Racism, misogyny, and the shootings in Georgia

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Host (Sean Rameswaram): A heads up. This episode is about a mass shooting, racism and misogyny. On Tuesday evening, Georgia's Cherokee County was on alert. At Bells Ferry Road in Woodstock, you can see several police cars on both sides of the roadway. Traffic appears to be at a standstill on one side. There was a shooting at a spa in Ackworth, a town just north of Atlanta. Right across the street from us, you can see there, it's taped off. Several investigators going in and out of the building right now. That's where the shooting took place. Three people dead, two injured. We're continuing to stay out here. Less than an hour later, there were two more shootings at spas in Atlanta. We have two crime scenes here, it's clear. Yellow crime scene tape in front of two places. Officers are outside the aromatherapy spa. You can see a lot of police cars there and crime scene tape. And then we're going to pan over here to the gold spa. Police arrested the suspect later that night. Officers later captured 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long, 150 miles south of Atlanta. In total, eight people were killed. Six were women of Asian descent. Some of the victims' names, they include Delaina Ashley Yaun, 33 years old, Paul Andre Michaels, 54, Xiao Jie Yan, and Dao Yo Feng, just 44 years old.

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Host (Sean Rameswaram): The day before the shooting, on the floor of the Georgia State Legislature, Senator Michelle Au, who represents the state's 48th district, said this. Georgia should not consider itself immune from this epidemic. And to be clear, the epidemic I'm referring to is not COVID-19, but racism towards Asian Americans. In the last year, 32 incidents of hate crimes towards our AAPI community here in Atlanta have been reported.

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Senator Michelle Au: Yeah, the timing of my remarks is in some ways, it's in some ways remarkable just how proximate it was to me speaking about this issue. But in another way, anytime I spoke about Asian American discrimination and violence, especially in this last year, there would have been something that happened pretty soon after. We need attention to this issue as a preventative, just as much as we need to shine light on incidents that have already taken place. It doesn't feel good to be right about some things. It doesn't feel good to be right about this. But I'm hoping that we can channel this attention now towards the change that we need to see.

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Host (Sean Rameswaram): This crime, these shootings happened in the Atlanta area, not far from the district that you represent. Can you talk a little bit about what it is like for the Asian American community living in the Atlanta area?

Senator Michelle Au: Yeah, so I've talked with many members of my community, and my community skews heavily Asian American Pacific Islander. I'll just tell you that my Senate district, which is District 48, is more than 24% AAPI as of 2010. And we're still awaiting the latest census to show us what those numbers are now, but I assume it's going to be even higher than that. So in my communities, what I'm hearing is that people are terrified, right? They feel unsafe. They're concerned about doing even the simplest things outside of their homes, like going to the supermarket. Especially our Asian elders who have been targeted, especially in other cities, are extremely concerned. And there is a sense that up until now, not enough attention has been paid to this issue. And even when these issues get reported or brought up, that people don't notice and don't listen and don't care.

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Host (Sean Rameswaram): Yeah And you know as a lawmaker I know you trying to bring more attention to this issue because you just spoke on the floor of the Georgia State Senate about it But after something so high profile that gotten local attention that gotten national attention that even gotten international attention what action do you think needs to be taken at this point

Senator Michelle Au: I want to start with the basics because I think that we have really been behind in how we are addressing discrimination and violence in the AAPI community. So the first thing I would like to do is to do what we're doing right now, which is to raise awareness, because I think that many people in our community, especially people who live outside the AAPI community, aren't even aware that this is going on. And the reason I know this is because after I gave my speech on the Senate floor, many other legislators came up to me saying, oh, thanks for saying that. I didn't know this was going on. So even to people who are so invested in current events in the state of the state, we're not aware that these incidents were taking place. So I think raising awareness is the very first thing that we can do.

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Senator Michelle Au: The second thing I would like to work on, and this is going to be work that has to be done both from the legislative level and with community partners, is making it easier for people to report these incidents as they happen. And I think I've said in the past that it's difficult to fix a problem when you can't measure the problem, right? And we know that these incidents, when they're not so big and flashy like this, when they don't command as much attention, tend to be vastly underreported, right? And there's a lot of reasons for that. In the AAPI community, especially one that has many like new immigrants, new Americans, there are significant language barriers that people don't feel comfortable reporting to someone who doesn't speak their language. They don't want to engage with law enforcement. There's an apprehension of law enforcement itself, sometimes with respect to, you know, immigration status, that there's a reasonable fear and apprehension for engaging government entities and that type of thing. And also people feel from watching the media and watching what has been happening that even if they do report, nothing happens because this has been going on, as we noted, for a year. And we've been talking about it, at least in our communities, for a year or more. And no one has seen any significant change and no one has felt any safer. And if anything, people feel more unsafe because these incidents are actually escalating.

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Host (Sean Rameswaram): Senator, I'm glad you brought up law enforcement because there's been a lot of scrutiny on Captain Jay Baker. He's a spokesman for the Cherokee County Sheriff's Office, and he talked about the suspect in custody in a press conference. Let me go into a little bit of detail. So the suspect did take responsibility for the shootings. He said that early on once we began the interviews with him. He claims that these and as the chief said, this is still early, but he does claim that it was not racially motivated. He apparently has an issue, what he considers a sex fiction, and sees these locations as something that allows him to go to these places. And it's a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate. And he got a lot of criticism for saying... He understood the gravity of it, and he was pretty much fed up at the end of his rope. And yesterday was a really bad day for him, and this is what he did. And since then, there's been a lot more scrutiny on the captain and people have found some anti-Asian Facebook posts from him. And given what you said about trust, what's your message to law enforcement right now?

Senator Michelle Au: I think that what we've been hearing is exactly why people don't report crimes. Because when they see that this is what happens, even when a murderer admits to killing eight people, and this is how gently and, you know, gingerly you're treated by the people who are supposed to be protecting the community, not protecting the criminal, then it feeds into the exact reasons that people don't trust law enforcement. I want to be very prudent in how we're interpreting some of the information we're getting, particularly about the Facebook page of the captain and these types of things, I want to get a little bit more confirmation and not run with it as absolute fact. However, I will say that the fact that this Facebook page existed at all, whether it was his or someone else's, and the fact that these products existed at all, you know, the t-shirts that people are showing that had anti-Asian sentiments and just very crass types of broadly racist stereotypes is part of a larger culture of why Asian American discrimination has been tolerated for so long, because I think that it's a type of racism that people are more comfortable with for some reason, that we accept it in a way that we don't accept other types of racism. It's somehow more palatable to us. So having someone who is in power, who is in law enforcement, be able to so blithely discount the lives of the victims and to excuse in a pretty broad way the motivations of the shooter of the murderer is really shocking to see and it disappointing

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Host (Sean Rameswaram): What do you think the community the greater Atlanta community the greater Asian American community needs right now to heal

Senator Michelle Au: I think we need in the immediacy is that we need support for the families of those who have been affected. And we are still gathering information about the victims and their families, but they are going to need support, right? These were all low-wage earners. They're working in these spas for what we presume is not very much money. We don't know who they were supporting, but they're going to need financial help. So as we get that information, I would like to see our community organizers and the larger Atlanta and Metro Atlanta community really try to chip in and support these families through what must be an incredibly difficult time. I'm sure they are also having a very bad day. So let's do that first. The second thing that I'd like to see is a little bit more speaking out on these issues from people who aren't necessarily in the AAPI community, right? When you have a community that has been historically overlooked and had their issues dismissed in a big way, right? These problems are not new. None of this is new, right? That what helps perhaps the most is to have other voices, other champions, other allies speak to those same issues and amplify them, right? Because clearly that's what we need in this moment. If people aren't listening to just us talking, we need to talk louder and we need other people to be saying the same thing.

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Host (Sean Rameswaram): Well, Senator Au, thank you so much for making time for us today. Thank you. I appreciate it.

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Host (Sean Rameswaram): Coming up, why attacks like this aren't about racism or misogyny. They're about both. Support for Today Explained comes from Built Rewards. These days, it seems like everybody has a rewards program. You swipe your card and you get one cent on the hundred dollars. But with your rent, frequently, you just pay month after month. You never get anything from it other than that roof over your head. Not anymore, says Built Rewards. Built Rewards says it lets you earn points on your rent. By paying rent through Bilt, they say you can earn flexible points that can be redeemed toward hundreds of hotels and airlines, perhaps a future rent payment, your next Lyft ride, and so much more. Your home isn't just where you sleep. It's your community. And Bilt wants you to go out and do things in the community. You can eat at your favorite local restaurants, then earn more points. You can get VIP treatment at certain fitness studios. You can enjoy exclusive experiences just for Bilt members every month. When you're ready to travel, they say Bilt points can be converted to miles or hotel points all around the world. You can earn points on rent and around your neighborhood wherever you call home by joining Bilt.com slash Explained. That's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T dot com slash Explained.

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Host (Sean Rameswaram): Kate Mann, you're the author of a book that's called Entitled, How Male Privilege Hurts Women. And there's been a lot of speculation about the motive behind this attack. The police say the shooter denies having a racial bias and he claims some kind of sex-based motive. Is that a real distinction to you?

Kate Mann: No. Gender and race always intersect. One of the crucial things to bear in mind, too, is that we really need to understand these kinds of heinous crimes from the perspective of the victims. Rather than the perpetrators. And certainly from the perspective of the Asian American women who were clearly targeted in this crime with six out of the eight murdered people being Asian American women, the idea of separating out their gender from their race in that way makes very little sense. They were targeted clearly as Asian American women and perhaps also as people who were perceived, rightly or wrongly, as sex workers.

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Kate Mann: So let's talk about Asian women in particular and how they're viewed in this society. How might that have made them targets here? So obviously we want to be careful at this point of speculation, but one thing that we do know based on the, shall we say, memorable press conference given by the county sheriff's office where this crime occurred, we were told that the shooter targeted these women because they were a source of temptation to him that he felt that he had a quote unquote sex addiction and that these women were kind of an illicit source of this temptation he had to visit the various establishments where they were workers. And one thing that is important to remember in that context is that Asian American women are often stereotyped, objectified, fetishized by white men such as the shooter Robert Long in ways that position them as particularly sexually submissive, perhaps sexually desirable, and otherwise kind of exoticised, fetishised, and othered.

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Kate Mann: So while this is by no means meant to be a diagnosis of the shooter's mindset, I think this is important context to bear in mind the ways in which Asian women are routinely seen as the other for the purposes of kind of sexual conquest by white men. What do you call this phenomenon of men dealing with their own discomfort by using violence? I mean, so setting aside the kind of spurious idea of a sex addiction, which seems very exonerating, a piece of exonerating ideology in this context, it is unfortunately routine for the most entitled, and particularly this is unfortunately true of white men, that when white men feel that a woman has brought them shame, which could be for a variety of reasons, It could be that she's left him and so he feels ashamed. It could be that he feels she's not sexually available enough and so he feels ashamed in the case of so-called incels. Or it could be as here because she's seen as too sexually available and so he feels ashamed. And unfortunately, I mean, we all can feel shame, but unfortunately, when the most entitled people feel shame, they often are tempted to do what Eric Erickson called destroying the eyes of the world. So they want to destroy the eyes of someone who would look at them in a way that would make them feel ashamed or make them feel inadequate in the gaze of others.

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Kate Mann: And we see that borne out in the fact that there are these horrifying crimes of intimate partner homicide, of family annihilation, of incels lashing out violently against women they perceive as not sexually admiring them. And here we have a variant on that kind of case, seemingly, at least according to the official narrative right now, of a man lashing out at women who made him feel ashamed because he wanted them and they were sexually available to him in his mind.

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Kate Mann: You wrote recently about how individual cases of violence get a lot of attention, but it can be harder to think about the broader state of misogynistic violence. And as more details about this attack come to light, what should people try to keep in mind about sexism and racism here?

Kate Mann: Yeah, I mean, I think as well as keeping in mind their intersection, I think it's important to bear in mind that the murder of women by men is unfortunately ubiquitous. And often it targets the most vulnerable women as we saw in this case. We know though that between two and three women are murdered every day on average in the US by a former or current intimate partner. We also know that there is a veritable epidemic of the murder of trans women, particularly trans women of colour. And so bearing in mind that the cases that make the news are often the quote-unquote kind of splashier cases where you have a stranger to the victims. It's just worth bearing in mind that we don't hear all the stories. And this isn't to take away one iota from the horrific tragedy that the victims that we do hear about have faced and that their families are undergoing. It's to say that we can think about also enlarging and extending our focus to encompass all of the victims of male violence, some of whom their stories are never told.

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Host (Sean Rameswaram): Kate Mann is a feminist philosopher and professor at Cornell University. I'm Halima Shah, filling in for Sean Rameswaram. It's Today Explained. Our team includes Cecilia Lay, Will Reed, Muj Zady, Amina El-Sadi, and Jillian Weinberger. Afim Shapiro is our senior audio engineer. Our facts are checked by Laura Bullard. We got extra help this week from Paul Mounsey and Ellen Eldridge. And our music comes from Breakmaster Cylinder and Noam Hassenfeld. Liz Kelly Nelson is Vox's editorial director of podcasts. Today Explained is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and you can connect with us on Twitter. We're at today underscore explained. You can also email us at todayexplained at fox.com.

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