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Nevilledog

(51,203 posts) Thu Mar 18, 2021, 06:39 PM Mar 2021

Are the Atlanta Killings a Hate Crime? The Suspect Doesn't Get to Decide.

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Tweet text:
Molly Jong-Fast🏡
@MollyJongFast
Oh wow, this is exactly right

Suspects Don’t Get to Decide If They Committed a Hate Crime
“I know of no intersectional hate-crimes case,” says one expert. But that may be what we need.
nymag.com
3:27 PM · Mar 18, 2021

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/03/are-the-atlanta-spa-shootings-a-hate-crime.html

On August 24, 1874, 22 Chinese women were held on a ship in San Francisco’s harbor. They had papers, but when inspected by California’s immigration commissioner and found to be traveling without male companions, they were declared “lewd” and barred from entry unless the ship’s master paid an extortionate sum, which he refused. This was legal, said the Supreme Court of California, because the state had a right to block “a lewd and debauched woman,” though no evidence was presented that they were sex workers. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled the state had gone too far, but victory was short-lived. President Ulysses S. Grant told Congress of an “evil — the importation of Chinese women, but few of whom are brought to our shores to pursue honorable or useful occupations.” The Page Act, passed in 1875, barred such “importation” of women from “China, Japan, or any Oriental country” for “lewd and immoral purposes.”

Throughout the following century, American soldiers stationed across occupied Asia engaged in a sex trade that, as historian Robert Kramm has written, “reproduced racist stereotypes of the obedient and sexually available Asian woman”; he estimates that “in Tokyo alone, fifty to seventy thousand sex workers catered to predominantly American servicemen during the occupation period.” In postwar Korea, American patronage of Korean sex workers was so codified, it was a matter of geopolitics. According to one local organizer, “The U.S.–South Korean alliance depended on these comfort women.”

On Tuesday night, Robert Aaron Long, 21, told police he had killed eight people at three Atlanta-area massage spas. Per Captain Jay Baker of the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office, Long also told officers there was no significance to the fact that six of his targets were Asian or Asian American women. “He does claim that it was not racially motivated,” Baker said. “He apparently has an issue, what he considers a sex addiction.” Long, he said, “sees these locations as a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate.” (Baker also offered a bizarrely nonchalant and sympathetic account of the self-described mass murderer they had managed to apprehend alive: “He was pretty much fed up and had been kind of at the end of his rope, and yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did.” The philosopher Kate Manne coined the term himpathy, the unearned empathy extended to men who commit misogynistic offenses, for days like this.)

There was already ample reason to take initial police accounts with a grain of salt — even before BuzzFeed reported that Baker had shared a racist shirt on Facebook that blamed China for the pandemic — but, as often happens, this uncritical recitation of a postarrest interview allowed the gunman’s words to define the narrative. Reuters initially headlined its piece “Sex addiction, not racial hatred, may have driven suspect in Georgia spa shootings: law enforcement.” As outrage built among a grieving Asian American community already grappling with a rise in hate crimes that have disproportionately singled out women, Reuters revised to a hedging acknowledgment: “Motive in Georgia spa shootings may not be race, but Asian-Americans fearful.” The updated headline wasn’t much better, implying that Asian Americans were overreacting or jumping to conclusions before all the facts were in.

*snip*