Silent no more
IT WAS HEARTBREAKING AND HORRIFYING—BUT TO MANY, IT WASN’T A SURPRISE.
The news that eight people, six of them Asian-American women, were killed at businesses in the Atlanta area on March 16 came after a year of intense anti-Asian racism in the U.S. On the platforms where news arrives first, and quickly attaches to feelings, emotions were already raw.
“This mass shooter was targeting Asian women and their businesses. This isn’t an isolated incident. There have been 500+ hate crimes targeted at Asian people this year alone,” social media specialist Mark Kim wrote on Twitter. “This Atlanta tragedy lies at an intersection of race, gender, class and the legacy of America’s history of colonization and violence in Asia,” journalist Elise Hu said on the site. “I don’t have the words. I’m just despondent. Protect Asian women, solidarity with sex workers, #StopAsianHate.”
And as posts went viral, with comments affirming their calls for change, the news kept coming. “Atlanta shooting suspect told investigators that killings of Asian women news alert. A quote from a Daily Beast story described the alleged shooter—who was charged on March 17 with eight counts of murder—as the son of a pastor who was “very innocent seeming.” Meanwhile the victims remained nameless. Later in the day, four were identified: Delaina Ashley Yaun, 33; Paul Andre Michels, 54; Xiaojie Yan, 49; and Daoyou Feng, 44. Additionally, Elcias R. Hernandez-Ortiz, 30, was injured in the attack. (Officials from the Atlanta police department are not naming the other victims until their families are notified.) By the time their names were made public, the suspect would already be accounted for by a member of the Cherokee County sheriff’s office who, in a video that was widely circulated, said: “Yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did.”
