Eight people died in Atlanta last Tuesday. We have no shortage of explanations, including the version of the offender, which many refuse to accept. Eros, branded as sex addiction and ignored, inspired a murderous cruelty. Is it just a beard for anti-Asian violence?
Unraveling the suspect’s motive is not easy as race and sex compete to dominate the story. Six of the dead are women of Asian descent, but the shooter told police he was not motivated by racial rights.
Did the suspect visit Asian spas because he had some sort of hangout over Asians, or is America more Asian than we realize? Our presence in all aspects of American life certainly increases the likelihood that people of all backgrounds now regularly communicate with Asian America. His visits to spas run by Asia can be inconspicuous if he was less violent or less white. In the US, interactions and relationships involving Asian women and non-Asian men sometimes attract attention. It happens while we talk, inspirational clickbait, eye rolls, maybe even a home industry of analysis and accusation. One accusation that is making the rounds is that the killer, 21 years old and white, is denied race. I think it misses the point.
His purpose was primarily sexual, not racial purity. According to law enforcement and a former roommate, he talked about pornography and the end of temptation. His language, apocalyptic and yet banal, gives a familiar tone.
Despite my Asian background, I find his disapproval of racism strangely credible. Like many people, I experienced prejudice and ethnic profiling, but I was also a sex worker and experienced more prejudice, more naming, more fear, anger and hostility in relation to my sex work than regarding my race. And because I’m also a writer, the author of novels about a call girl, there’s the hate mail. The most memorable outbursts were strange indictments from Asian American readers exposing the underbelly of identity politics.
U.S. Army veterans Latrelle Rolling and Jessica Lang pray during Young’s Asian Massage, which killed four people in Acworth, Ga.
(Curtis Compton / Atlanta Journal-Constitution via Tribune News Service)
White supremacy has recently been defined as America’s “original sin” – a confusing term reminiscent of St. Augustine who read Genesis, so we do not have to. Sin has traditionally sought sexual knowledge and desire. Now it has been laughed at and made racist – a moral stain that erases all others.
Asian identity is not well defined in a country where race is understood as black or white, but after a wave of attacks on Asians caused by the pandemic and the former president, it has become a unifying force within and outside the community. The Black Mayor of Atlanta, a white president and a multi-ethnic vice president with a South Asian name, has tried to unite us in the face of yet another incomprehensible mass shooting by focusing on the increase in these prejudice crimes. Flags were reduced to half staff.
There are conventions and general ways of dealing with racial violence, and sometimes it transcends party lines. For most public figures, there is a terrifying book about race, bloodshed and gun violence. The impact of sexual distress is harder to discuss – and not just because of Puritanism. Sexuality is surprising, unpredictable; part of adulthood is to pretend it’s sex. There is sometimes more shame in sex than in race.
Race is public and sex is private, but the shooting in Atlanta has heightened this arrangement. Racial feelings begin to look more like a taboo than sexual obsessions. The murder of an Asian American is described as a hate crime, while the murder of a sex worker is considered an issue of mental health. The scarlet R humiliates Nathaniel Hawthorne’s blood red letter A to a healthy sin, which now stands for (male) addiction rather than (female) adultery. Racism is stigmatized, while sex is pathologized. This new chapter in American life needs a closer reading.
‘Sex addiction’ is seen by many as an empty psychic stumbling block, at best a dull metaphor dangerously armed on a very bad day ‘. The rehabilitation center that visited the shooter offers a clinically effective and Christ-centered ‘treatment for this nebulous condition, essentially a medicine of Christian morality. To me, the doctrine of sex addiction is the erotic equivalent of racial science. And yet, the offender’s conviction is probably sincere: news reports show his spa visits as a relapse of an addict, as if sexual contact is a chemical that destroys the liver. He may have become confused by appetite that is normal in 21-year-old men.
Robert Aaron Long has something in common with serial killer Ted Bundy (who blamed pornography for his own violence), and his religious beliefs should not be ignored. He thinks of Peter Sutcliffe, known as the Yorkshire Ripper, who thought that killing sex workers did God’s will. We need to take the rejection of racial motives more seriously and reconsider our own assumptions.
Mainstream Americans, including many Asian Americans, quickly give the accusation of racism not yet ready to discuss an older hatred – what my French friends call “la putophobie” (a term more pleasing to the eye than the clumsy composition “whorephobia”). This is the last acceptable form of hate speech, someone once told me and lives within minority communities where a good immigrant is combined with sexual virtue. Speculation about the spas where the massacre took place is fueled by prejudice. This prejudice is reinforced by so-called anti-competitive voices, and is dangerously toxic.
Fueled by religious fanaticism and illiberal forms of feminism, by punitive laws and headlines of pony newspapers, this prejudice arouses contempt in young men who must learn how to nurture the varieties of human commitments. Will the American flag, which is halfway to our death in Atlanta, make a difference? I hope so.
Quan, author of three novels, including “Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl”, is a regular guest on RTHK Radio 3 in Hong Kong.