I woke up today exhausted at 3:52am. I couldn’t go back to sleep thinking about these murders— the images of these people who could have been my own blood. It requires us to confront the society we live in.
The police officer debriefing told the public that the killer was “having a bad day.” Outside of the absurdity of that statement (does everyone who has a bad day now go have massacres with a gun?), we are tasked by this police officer, by the media, by Our White Society to sympathize with the killer, a poor boy who was:
- “not racially motivated”;
- “having a bad day”;
- has “taken full responsibility”;
- is being “fully cooperative with the police”;
- “super nice” at school and carried around a Bible;
- and, for goodness sake, has sweet, Christian grandparents.
What does it mean to take full responsibility after snuffing out life? Does he even now know the names of the people he killed? What kind of rhetoric were his sweet, Christian family, fully cooperating with the police, espousing?
This non-sensical killing makes sense in America. The 45th president’s own treatment of women as disposable objects, grab-able, signaling devices, helps simplify human interactions with the other gender: they are here for our pleasure, for our status, for us. Particularly the ones who do not come from our race, who don’t look like our mothers or sisters. They serve one purpose in life: to tempt us into sin.
This reality of white men taking out their anger is much scarier than any image of a screaming bearded man the news has repeatedly shown; the killer screamed in English that he was going to “KILL ALL THE ASIANS!” Later, he portrayed his murdering of this 66-year-old woman, this 49-year-old woman, as taking out “sexual temptations.” Did he say that with a wink and a smile? For Asian women, as we all know, are pliant and obedient, exotic and oriental, a great alternative if you cannot get a white girl to like you. Does the police officer go home at night and search “exotic Asian” into his machine? Does he want a Dragon Madam or a Fookoo-me to comfort him?
A white man killed Asian women in America. Not across the sea in Asia, but here. The colonizer has come home to roost. Boys*, after all, are just being boys. He was responding to the very real foreign threat of the virus, and of course, taking out the trash that dirties American men, read: exotic temptresses.
*only white boys
And yet, I would almost take this clear-cut racism, clear-cut sexism over the unsaid whispers, the glazed-eye jokes, the “trendy” takes that make pork belly cool but pork feet gross, the discovery of new cultures and eagerness to exploit. Total ignorance is easier to condemn than a purported woke ally who snickers behind doors and still repeats to themselves, consciously or not, that they were born into the right race or the right gender — the accepted mainstream, not the Other.
I want to believe friends, white male friends, whose “yellow fever” (white men who seek out Asian women) is claimed to be a type — merely an “affinity.” That my friendship is enough to humanize my whole “demographic”, to open their eyes enough to see that I too have a soul, that a sexual fetish for one type of human can be abolished with my wit.
Boys* will continue to be boys even if they kill other people, people who are just as human, no, much more human than the killer. Reading the press, we know that the killer brought his Bible to school every day, but what do we know about these victims? Would it make a difference if they were good Christians as well? Do we assume the exotic foreigners are heathens? The fact that the police officer said that the killer was “having a bad day” already indicates that this case, as handled by the current structures of power, will not change anything. Would this bible thumper like to know that one woman whom he killed in cold blood was a “good godly, woman” who attended church weekly? Would that soften the killings and hate? Does it matter?
Men often kill their intimate partners, the object of their fancies and fetishes, the unattainable. Kill your darlings. But we never asked to be.
