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One of the crime scenes in Atlanta
Photo: ERIK S. LESSER / EPA
"He had a very bad day yesterday," the investigating officer will say of the perpetrator who shot eight people and seriously injured another in Atlanta within an hour the day before yesterday.
Seven of the victims are women.
Six of them Asian-American.
The perpetrator drove to three massage parlors to kill these people.
The officer will quote the perpetrator as saying that the attacks were not racially motivated.
According to his own statement, the perpetrator suffers from a sex addiction and the wellness places are "a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate".
In this case, however, you cannot think of racism and sexism apart.
Not wanting to notice the racism in its statement as such is in fact already a mechanism of racist thinking.
Because the white assassin drove miles to three massage facilities, where he assumed to find not only women, but women of Asian descent.
He could have targeted a brothel, a porn video store, or a strip club, but his misanthropy was evidently aimed at women who read Asian.
One must therefore view this assassination with the glasses of intersectionality, i.e. multiple discrimination, in order to be able to grasp the whole problem.
Samira El Ouassil Right Arrow
Photo: Stefan Klüter
Born in Munich in 1984, is an actress and author.
In 2016 her book “The 100 most important things” (with Timon Kaleyta and Martin Schlesinger) was published by Hatje Cantz Verlag.
In 2009 she was candidate for chancellor of the »party«, which at the time was not allowed to vote in the federal election.
She was recently awarded the Bert Donnepp Prize for media journalism for her media-critical column »Wochenschau« (uebermedien.de).
The term intersectionality was coined by the African-American lawyer Kimberlé Crenshaw.
This stated that “the fight against racism must also include the fight against sexism”.
The professor of law at UCLA in Los Angeles and Columbia University New York developed her theses based on the case of Emma DeGraffenreid.
In 1976, she filed a lawsuit against General Motors alleging sexist and racial discrimination when she was hired.
The lawsuit was denied because General Motors had both Afro-Americans and women - but these African-Americans were mostly in the industrial and maintenance sectors, and all were men.
The women were usually employed at reception and as secretaries and everyone was white.
Crenshaw noted that DeGraffenreid was hired not because she was black or a woman, but because she was black and a woman.
This awareness of the fact that there can be two or more forms of discrimination which, when taken together, put a person at even greater risk, must be kept in mind, especially in attacks like the one in Atlanta, in order to be able to grasp the scope of the problem and make it visible.
The women killed were apparently the target not only because they were women or because they were read as Asian, but because they were read as women and as Asian.
Massage parlors = sex work?
In addition, the perversion of blaming Asian-read women responsible for the alleged uncontrollability of one's own sexuality is an age-old misogynous moment of post-colonial exoticization.
The shame about one's own libido is transformed into hatred of the desired person.
It is classic perpetrator-victim reversal.
And not only that: white stories of superiority, as cultivated by racist assassins, work primarily through the idea of the dangerousness of "the other".
Women as "the other" and non-white persons as "the other" increase in a notion of women of color who must be tamed, civilized or eliminated.
The prejudice assumed that the massage parlors would of course offer sexual services because Asian-American women work there is another aspect that rounds off the worldview of the perpetrator, his sexism and racism.
This devaluation is based on a long tradition of objectification, fetishization and hypersexualization of women who read Asian women, which runs through history and, above all, through popular culture.
In addition to all these misanthropes between manic chastity and xenophobia, as the young man must have evidently cultivated, there is currently a climate of anti-Asian racism in the USA - as well as worldwide - that has been intensified by the pandemic.
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Then you will hate this bookBy Enrico Ippolito
Historically, since the turn of the century, the consciously racist image of dangerous Chinese and Asian-read people has been cultivated in the USA for economic and political reasons.
On the one hand to have a human scapegoat for the rat-borne plague, on the other hand out of the hatred of the white railroad workers who lost their jobs as a result of the depression and who had a slight enemy image with the cheaper, because exploited Chinese workers.
The government gratefully accepted this hatred, and the media cultivated it.
"Chinese virus" versus "British variant"
Among other things, this led to Honolulu state officials setting a fire in the Chinatown district in 1900 to set 150,000 square meters of Chinese accommodation on fire.
In the past few years, the former President of the United States spoke of the "China virus" and "Kung Flu".
And even in current reports, the corona virus is still occasionally referred to as the “Chinese virus”, which deliberately or unintentionally continues the legacy of anti-Asian framing.
Why does it make a difference whether one speaks of the "Chinese virus" or the "British mutation"?
People can be read in Asia and are then discriminated against.
To read someone purely phenotypically »British« and therefore discriminate against them is hardly possible.
The "Stop AAPI Hate" reporting office recorded almost 3800 cases of antiasiaitic attacks in the USA last year.
more on the subject
Deadly attacks in Georgia: Investigators have so far no evidence of the alleged shooter's racist motive
In the largest US cities, anti-Asian attacks have increased 150 percent since the pandemic.
With the hashtag #ichbinkeinVirus, #jesuispasunvirus or #iamnotavirus, people of Asian readings around the world defend themselves against this racism.
In May of last year there was such an accumulation of cases in Germany that the South Korean embassy had to warn its compatriots against attacks on its website.
In front.
Germany.
To warn.
Had to.
Not covered with objectivity
Such resentments are also popular in the media, from the “yellow danger” to the “red dragon” - and SPIEGEL has not necessarily covered itself with objectivity when it comes to the Asian-related Covid covers.
The old bat soup jokes are still being warmed up in Germany, a South Korean boy group is being compared to a virus and the racist CCC insult is being unpacked (google it, I don't want to write it out here).
You have to keep in mind that incelic, self-radicalizing misogynists plus a global pandemic, which continues to be falsely framed in the media with reference to Asia, represent an acute threat - for women, for people of Asian origin and especially for women of Asian origin.
We must not ignore the connection between racism and sexism in order to be able to better protect people from falling victim to types "who sometimes have a bad day".
Icon: The mirror