Attacks have familiar ring of racism

SAN DIEGO — Racism deniers are either evil, naive or just dumb. Not to mention overrepresented among white male podcasters, Fox News hosts, and radio commentators.

On his podcast, Ben Shapiro — a white conservative who should stop talking about race altogether — offered a nugget of wisdom that was actually fool’s gold.

“The left decries anti-Asian hate, but only when they believe the culprit is ‘whiteness,’” Shapiro told listeners.

Sometimes, it seems like Americans of all colors can’t stop talking about race. Then, one day, something truly racist happens. And people want to talk about anything but race.

Now the deniers are at it again, all spun out over an attack this week on three Asian spas near

Atlanta.

In a horrifying take on “Groundhog Day,” Americans are — because of their failure to acknowledge and confront White supremacy — cursed to relive the same kind of tragedies.

The actors change, but the script always has a familiar rhythm. A young white male, feeling powerless against forces he can’t control, channels his anger at people of color. So he grabs a gun and seeks out a place where these people gather.

In 2015, 21-year-old White supremacist Dylann Roof found his way to the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., and killed nine African Americans who had gathered for Bible study.

In 2019, 21-year-old White supremacist Patrick Crusius traveled halfway across Texas to a Walmart in El Paso, where he allegedly killed 23 people and wounded 23 others. Most of the victims were Mexican or Mexican Americans.

And this week, near Atlanta, 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long allegedly shot and killed eight people — including six Asian women — at three spas known to employ Asian women, at least one of which was owned by an Asian woman.

Those are the facts. Now for the context.

First, the attacks on the spas took place on the heels of a wave of anti-Asian violence over the last several weeks, including acts of violence against elderly Asian Americans.

Next, we just closed out 2020, which produced a slew of anti-Asian hate crimes amid a pandemic that then-President Donald Trump blamed on China and dubbed “Kung Flu.”

Over the course of roughly a year during the pandemic, there were nearly 3,800 anti-Asian hate incidents, which include everything from shouting slurs to violent acts, according to the group Stop AAPI Hate. Sixty-eight percent of these attacks were aimed at Asian women, compared with 29% at Asian men.

Finally, there is the history of anti-Asian violence in the United States.

This dates back to the mid-1800s, when Chinese immigrants first arrived in California to do jobs that native-born Americans wouldn’t do. One task was dangling from ropes to lodge sticks of dynamite into mountainsides to build a railroad.

In 1882, Congress passed the unambiguously titled Chinese-Exclusion Act to ban further migration from China. As the curtain fell on the 19th century, in towns across the West, there were “anti-Chinese leagues.” There, like-minded citizens banded together to rid their communities of the same Chinese immigrants they had once welcomed as essential workers.

The 20th century bought more bigotry and pain. In the 1940s, during World War II, Japanese-Americans were put in internment camps. During the 1970s and 1980s, in Central California, the new target were refugees from Southeast Asia — including the Hmong, many of whom fled Laos after the Fall of Saigon because they feared punishment for having helped CIA operatives during the Vietnam War.

Brushing all that aside, there are a lot of Americans on social media and talk radio who still seem desperate to deny that race played any part whatsoever in the Asian spa shootings.

The deniers fall back on the familiar line that this was a lone gunman with some mental defect. Authorities have even said that in the case of the accused shooter of the Asian spas, that defect is a sex addiction that supposedly led the suspect to target massage parlors that he saw as a temptation.

Of course, we heard that from the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Department, and the department is now under scrutiny. Capt. Jay Baker, the director of communications and community relations for the department, glibly told reporters that Long had “a really bad day.” In April 2020, Baker posted racist material on Facebook, showing off a T-shirt that blamed China for the pandemic. It read: “Covid 19 imported virus from Chy-na.” In the post, which was removed, Baker wrote: “Love my shirt.”

This is not a guy who should decide what is, or isn’t, racist toward Asian Americans.

Who could deny that?