Capt. Jay Baker of Cherokee county in Atlanta, Georgia appears to be having a “bad day” as well. After 21-year-old white domestic terrorist Robert Aaron Long went on a massacre in the Atlanta area, visiting three Asian spas and murdering eight people — six of whom were Asian women — Baker spoke at a news conference saying the authorities were not treating the killings as a hate crime, but rather a situation where the gunman was dealing with a “sex addiction” who was at the “end of his rope” and having a “really bad day.”
Beyond being tone-deaf, many condemned Baker’s reductive assessment as whitewashing and centering the suspect’s admission over the actual witnesses of the murders. Many also criticized the decision to not treat the murders as racially-motivated, saying it ignores the history of objectification Asian women face in the United States and globally — the insidious legacies of colonialism and Western military conquest.
“It doesn’t require admission of a hate crime by the suspect in custody to determine if this is, in fact, a hate crime. Three Asian businesses, six Asian women killed, the sexualization and dehumanization of Asian women — that cannot be overlooked,” Bee Nguyen, the first Vietnamese American to serve on Georgia’s House of Representatives said on Twitter, further adding that the shooting was at the “intersection of gender-based violence, misogyny and xenophobia.”
