The Surge of AAPI Hate Crimes and the Passivity of White Supremacy
I don’t know how to write about this.
I don’t know how to be angry and sad on a public blog forum when I can’t even be angry and sad with my friends or my boyfriend. When I hold it all in my body like air bubbles underwater.
Photo from Al Jazeera.
“Patiently educating a clueless white person about race is draining. It takes all your powers of persuasion. Because it’s more than a chat about race. It’s ontological. It’s like explaining to a person why you exist, or why you feel pain, or why your reality is distinct from their reality. Except it’s even trickier than that. Because the person has all of Western history, politics, literature, and mass culture on their side, proving that you don’t exist.”
I don’t even know if I have anything new to say on a topic like this. But I was having a discussion with some colleagues today, and something stuck with me - the passive language we use to describe crimes against women and minorities.
“Woman raped on way home from work.”
“Black student killed while walking home from convenience store.”
“Six Asian women murdered in Atlanta.”
What do these headlines have in common? There’s no action in them. According to these headlines, these things are just happening to women, to Black people, to Asian people. Elderly Asian folks are being assaulted across the country, not: White supremacist stabs Asian man on NYC subway.
As I’ve discussed several times before, the way we speak about things holds meaning. When we discuss crimes committed against minorities, we discuss what’s happened, not who is doing it. We’re seeing that something wrong is happening but not addressing the root of it.
When a captain in the Atlanta sheriff’s office said the shooter acted the way he did because the man “had a bad day,” we can examine not only his racist language but also his sexist attitude. We tend to forgive men, especially white men, much easier than women or women of color. We also tend to believe them more. While the captain was savagely ripped apart by almost everyone, it doesn’t negate the fact that he felt comfortable saying something like this in the first place. He didn’t feel bad saying it. He didn’t feel bad posting a racist photo of a t-shirt blaming the coronavirus on China.
Language matters. It matters when talking about the victims, and it matters when talking about the people perpetrating the crimes. It also matters when we talk about the movement overall. So yes, while we should be working to stop Asian hate and promote the Black Lives Matter movement, we should also be working to eradicate the root of the problem -- white terror.
Here’s a poem. Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
Am I allowed to be angry about this?
Standing at the crossroads of almost but
not quite, I wonder about the man who
would introduce me first by my race, and then
my name. Who slapped me in the face &
had the audacity to claim I was just another white
woman accusing a brown man of abuse. Am
I allowed to be angry about this, or is it another
instance where I must stand silent as an
ally, & let the real Asian women let loose their
anger & their fears, while my anxiety sits
as tethered knots from my chest to my tongue &
these are the days where I wish I didn’t feel
so uncertain about if I’m Japanese or not. To the women
who were murdered at the spa yesterday, I’m
sorry someone saw you as an object instead of a human, &
I wish there was more I could say to make this
world heal a bit, to bring you home to a country that holds
you in its arms outstretched, regardless of if you’re
white.
