On March 16, 2021, Robert Aaron Long shot and killed eight people at 3 different spas/massage parlors in the Atlanta metropolitan area. 75% of his victims were Asian women. According to Long, his motivation for the shootings was the dissonance between his ‘sex addiction’ and religious beliefs.
This explanation doesn’t quite pass the sniff test.
For one, ‘sex addiction’ doesn’t appear in the DSM-5, the most up-to-date diagnostic catalog of mental illnesses used by psychologists in the United States today. So, there’s doubt in the fundamental existence of the condition Long claims to suffer from.
Even still, it’s important to understand this crime through the lens of sexuality. Regardless of its use as a distraction from more likely motivations, it’s evocation reveals one of those likelier motives: racism.
Throughout the pandemic, the frequency of hate crimes against the AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) community has dramatically increased in large part due to conservative propaganda directed at shifting blame for the coronavirus onto China and the Chinese more broadly. Donald Trump’s insistence on taking every opportunity to offensively remind the American people of the virus’s country of origin (ie. China-Virus, Kung Flu, etc.) gave the conservative media ecosystem the go-ahead to double-down on existing anti-China rhetoric. This stochastic terrorism campaign unsurprisingly lead to the aforementioned increase in AAPI-targeted hate crimes.
So how exactly does anti-Asian racism factor into Long’s claims of wanting to eliminate sexual temptation?
To start exploring this question, it’s vital to understand the fetishization of Asian women as a form of deep and actively harmful racism.
The infantilization and hyper-sexualization of Asian women is nothing new. Examples of it are littered across the history of the United States in law like The Page Act of 1875 (which claimed to restrict the immigration of prostitutes, but functionally prevented all Chinese women from entering the country) and in media like Full Metal Jacket (which infamously introduced the racially charged phrase “me love you long time” into the cultural vernacular). In all arenas of American life, Asian women were (and continue to be) seen as exotic and submissive sexual beings.
This kind of stereotyping leads directly to the dehumanization necessary to view Asian masseuses, spa employees, and sex workers as the abstract vessels of ‘temptation’ Robert Aaron Long viewed them as. And it is precisely that dehumanization that allows murderers like Long to more easily justify their actions.
After the massacre on March 16, Atlanta police said that it was too early to designate the killings as hate crimes. They were wrong, which isn’t exactly surprising coming from an institution whose primary prerogative is to uphold white supremacy and culturally hegemony at every opportunity.
It’s also not surprising that Robert Aaron Long fits neatly into the demographic most likely to commit acts of racially motivated terror in the United States: white men. In 2015, Dylan Roof slaughtered 9 black church attendees in Charleston, South Carolina. In 2019, Patrick Crusius killed 23 people in a targeted anti-latino attack in a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. In 2020, Robert Gregory Bowers murdered 11 Jews at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, PA.
The white population of the United States has long been convinced by shameful history, codified law, and the country’s conservative media ecosystem that they are the rightful inhabitants of this land and the only ones who truly deserve to make decisions regarding the nation’s path forward. So, when that perceived supremacy and unjustified dominance is threatened, white men feel obligated to protect it. And sometimes, protecting it means slaughtering innocent people.
In 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement did not just highlight police brutality, it primed the appetites of Americans for transformative dialogue regarding all kinds of systemic racial injustice. Now, we find ourselves confronting the immeasurable harm white supremacy has wrought on the AAPI community. Hopefully, we can use the tools we have gained to eliminate white supremacy in our societal structures and work to alleviate the generational harm it has caused before more tragedies like the massacre in Atlanta happen again.