I’ve been thinking about the shootings at three massage parlors that took place in Atlanta, Georgia on Tuesday night, where a white man allegedly just having “a bad day” went on a shooting rampage leaving eight people dead, six of them women of Asian descent.
I’ve also been thinking about how the police department didn’t classify this as a terrorist act or even a hate crime from the get-go, and I’ve been thinking about how instead of treating Tuesday night’s events as an inexcusable, monstrous crime, the police department chose to explain where the terrorist was coming from, and chose to humanize him instead of his victims. Sex addiction, the police explained, had led this 21-year-old White dude to want to “eliminate” the source of temptation, those three massage parlors that, according to an article in the New York Times, are located on a stretch of the Piedmont Heights neighborhood in Atlanta that is considered the “red-light district.”
All that thinking has left me with the belief that if it’s not racism, it’s misogyny, and if it’s neither, it’s both. I know this because the perpetrator is an angry White man…
As an Arab-Muslim living in the US, I have gotten more than my share of the prejudice and racism some white Americans harbor against those they see as the face of all that is wrong in their world. By the time the twin towers fell on September 11th, 2001, I had been blamed for everything from the First Gulf War to the Oklahoma City bombing (an angry White man left an angry message on my family’s answering machine before the other angry White man was identified as the perpetrator of the latter). I knew I was in for quite an unfortunate ride in 2001 as I watched the aftermath of that darkest of days that changed the world on live television and felt complete dread, though I must admit that I was lucky enough to be in a place in my life then that insulated me and helped spare me of any direct hostility or violence for what I am at face value — a representative of that era’s bogeyman.
Still, I had to hear people be racist while keeping my mouth shut at school and work in the period following 9/11, and it traumatized me and showed me how little I was worth as a human being to the people I sat next to and dealt with on a daily basis.
It’s easy to think that, at least in some ways, the US has come a long way since the First Gulf War, and even since 9/11. At the very least, being openly racist at work today is grounds for losing one’s job, possibly ruining an entire career, and thanks to the far reach of social media, it can be grounds for a complete shunning by society altogether.
Still, being a person of color living in this country will always carry with it a certain (well, great, actually) amount of risk, a risk that one day you will be a target and/or victim of White hate, rage and unfettered violence that too often goes unpunished. Buried within that risk is the reality that it’s just a matter of time until you, a marginalized person, will be part of the latest collective bogeyman to ruffle White feathers.
This is what our Asian brothers and sisters are right now: the collective bogeyman ruffling White feathers. And what’s ruffling White feathers right now is COVID-19, that inconvenience of gargantuan proportions that just had its first anniversary this month. COVID-19 continues to rage on and disrupt our lives in big ways, even as we approach the end of the nightmare with vaccinations. Of course, I like to think of COVID-19 as the bogeyman in this scenario, which it is, but because everything has to be someone else’s fault for some people, particularly those who watched the last president with twinkles in their eyes refer to COVID-19 as the “Chinese Virus,” it is Asian Americans that are bearing the brunt of White anger and rage, becoming its targets.
We can analyze the heck out of what drove the latest angry White man to kill people — most of them Asian women who may or may not have been sex workers — but analysis of this sort has become but a waste of time.
Angry White men have been showing us and telling us who they are forever. They’ve been telling us through manifestos, by chanting like zombies with tiki torches in their hands, and by convening with their brethren online from their mothers’ basements…there is nothing to analyze here. These angry White men are dealers of indiscriminate hate toward anything that isn’t like them and/or is above them. This can be skin color, gender or sexual orientation — it does not matter. If you’re different and/or better off in any way than they are, angry White men are ready to put you in your place, which is often a grave.
Meanwhile, we, as in American society, have paid them no mind, part because we like to chalk abnormal (if not downright terrifying) behavior and the talk that comes with it up to lunacy, and part because we live in a racist country where the peaceful protestors of Black Lives Matter are met with riot police and those who storm the Capitol are given enough space to kill a Capitol police officer.
Either way, no one has paid these expressive and vocal angry White men the kind of mind they want, so like the toddlers with behavioral problems they are, they have been acting out, and instead of putting them in time-out, those whose response makes or breaks how that behavior is handled enable them by making excuses like tired parents who reach for “boys will be boys” whenever possible. And if those excuses aren’t infuriating enough, sometimes another scoop of racism is added to the racism sundae, like when Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson did when he said the quiet part out loud and proud about his feelings on the events at the Capitol on Jan. 6:
“I knew those were people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law, and so I wasn’t concerned. Now, had the tables been turned — Joe, this could get me in trouble — had the tables been turned, and President Trump won the election and those were tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and antifa protesters, I might have been a little concerned.”
https://people.com/politics/ron-johnson-speaks-out-after-remarks-about-capitol-rioters-blm/
No matter how you slice it, racism is a huge problem in this country, and like sickle cell anemia being in its sufferer’s DNA, racism is in America’s DNA (no offense to sickle cell anemia or its sufferers). Pearl Harbor, 9/11, COVID-19 — all of these are merely triggers for an ever-present condition that is a ticking time-bomb, and it’s difficult if not impossible to argue against this objective truth.
But like anything else ever present, racism has evolved and often intersects with misogyny as it did in Atlanta this week, and for this type of hybrid hate, there is but one kind of treatment: we have to start taking angry White men at face value. After all, isn’t that how this country has succeeded in keeping people of color, women, and the LGBTQ community from using their justifiable anger to commit acts of inherent terrorism? It is certainly what has kept them the victims of angry White men.