A Hate Crime by Any Other Name
Trigger Warning: Discussions of racism and violence against Black and Asian people
On Mar. 19, a white man was arrested for killing eight women, six of them were Asian. The eight women’s names are Delaina Yaun, Paul Andre Michels, Xiaojio Tan, Daoyou Feng, Soon C. Park, Hyun J. Grant, Suncha Kim, and Yong. A Yue. There was one victim who survived the shooting: Elcias Hernandez-Ortiz. This is a tragedy, this is a monstrous act motivated by hatred. A monstrous act that the killer admitted to committing, and yet, declaring this a hate crime is a controversial thing to say.
Why? Why is a white man murdering mostly Asian women, at massage parlors he specifically drove to that he knows to be run and staffed by Asian women, one of them being literally named “Young’s Asian Massage,” not a hate crime? Defenders of the racist murderer, those who say this isn’t a hate crime, point to his statement given to police, where he blamed his crimes on his “sex addiction” and said that the murdered women were “objects of temptation.” This “defense” is no defense at all, and utterly fails at disproving the idea that his murder spree was a hate crime, in fact, it supports the idea that his spree was a racial hate crime. The fetishization of Asian women and the stereotype that Asian massage parlors are a front for sex work is a result of and a form of racism.
America’s History of Fetishizing Asian Women
White people have fetishized Asia and Asian people for a very long time, it was “the Orient,” and often treated as mystical, and Asian women certainly felt the effect of this western fetishization. This fetishization went hand in hand with violence against the fetishized women, as the tragic events of this month reminded us. During the Second World War, at home the American government interned 120,000 Japanese Americans in concentration camps. America’s horrific treatment of Asian people during WWII wasn’t limited to Japanese Internment, in the first six months of the American occupation of Japan, American servicemen visited Japan’s “comfort women,” a system constructed by the Imperial Japanese government that forced women into sexual slavery, and they were often treated horrifically.
This fetishization of Asian women has continued to the present day, a study from Quartz shows that for white, Black, and Latino men were most interested in Asian women during heterosexual online dating (Asian men preferred Latino women.). Going beyond the data, according to a column in the Harvard Crimson (the school’s newspaper), “yellow fever” has become a colloquial term for a man who has a preference for Asian women and these men “seem to only ever date Asian women.” (Also for clarification, yellow fever is also the name of a viral infection, the two are wholly unrelated.)
Popular media in America and the West as a whole has helped keep this fetishization of Asian women alive through the depictions of them in popular media. The trope of the “China Doll” stereotype, where Asian women are depicted as docile, submissive, one could almost say, as objects of temptation, is something Hollywood is no stranger to, as Joey Lee explores in their 2018 academic paper on the subject. One of the films the paper explores is the 2001 film “Rush Hour 2,” where, at an all Asian women run massage parlour, the Asian women are revealed by the owners of the spa pulling “back the sliding doors, their hands positioned as if they are revealing goods to an audience.” That certainly sounds like fetishization, like the film was portraying them as objects, and yet, it gets worse, the women are “costumed to highlight their sexual features and suggest that they would be easily undressed and accessible.” The seductively dressed Asian women are also portrayed as “seductive.” This trope is not a relic either, it was portrayed in 2015’s “Ex Machina” which Lee examines in depth, and if you need any more evidence it’s not a relic, cast your mind back to what the killer of less than a week ago said his motive was.
Fetishization and Hate
It’s clear that the killer fetishized Asian women, and believed them to be nothing more than sexual objects, a dangerous and untrue belief our culture has done little to discourage and much to encourage. Yet, people have still said that we should wait for more of an investigation to tell if it’s a hate crime, and why? Well, for many people, it seems that they don’t believe that the fetishization of Asian women is racist, after all, in their minds, it’s thinking positively of Asian women! I hope that by this point in the piece I don’t have to explain why that is so very untrue, but for examples, well, just look back through this article to see the fate Asian women who were victims of fetishization met. Fetishization is dehumanizing, cruel, and one hundred percent racist. It wouldn’t be any less racist if, after being arrested peacefully and treated well by white police officers, the killer has said he did what he did because he hated Asian women and thought Asian people were inferior in every way to white people. In a way, he did say that he believed his victims, and all Asian women, were inferior to white people, because he viewed them as sexual objects, as not fully human, because of their race.
The shooting this monster carried out is a hate crime, the same way that when a young white man killed nine Black people at a Black church in Charleston and stated his motive was white supremacy, the media said that he committed a horrendous hate crime. The monster of this week, this man who a police captain (who is himself also a racist) said was having a “bad day” when he murdered eight people, committed a hate crime, and to call what he did any other name protects racists from consequences and even further endangers Asians Americans.
Follow this link to see a collection of various resources you can donate to to support the Asian American and Pacific Islander community (AAPI) in the wake of the awful tragedy this past week brought.
