Critical Feminist Reflections on the Atlanta Murders of March 16,2021

On March 16, 2021, six Asian American women and two men were slain by gunshot in the suburbs of Atlanta. The media’s use of storefront signs with the words “spa” or “massage” signaled the small businesses many of us see in strip malls across the United States. Their association with “Asian women” evokes centuries-old connotations—steeped in power inequities and social/political/economic relationships, driven by exploitation, extraction, dehumanization, and disposability. While these murders took place in Atlanta, their legacies reach back to Japanese occupation, the Korean War, U.S. military occupation, and today’s immigration labyrinth.

Clearly, white supremacy, the specifics of anti-Asian and anti-immigrant racism, misogyny, and the devaluation of working-class lives—especially among those assumed to be engaged in sex work—were tightly woven into the gunman’s search for victims that evening of March 16, 2021. These multiple factors also distort the reactions of a public awoken, once again, to the reality and lethal consequences of anti-Asian racism. While gender, class, and the fetishization of sexualized Asian women’s bodies (Azhar et al., 2021) play a role in this recent set of murders, these dimensions were flattened into a singular category, “Asian,” obscuring the complex realities of these women’s lives. The women murdered in Atlanta, we later learned, were, of course, mothers, wives, aunts, sisters, and daughters, leaving behind devastated family members, friends, and communities. The seemingly daily attacks on older Asian Americans, with a specific brutality towards women, mark another category of disposability and targeted violence that now punctuates the daily news—too often accompanied by accounts of an utter lack of response by bystanders.

Again, we ask, why is it a blood bath that makes the daily violence and loss of lives suddenly become a public concern? Why is it that a 9 min 29 s recording made in broad daylight of the murder of George Floyd is that which awakens a nation (yet again) to over 500 years of systematic murders of BIPOC in this country? Each public tragedy momentarily lifts us from the normality of violence that characterizes the everyday lives of so many community members.

As incoming Editors-in-Chief of a journal committed to critical feminist analysis and research in social work, we take this opportunity to publicly join others in outrage and sorrow as we mourn the lives lost in Atlanta, that of 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant, those of 23 transgender people murdered in the United States in the first 4 months of 2021, and so many others, to elevate the role that critical feminist scholarship can and must take in our analyses of these intersecting forms of violence and our move forward to meaningful change.

Since March 16, the outpouring of messages of solidarity across race reminds us that anti-Asian violence must be understood in the context of racist, misogynist, classist, heterosexist, transphobic, and ableist violence across the globe. Atlanta cannot be understood outside of the brutal rapes, murders, and disappearance of Indigenous women across the Northern and Southern hemispheres of America. It stands in the context of the over 500 rape cases reported (and, hence, not including those unreported) in Ethiopia’s Tigray region today. It must be seen in the light of the ongoing murders of mostly Black and Brown transgender and gender non-conforming people that numbered 44 in the United States in 2020 and have already reached record-breaking numbers in 2021. We at Affilia call upon the critical feminist community of scholars to address and uplift the conditions of countless others across the globe whose victimization remains invisible and forgotten. We invite submissions to the journal that enhance our understanding of the factors contributing to racist, misogynist, and other intersecting forms of violence and to changes that might lead to their eventual elimination.

Since the murders in March, silence about anti-Asian violence has transformed into a resounding chorus of support for heightened policing as a response—culminating thus far in the passage of the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act signed by President Biden on May 20, 2021. In an era characterized by extreme polarization, this bill passed by Congress as a rare act of bi-partisan unity with a vote of 94-1 in the Senate and 364-62 in the House. Echoing the enhanced criminal penalties carceral feminists fought for over the past 40 years (Kim, 2020; Mehrotra et al., 2016), those demonstrating their contempt for anti-Asian violence have turned to legislation that links “hate” to “crime,” increasing police powers as the public’s once-again “common sense” response. On May 11, prosecutors in Georgia’s Fulton County responded locally by charging the four killings in that county as hate crimes and calling for the death penalty. By the publication of this editorial, Cherokee County will likely have followed with similar charges. Less than a year since many of these same proponents called to “defund the police,” the police have again been beckoned as an answer, not only to crime, but to hate itself. In line with this carceral logic, support for the death penalty has been resurrected as the ultimate demonstration of condemnation of anti-Asian hate crimes.

We join in the growing voices of those who do not and will not accept a turn to policing as the answer to violence. The policing of sex work (Capous-Desyllas et al., 2020; Shih, 2021) has only added to vulnerability, detention and deportations, incarceration, and victimization not only by the police but by social work’s paternalism and collusion with law enforcement. As Chicago social worker, Anjanette Young, reminds us in our recent editorial (Young et al., 2021), police violence against Black women is an everyday occurrence. Affilia’s stance against carceral feminism and its reliance on punishment and policing—and our alignment with liberatory and collective notions of community safety—have been uplifted in our Special Topics on Anticarceral Feminisms: Imagining a World Without Prisons (O’Brien et al., 2020) and characterize what we see as foundational tenets of critical feminism.

Finally, we stand in solidarity with those working on the ground to elevate and defend the rights and livelihoods of vulnerable workers—the sex work collectives such as Red Canary Song in New York, Massage Parlor Outreach Project (MPOP) in Seattle, Butterfly in Toronto, and SWAN in Vancouver—whose anti-violence and pro-worker/pro-immigrant/radical feminist work embraces intimately the intersections between anti-Asian misogynist racism, police surveillance and violence coupled with social worker interventions, immigrant worker rights, and the complex lived experiences of the most vulnerable and stigmatized members of our communities. We acknowledge and thank those most impacted by racist and misogynist violence for their contributions to knowledge based on lived experience, that which forms the grounding for our critical feminist scholarship and to whom we at Affilia are accountable.

Red Canary Song (n.d.) and other Asian organizations and individuals have countered calls for these killings to be met by increased policing (Coalition for Rights & Safety, 2021; Lam & Chu, 2021; Lam et al., 2021) and have condemned the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act (18 Million Rising, n.d.). Instead, they have responded through a rapid network of care—creating mutual aid responses for the families of victims, calling upon racial solidarity across BIPOC communities in sharp contrast to incendiary tropes of cross-racial violence, and re-imagining community safety that elevates affordable housing, access to health and mental health care, public education, and rights to a living wage and safe working conditions. While these voices have been muffled in the din of demands for justice as defined by our criminal legal system, we at Affilia call upon critical feminists to ask ourselves which communities and whose perspectives we uplift and how we together can radically redefine our concepts of safety and justice with those that might actually root out systemic sources of violence.