Less than two weeks ago, a white man went on a shooting spree at three Asian massage parlors in Atlanta, killing eight people – six of them Asian women. The horrific murders sent shockwaves across the United States and raised fears among the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community, which was already reeling from the surge in anti-Asian hate crimes linked to xenophobia exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. As the nation grieves and rallies around movements to #StopAsianHate, the spotlight is now on Asian massage parlors, which the murderer claimed were a “temptation he wanted to eliminate” because of his “sex addiction”.
We don’t know if any of the victims were sex workers or if they would have even self-identified as sex workers. But this has now become a conversation about sex work due the murderer’s “sex addiction” claim and the assumption by many anti-trafficking organizations and the police that Asian massage parlors are rife with sex trafficking. We also can’t ignore the long-standing history of fetishization of Asian women, anti-Asian racism, misogyny, and hatred towards Asian immigrants and sex workers at play in this case.
According to Captain Jay Baker of the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office, the murderer “was pretty much fed up and at the end of his rope, and yesterday was a really bad day for him, and this is what he did.” Such statements wrongly center and attempt to humanize the killer, while simultaneously failing to acknowledge the role of anti-Asian racism and misogyny. Apart from the killings themselves, these are found both on Baker’s social media feed, where he posted a picture of racist T-shirts blaming China for the pandemic, and in officials’ misspelling of the all the Korean victims’ names. Law enforcement still says there is no evidence that this constitutes a federal hate crime, despite the fact that the majority of victims were immigrant Asian women and all three of the massage parlors were Asian-owned.
