CWJC MOURNS THE VICTIMS IN ATLANTA

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CWJC MOURNS THE VICTIMS IN ATLANTA

The “Comfort Women” Justice Coalition mourns the death of all those killed in Atlanta on March 17, 2021. We mourn with both sadness and deep anger.  This is yet another attack in the long history of white supremacy and anti-Asian violence that has plagued this country.  This racism was only exacerbated by the Trump administration’s constant placement of blame on China for the Covid-19 pandemic, calling it the “Chinese virus” and/or “Wuhan virus.”  Stop AAPI Hate has tracked 3,800 such “incidents” in the last year, and 500 in the last two months alone: Stop AAPI Hate’s data reveals that the majority were hate crimes against women.

Despite the circumstances surrounding the March 17th incident, local public officials continue to maintain this was not a hate crime. In the follow-up to the shooting, Captain Jay Baker, the spokesman for the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office, dismissed the idea and said:  “Well he was having a bad day!”  Stating that these killings occurred as a result of a man having “a bad day,” is just another way of softening the gravity of the killings, although Mr. Robert Long, the alleged perpetrator, was overheard saying:  “I want to kill all Asians.” Captain Baker, himself, also has been found to have posted anti-asian sentiment onto his Facebook account (NBC News).

This was a targeted killing of six Asian women. Thus, it was a hate crime of both white and male supremacy and should be denounced as such.  There is a long history of fetishizing Asian women for their sexuality.  Colonial Orientalism, with its hyper-sexualization, has viewed women from Asia as “mysterious” and “possessing secrets” that western men can’t resist and have to possess.  When Mr. Long claimed that he had to target the women in Atlanta for his own “sex addiction,” he was just the latest white man to claim he just couldn’t “help himself” and that the women were to blame for his own mental health.

“AAPI women more than twice as likely to report hate incidents as men.”

—Stop AAPI Hate, March 2021

 In addition, there has been an element of victim-shaming of those who were killed.  Because these migrant women, whose ages ranged from 33 – 63, worked in spas, people have posed the notion that somehow they were partly to blame.

We, in CWJC, understand the stigmatization of Asian American women, and urge to justify sexual violence against them, too well.  It was used over and over again to explain the sexual enslavement of hundreds of thousands of women in the Japanese Imperial Army’s system of “comfort stations” during WWII. We understand the relationship between sexual violence and militarism and war, as well as their relationship to migration.

“Businesses are the “primary site” of discrimination (35.4%),
while 25.3% of reported incidents took place in public streets.”

—Stop AAPI Hate, March 2021

While working to set itself apart as a leader of industry, Japan continues to deny its own crime against humanity to the world. By refusing to formally apologize to the survivors and their families, Japan’s government continues to deny justice for “comfort women.” This denialism also must be seen in the rise of rightwing nationalism which has at its root racism and misogyny.

The attacks in Atlanta are not random, nor will they be the last of their kind. The pandemic, wars, and economic and political insecurity, all work to promote gender and racial violence.

We join with all those who say, NO TO THESE CRIMES! STOP THE HATE! END VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN!

We will be holding a socially distanced vigil at the “Comfort Women” Column of Strength Memorial for these victims on Saturday, March 27, 2021 at 11 am PDT.

Learn more about CWJC here.