Last week, a 21-year-old white man wandered the streets of Atlanta, Georgia, looking for his victims. He stopped at three massage parlors and killed eight people there, six of them Asian women.
Self-proclaimed murderer, Robert Aaron Long, declared himself a “sex addict” and described his crime as an exorcism to “end the temptation.” He is known to have previously visited at least two of the massage rooms he shot.
And while acts of violence are common in this country, every time a new one occurs, people wonder about the reason for this deviation.
The suspicions about the possible motive for this case revolve around four poles, the driving force of which is hatred. The killer acted for religious reasons or because of his resentment towards the Asian community or out of actual xenophobia or misogyny. Or maybe for a combination of some of these reasons.
Attacks for religious reasons have been central to attacks on Jewish temples for anti-Semitism. Also for lost people who kill in the name of Islam. In this case, it turns out that the decision to kill was for personal reasons. The church to which Long belongs was quick to reject his explanation.
In the Asian community they see it as a case of racial hatred. Another on the long list of grievances against him since his arrival in the United States. In the mid-1800s, a Supreme Court ruling prohibiting people of Asian descent from testifying against a white person was translated as a guarantee that no white person would be punished for raping an Asian.
During World War II, prejudice against their community aroused suspicion in their loyalty, and thousands of Japanese-Americans were imprisoned in concentration camps on the suspicion, without any evidence, that they might be traitors to their homeland.
The Atlanta massacre is part of a new phase of attacks against him that began in 2019, when the pandemic began, and that has led to more than 3,800 hate crimes against people of Asian descent. Ever since Trump blamed China for spoiling his reelection with the coronavirus and with the disdain of the arrogant teenager he called he didn’t like, Trump spoke of the pandemic as ‘the Chinese virus’, ‘the virus’. Kung Fu “.
Another interpretation is that xenophobia could also have played a determining role. Experience shows that hatred for a minority community often spreads to members of other colored communities from non-European countries. Racism and xenophobia almost always go together, and the country’s history is full of this amalgamation of hatred.
Not long ago, another white young man, a 21-year-old Texan, who called himself a protector of the white race, drove 11 hours non-stop to El Paso, Texas, with the goal of killing Mexicans. Paradoxically, of the 22 dead, only eight were Mexican.
Another theory resorts to a different facet of femicide. According to a psychologist at the University of Georgia, Long went on to kill women for inducing unhealthy desires. This case thus responds to the old and bad idea that women should be punished for the feelings they arouse in men.
The truth is, I think, that this crime is at the crossroads of several dangerous ideologies and cannot be easily unraveled. However, if we note that the problem of hate crimes due to racial, xenophobic or misogynistic bias dates back to ancient times and that it is very difficult to solve, this should not immobilize us. It must be fought until it is eradicated, regardless of how long the fight lasts.
SERGIO MUÑOZ BATA