I woke up this morning feeling like shit. Sickened, terrified, angry. Last night, a 21-year-old white man shot and killed eight people at three massage parlors in Atlanta. Six of them were women of Asian descent. Four of those six were, reportedly, Korean. There are still a lot of unknowns.
This horrific night and its aftermath are unspooling during a time when anti-Asian hate crimes are on the rise. These hate crimes have, in fact, notably been surging in America since last year, when people like this country’s former president blamed the coronavirus on China.
Naturally, people are taking to Twitter, Clubhouse, the internet to rage, to cry, to find solidarity and comfort among others who understand and share the nauseous storm of fear and anger and exhaustion they feel. And now there are reports of the gunman saying that his spree was not “racially motivated,” but instead fueled by a “sex addiction.”
Even if, and this is a big if, we can believe this person’s words, that the atrocities he committed last night weren’t racially motivated, that doesn’t undermine nor diminish the reality of racism and discrimination lived by minorities everyday in this country.
This is a long overdue wakeup call.
I knew these sorts of racist acts — both overt and subtle — happen, and have been happening for most of human history and recently, at an alarming rate. I’ve seen those Instagram posts about pressing your iPhone button five times to issue an emergency alert, or having your back against a wall if you ever need to stop to check something when you’re in the middle of the street. The videos of Asian elders flung and beaten to the ground are hard to watch, unsettling.
But they had seemed like isolated incidents, tricking me into a false sense of security. What are the chances of something like that happening to me? It’s the naive question that so many of us think when we see headlines of terrible events. The shooting last night punctured, finally, that flimsy bubble of ignorance, self-assurance, blinding optimism.
I don’t know where to go from here. Conversations with friends have helped. Messages from coworkers checking in (it’s also not lost on me that I’m the only East Asian person on my team) help. Even social media posts from strangers help. I don’t know if this is because I’ve always found solace in fiction, but I was reminded of a few books I’ve read recently, like Ling Ma’s Severance, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, and Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown. All three explore how race has been inextricably baked into the cyclical structures of our society, from the market economy, the movies we watch, the communities we live in. It’s only when something breaks that cycle — a viral disease, like in Severance, a war, a shooting — that self-awareness and -examination are sparked, that change can happen.
We don’t need virtue signaling, or empty words.
We need truth, justice, change: I hope that there’s some truth that comes out of this. There’s still a lot of speculation and uncertainty around the facts of what actually happened last night. I hope there’s justice for the eight people who were killed and their families and loved ones. I hope that there’s change that comes out of this, too, whether it’s in the way people think about their own biases and everyday actions, or the policies that federal and local representatives enact to protect their constituents.
