchised human being. It means you are a blank screen on which others project their stories, especially, too often, their sexualized fantasies—because US culture has long presented Asian women as sexualized objects for White male enjoyment.”
  • Ho, Jennifer. “White Supremacy Is the Root of All Race-Related Violence in the US.” The Conversation, April 8, 2021.
    • “The point I’ve made through all of those experiences is that anti-Asian racism has the same source as anti-Black racism: white supremacy. So when a Black person attacks an Asian person, the encounter is fueled perhaps by racism, but very specifically by white supremacy. White supremacy does not require a white person to perpetuate it.”
  • Hong, Nicole, and Jonah E. Bromwich. “Asian-Americans Are Being Attacked. Why Are Hate Crime Charges So Rare?” New York Times, March 18, 2021.
    • “But proving a racist motive can be particularly difficult with attacks against Asians, experts say. There is no widely recognized symbol of anti-Asian hate comparable to a noose or a swastika.”
  • “In the Wake of Atlanta: A Dialogue on Racism, Misogyny, and Asians in America.” Kansas State English Department, March 25, 2021.
    • Q&A with Professors Michele Janette and Tom Sarmiento. “And yet, the racialized discourse surrounding the pandemic ironically has flown under the radar for a year. Not only do we need to engage the Atlanta events intersectionally, but we also need to consider the relational intimacies between anti-Asianness and anti-Blackness, for example, directed as they are by white supremacy, patriarchal power, and capitalist exploitation.”
  • Jani, Pranav. “Why the Atlanta Murders Were Racist.” Medium, March 21, 2021.
    • “When we say ‘anti-Asian racism’ we have to include the specific ways that different Asians experience racism, in terms of gender, sexuality, class, and so much else.”
  • Jeong, May. “The Deep American Roots of the Atlanta Shootings.” New York Times, March 19, 2021.
    • Quotes Yuri Doolan, Katharine Moon, and and Judy Yung. “It is the instinct of the living to commemorate the dead, to make their passing not be in vain. I, too, am vulnerable to such impulses, and so I end by saying Georgia reminds us — I hope — that anti-Asian violence is also anti-women violence, anti-poor violence, and anti-sex-work violence, that our fates are entwined, that fighting oppression means fighting oppression not just in one’s own narrowly defined community, but also everywhere.”
  • Jiang, Irene, and Haven Orecchio-Egresitz. “The shooter blamed sex addiction, but experts have ‘no doubt’ the Atlanta killings were racially motivated.” Insider, March 18, 2021.
    • Quotes Grace Kao, Ellen Wu, Nancy Wang Yuen. “The sexual stereotypes associated with Asian women were reinforced through over a century of US military activities in Asia. Military men in Asian countries usually encountered Asian women in the context of romance or sex work, and those experiences quickly influenced mainstream stereotypes of Asian women, Wu said, especially in media depictions.”
  • Kim, Joey S. “The Paradox at the Heart of the Atlanta Spa Shootings and the Rise in Anti-Asian Hate.” Shondaland, April 1, 2021.
    • “This paradox is a constant oscillation between the Asian celebrity and the dehumanized or unnamed Asian victim. This paradox seems to continually sustain itself as a never-ending recitation of model-minority stereotypes, the proof that meritocracy works, and the silencing of the most vulnerable Asians in our country, including the women who died in Atlanta.”
  • Kim, Ju Yon. “The Story Does Not Begin in Georgia: A Letter to Students About the Recent Shootings.” Harvard Crimson, March 20, 2021.
    • “To our Asian American students, we share the frustrations of being rendered silent, complicit, and indebted as the model minority, of having the complexities of our experiences reduced to caricature, of having the knowledge gleaned from the richness of that experience and our desire for social change cast as ‘navel-gazing’ identity politics or attempts to play the ‘race card’—even when we are fighting for the right to walk outside our homes without fear of being punched, spat on, harassed, or shot.”
  • Kim, Lee Ann. “Opinion: Asian America women like me have been objectified and dehumanized. This was my experience in TV news.” San Diego Union-Tribune, March 26, 2021.
    • “Springfield at the time was 99 percent White, so the use of the N-word was confusing. News colleagues explained that the Ku Klux Klan, which was active in the area, used the N-word for anyone who is not a White Protestant. As the first and only person of color anchoring the news in the market, the N-word it turns out, was for me.”
  • Kim, Regina. “Atlanta Spa Shootings: What Korean-Language Media Told Us That the Mainstream Media Didn’t.” Rolling Stone, March 31, 2021.
    • “Families of the Korean victims have decried law enforcement’s and English-language media’s framing of the incident as a sexually motivated crime and not a racially motivated one.”
  • Kindig, Jessie. “The Violent Embrace.” Boston Review, April 5, 2021.
    • “What we lack here is not information or empirical evidence. What we lack is an attendance to Asian and Asian American women’s stories.”
  • Kolhatkar, Sonali. “The Roots of Anti-Asian Racism in America and Beyond.” Rising Up with Sonali, March 22, 2021.
    • Video interview with Mai-Linh Hong and Terry Park.
  • Kwon, R.O. “A Letter to My Fellow Asian Women Whose Hearts Are Still Breaking.” Vanity Fair, March 19, 2021‍.
    • “It’s not just that I love being a Korean woman; I also love that my life is full of Korean women. No one is more intimidating to me than ferocious Korean women, and it is part of my life’s work to try to more fully be one of these women.”
  • Lawsin, Emily, and Scott Kurashige. “Support for Asian Americans Must Go Beyond Performative Statements.” Michigan Daily, April 15, 2021.
    • “The message to leaders of higher education and corporate employers should be clear. Asian Americans have heard your statements./ Now it’s time to listen to us in shaping the policies and priorities that will exemplify your true values.”
  • Leong, Karen, and Karen Kuo. “US Has a Long History of Violence against Asian Women.” The Conversation, March 22, 2021.
    • “Long sought to eliminate the objects of his sexual temptations, Asian women. In doing so, he drew on the U.S.‘s long history of sexualizing Asian American women.”
  • McCaughan, Pat. “In the Southland, Grief, Rage and Calls for Action Follow Attacks on Asian Americans.” Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles, March 19, 2021.
    • Quotes Rev. Yein Kim, Rev. Jim Lee. “‘Until we actually see it as part of our national narrative, we’re never going to be able to change the story,’ Lee said. ‘There is a tendency for us to want to paint an overly optimistic picture of what our society can be in our better moments. But that’s only possible if we engage in actual repentance for what we have done, especially during this Lenten season. We need to read this history and commit to not look away, but to face it.’”
  • Mills, Robert. “Lowell Shares Painful Stories of Asian Hate at Vigil in Cambodiatown.” Lowell Sun, March 18, 2021.
  • Mitra, Durba, Sara Kang, and Genevieve Clutario. “It’s Time to Reckon with the History of Asian Women in America.” Harpers Bazaar, March 23, 2021.
    • “These women’s lives are a testament to their survival, enduring systems of war and global labor that displace millions, force migrations, and continue to exploit women’s work through systems of low-wage care work. It is time to narrate these women through their lives, not solely through the circumstances of their deaths. These women made lives in this country, had good and bad days, did many kinds of labor with their tired hands, laughed, dreamed, and built lifeworlds in a country intent on disappearing them.”
  • Nawaz, Amna. “Author Viet Thanh Nguyen on the ‘deep well’ of anti-Asian racism in the U.S.” PBS, March 18, 2021.
    • “‘We, as Asian Americans, have never been insulated from the entire anti-Asian feeling that the United States, every now and then, promotes towards Asian countries with which it builds competition,’ he said.”
  • Nguyen, Linh Thuy. “Asian Americans’ Economic Inequality is Violence, Too.” Seattle Times, March 19, 2021.
    • “If we can name physical attacks and deaths as racist violence, why can’t we name the system of racial capitalism that produces the economic precarity of living paycheck to paycheck an issue of violence, as well? Much of the mainstream focus on race and racial violence ignores the intersection of class.”
  • Nguyen, Viet Thanh. “From Colonialism to Covid: Viet Thanh Nguyen on the Rise of Anti-Asian Violence.” Guardian, April 3, 2021.
    • “Calls to stop anti-Asian hate will have limited impact without an awareness of the enduring history of anti-Asian violence carried out in American wars in Asia and European colonisation.”
  • Nguyen, Viet Thanh, and Janelle Wong. “Bipartisan Political Rhetoric about Asia Leads to Anti-Asian Violence Here.” Washington Post, March 19, 2021.
    • “While it is ever-lurking, the prominence of anti-Asian bias in U.S. life is cyclical. Though Asian Americans are often cast as a success story because of their high average levels of education and income, many Americans, at times of economic stress and uncertainty over U.S. global standing, associate Asian faces with a foreign threat.”
  • Ome, Morgan. “Why This Wave of Anti-Asian Racism Feels Different.” Atlantic, March 17, 2021.
    • Interview with Cathy Park Hong. “This is typical of this country, to not really focus on racism unless it’s sensationalized in some way, unless there’s a viral video, or someone gets murdered.”
  • Phillips, Steve, and Sharline Chiang. “Bold Asian American Activism and Its Roots.” Democracy in Color with Steve Phillips (podcast), April 1, 2021.
    • Podcast interview with Judy Tzu-Chun Wu.
  • Ramirez, Marc. “Stop Asian Hate, Stop Black Hate, Stop All Hate: Many Americans Call for Unity against Racism.” USA Today, March 20, 2021.
    • Quotes Gabriel Chin, Robert Green II, Mai-Linh Hong, Claire Jean Kim, Ruben Martinez, Jakobi Williams, Caroline Yang. “In the wake of this week’s killings, many have rallied in support of the Asian American community, producing a palpable sense of unity in the fight against anti-Asian violence. And some say the heightened solidarity also presents a chance for communities of color to effectively address the common enemy of white supremacy.”
  • Ramirez, Rachel. “The History of Fetishizing Asian Women.” Vox, March 19, 2021.
    • Interview with Celine Parreñas Shimizu. “When I hear those words, that the Asian women at those spas were ‘temptations’ that he wanted to eliminate, it really captures the legacy of the history and the law and popular culture constructions of Asian women — that they are the vessels of excessive sexuality.”
  • Redden, Elizabeth. “Students Seek Tangible Changes in Face of Anti-Asian Hate” / “Asian and Asian American Student Activists Call for Changes on Their Campuses.” Inside Higher Ed, April 20, 2021.
    • “The student activists are variously calling for the establishment of Asian American studies programs, expansion of mental health services for Asian American and Pacific Islander students, increased resources for cultural centers, improved processes for reporting hate and bias incidents, and more. The activism comes in the context of intense concerns about an increase in anti-Asian hate crimes since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.”
  • Shahani, Lila Ramos. “A New Low for Asians in America.” Rappler, April 2, 2021.
    • “The bigger picture here, of course, is white supremacy, to which other races react, often with brutal consequences. After all, colonizers have been deploying this divide-and-rule strategy for centuries, toying arbitrarily with territorial boundaries and notions of ‘racial difference.’”
  • Song, Min Hyoung. “Without Asian American Studies, We Can’t Understand American Racism.” Chronicle of Higher Education, April 5, 2021.
    • “These efforts are why Asian Americans have been able to assume a role in shaping the frame around the Atlanta massacre. They were building on decades of research and classroom experience — a vibrant corpus of knowledge that is unfortunately often ignored or even dismissed.”
  • Tran, Ly. “What a Bad Day Means to Me.” Vogue, March 23, 2021.
    • “That time when, on the evening of the Fourth of July, after a long day of painting red, white, and blue nails for our customers, explosive fireworks were suddenly and violently thrown into our salon by a group of boys jeering racial slurs, our carpet catching on fire, and my mother and I scrambling to put it out. Since then, Independence Day, a day of supposed freedom, holds a different meaning for me. That was a bad day.”
  • Tran, Matthew. “Deeper than ‘Hate’: Racial Violence and the Atlanta Shootings.” Roar Magazine, March 20, 2021.
    • “Above all, we must listen to and follow the lead of Asian women and sex worker movements who have been at the forefront of resistance against criminalization, police surveillance and state violence.”
  • Waxman, Olivia B. “A ‘History of Exclusion, of Erasure, of Invisibility’: Why the Asian-American Story Is Missing From Many U.S. Classrooms.” Time, March 30, 2021.
    • “Scholars agree that one of the reasons a full history of Asian Americans has not been incorporated into core U.S. History curricula in K-12 schools is because it doesn’t portray America in a positive light.”
  • Wun, Connie. “Stop Asian Hate: Connie Wun on Atlanta Spa Killings, Gender Violence and Spike in Anti-Asian Attacks.” Democracy Now, March 18, 2021.
    • “The way that we have framed the violence against our communities, however, has failed to address the systemic violence against our communities. We have not implicated white supremacy enough. We have not implicated xenophobia enough. We have not implicated gendered violence enough. We haven’t even come close to addressing, you know, the conflicts around anti-Blackness within the community enough. And so, what the narratives have done is they’ve individualized these acts of violence. And what we need to do is also have a systemic analysis of what’s happening.”
  • Yam, Kimmy. “Racism, Sexism Must be Considered in Atlanta Case Involving Killing of Six Asian Women Experts Say.” NBC News, March 17, 2021.
    • Quotes Sung Yeon Choimorrow, Catherine Ceniza Choy, Phi Nguyen, Ellen Wu. “Killing Asian American women to eliminate a man’s temptation speaks to the history of the objectification of Asian and Asian American women as variations of the Asian temptress, the dragon ladies and the lotus blossoms, whose value is only in relation to men’s fantasies and desires.”
  • Yuan, Karen. “The Talk My Chinese Parents Never Had With Me.” Atlantic, March 25, 2021.
    • “The tragedy of anti-Asian racism is that we partly can’t see it. If stories of racism aren’t shared within families, they’re likely even scarcer in official tallies of anti-Asian violence. The true scale and horror of violence against Asians in America may never be known.”
  • Yuen, Nancy Wang. “Atlanta Suspect’s Excuses Spotlight America’s Sexualized Racism Problem.” NBC News, March 18, 2021.
    • “When I reject or ignore sexual propositions from white men, some come back at me with racial slurs and even threats. Even the perception that I will not fight back if I am attacked racially is a form of racism intersecting with sexism.”

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