Atlanta tragedy: Right-wing hate targets Asian women

Statement by Socialist Alternative (our sister organisation in the United States)

Socialist Alternative extends our condolences to the family and friends of the eight victims of a deadly shooting in Atlanta Tuesday evening. Six of the victims were Asian women, placing the attack squarely at the intersection of extreme sexism, racism, and xenophobia. 

Since the beginning of the pandemic last March, there have been 3,800 reports of hate incidents targeting Asian-Americans across the country, 68% of which were against women. This uptick was stoked by Trump’s xenophobic rebranding of COVID as the “China virus” or the “Kung flu,” fanning the flames of existing racism against Asian-Americans. 

While details are still emerging about the perpetrator Robert Aaron Long, it is clear that deeply held sexism was a core motivator in these murders. He claims that he targeted these businesses for providing “an outlet for his addiction to sex,” insinuating that he purchased sex from the women he killed. If true, this is an absolutely grotesque illustration of the extreme violence sex workers are exposed to and why it ranks among the most dangerous jobs. Regardless of whether he patronized these businesses or not, fetishizing and over-sexualizing Asian women is exactly why Asian massage parlors and spas are seen as places to solicit sex in the first place.

As Asian-Americans face a disturbing increase in violent attacks, and as COVID and the resulting economic crisis has exacerbated existing racial inequalities and the oppression of women, we urgently need a multi-racial, multi-gender mass movement to challenge all forms of racism, including racial violence against Asian Americans, and extreme sexism.

Total
1
Shares
Previous Article

Irish Sea border threatens political instability

Next Article

Year one of capitalism's Covid crisis

Related Posts
Read More

US: OccupyTogether spreads – despite repression!

The oftentimes brilliant Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Chris Hedges summed things up: “The state and corporate forces are determined to crush this. They are not going to wait for you. They are terrified this will spread. They have their long phalanxes of police on motorcycles, their rows of white paddy wagons, their foot soldiers hunting for you on the streets with pepper spray and orange plastic nets. They have their metal barricades set up on every single street leading into the New York financial district, where the mandarins in Brooks Brothers suits use your money, money they stole from you, to gamble and speculate and gorge themselves while one in four children outside those barricades depend on food stamps to eat.”

Read More

Tamil Refugees Held in Indonesia

Two hundred and fifty five asylum seekers from Sri Lanka have been forced to live in a small wooden boat in Indonesia since October 11th. The Tamil-speaking refugees were fleeing for their lives from Sri Lanka where a quarter of a million of their people are currently suffering in so-called “refugee camps”, in reality concentration camps.