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

Abstract

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...