No one should turn a blind eye to wave of anti-Asian violence
2019: trying to help Asian Americans in the Houston area cope with both the pandemic and the scapegoating that many have faced because of their ethnicity.
Two days earlier, a man had gone on a killing spree in the Atlanta area, killing eight people at three spas. Seven of the victims were women, and six were Asian, with four being of Korean descent. So there was a vigil to organize, among other things.
“It was a shock to me but it was also not a surprise, because I felt like something like this was going to happen,” said Shih, a medical pharmacist based in Pearland who serves on the board of United Chinese Americans. “It’s not a matter of if it’s going to happen — it’s a matter of when.”
The suspect, a 21-year-old white man, reportedly denied that the slayings were racially motivated, telling law enforcement officers that he has suffered from sex addiction and was trying to eliminate a source of “temptation.”
Some seem to have taken that claim at face value, as if the word of an alleged mass murderer carries more weight than the plain facts. A spokesman for the Cherokee County, Ga., sheriff ’s office told reporters that the suspect “had a bad day, and this is what he did.”
“People are very angry and frustrated,” Shih told me.
Many, she added, were having doubts about how much they trust the criminal justice system to handle this case, especially given the comments about the suspect’s supposed sex addiction, and the implication that his decision to target these three spas should be understood in that context: “A lot of this put the burden back on the community, as if Asian women are to be blamed.”
That anger and frustration are entirely understandable, as is the grief and fear many Asian Americans are feeling in the wake of the spa shootings — and not for the first time.
It’s been more than a year since the first cases of COVID-19
were diagnosed in the United States, a threat that became real for many in our area when the Houston Rodeo was shut down on March 11, 2020. This entire time, advocates for Asian American Pacific Islander — AAPI — persons have been sounding the alarm about the rhetoric used by some leaders to describe the situation.
Then-President Donald Trump led the charge last year, referring to COVID-19 as “the Chinese virus,” and sometimes, even more belligerently, as “kung flu.” This coarseness found an appreciative audience at his campaign rallies.
And even the more well-mannered members of his party, who were eschewing such language themselves, defended the president’s decision to peddle it. U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, for example, defended Trump’s use of the phrase “the Chinese virus” last year, even as he himself was referring to it as “the coronavirus.”
“China is to blame,” Cornyn said in March
2020, after being asked about Trump’s language, “because the culture where people eat bats and snakes and dogs and things like that — these viruses are transmitted from the animal to the people, and that’s why China has been the source of a lot of these viruses.”
Even at the time, it was wrong — short-sighted as well as callous — to dismiss fears of Asian Americans being targeted as idle, or animated by an excess of politically correct sensitivity. On March 14 that year, three members of a Chinese American family, including a 6-year-old and a 2-year-old, were stabbed at a Sam’s Club in Midland. A store employee was also injured in the attack, which the FBI quickly determined to be a hate crime.
“The suspect indicated that he stabbed the family because he thought the family was Chinese, and infecting people with the coronavirus,” the agency noted in a report, which was prepared by the FBI’s Houston office and obtained by ABC News.
The report warned that the stabbing would likely not be an isolated incident: “The FBI assesses hate crime incidents against Asian Americans likely will surge across the United States … based on the assumption that a portion of the US public will associate COVID-19 with China and Asian American populations.”
That has sadly proved to be the case. On Monday, state Rep. Gene Wu, a Democrat from Houston, introduced a resolution in the Texas House condemning anti-Asian racism. It notes that the group Stop AAPI Hate received close to 3,800 reports of anti-Asian discrimination from March 19, 2020, to Feb. 28, ranging from verbal assaults and shunning to physical assaults, including on elders.
The resolution is coauthored by the three other AAPI members of the chamber: Democrat Hubert Vo, also of Houston, and Republicans Angie Chen Button of Garland and Jacey Jetton of Richmond.
Some Republicans have arrived at the stance that Americans who object to such language are evincing a disdain for free speech.
U.S. Rep Chip Roy, a Republican who represents Texas’s 21st Congressional District, illustrated this attitude during a Thursday hearing on the Atlanta-area attacks held by the House Judiciary Committee.
“There are old sayings in Texas about find all the rope in Texas and get a tall oak tree. We take justice very seriously. And we ought to do that. Round up the bad guys,” said Roy, who was apparently quoting the Oklahoman Toby Keith’s song “Beer for My Horses” rather than an old Texas saying, per se.
Roy continued: “My concern about this hearing is that it seems to want to venture into the policing of rhetoric in a free society, free speech, and away from the rule of law and taking out bad guys.”
His remarks drew a passionate rebuke from
U.S. Rep. Grace Meng, a New York Democrat. “Your president, your party and your colleagues can talk about issues with any other countries that you want, but you don’t have to do it by putting a bull’s eye on the back of Asian Americans across the country, on our grandparents, on our kids,” she told Roy. “This hearing was to address the hurt and pain of our community to find solutions, and we will not let you take our voice away from us.”
You can, of course, believe in the rule of law and the pursuit of justice while also believing that the broader community has a role to play in upholding a climate of respect for each other’s dignity and humanity.
I recalled a comment Shih made a year ago, when we were all coming to terms with what the pandemic might mean. She and other AAPI community leaders were already warning about the harm that Trump’s incendiary rhetoric — widely seen as a way of deflecting blame from his administration’s botched handling of the public health crisis — might bring.
“It’s really not fair to us,” Shih said at the time.
That’s right. It isn’t fair that Asian Americans have been breezily targeted this way and that even now, in the wake of a mass murder that targeted these three particular businesses, that we’re being asked to reserve judgment about the suspect’s motives — as if misogyny were separable from racism, in any case.
It remains the case that glib rhetoric about “the Chinese virus” serves no useful purpose, and contributes to a climate of casual vilification that has real and tragic consequences for our neighbors’ wellbeing, livelihood and lives.