Robert Peterson has been quietly grieving the death of his mother, Yong Ae Yue, in private for the last year – remembering her Korean cooking, the way she adored her grandchildren, and the pride she took in casting her vote as an American citizen. He holds on to those personal memories one year on, while many others reflect on the chilling public memory of the last moments of her life, when she was shot and killed at the spa where she worked.
The 63-year-old Korean American was one of six Asian women murdered on 16 March 2021 in a shooting rampage that targeted three Atlanta-area spas. Two others were also killed in the shootings. That attack has come to symbolize a pattern of violence that emerged with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and continues to haunt Asian American communities today.
Peterson did not think his mother was unsafe at the spa, where she had recently gotten a job cooking meals for the staff and cleaning, but he recalls their conversations about violent attacks against Asian Americans during the pandemic.
“We talked about her being targeted [for] being Asian, with this influx of hatred,” he said. “Similarly [to] the way in which she talked about me, as a Black man, possibly being targeted if I engage with law enforcement. So, we both understood what it was like, but I guess we didn’t let fear constrain our movement.”
Peterson, whose father is Black, recognizes that his mourning parallels a collective grief that weighs on Atlanta’s Asian American community. “So I always tell people, it’s not really about my mother, it is about what she represents and what these victims were.”
On this anniversary of the shooting, Atlanta-based civil rights groups have organized a Community Remembrance Day calling for “healing and solidarity”; there are gatherings planned in several cities under the banner of “Break the Silence” and a “Justice for AAPI Women” rally at the Georgia state capitol.
In other parts of the country, state-level legislative initiatives have focused on strengthening social protections for Asian American communities instead of policing them. Last year, California’s Asian American and Pacific Islander Legislative Caucus sponsored the Asian and Pacific Islander Equity Budget, which invests in social programs in Asian American communities, such as grassroots organizations working on violence prevention and school-based “restorative justice programs to address hate and macroaggressions early”. In New York, progressive lawmakers and civil rights groups are pushing legislation to eliminate criminal penalties for unlicensed massage workers in order to prevent what advocates decry as racially biased, often abusive policing of Asian American women.
But New York has also seen more attacks against Asian American women including two recent murders and a spate of street assaults, and earlier this week, a woman allegedly beaten and called a racial slur in Yonkers, New York. These incidents have called the attention of activists yet again as they strategize how to protect and inform their communities.
Disturbing trends
According to Stop AAPI Hate, a California-based coalition that tracks self-reported incidents of harassment, assault and discrimination against Asian Americans, there were 6,273 reported incidents in 2021, up from 4,632 in 2020. While it’s difficult to gauge whether incidents are actually going up or just being reported at a higher rate, the trendlines are disturbing: two-thirds of reported incidents involved verbal harassment; about one in six involved physical assault; and women and non-binary people together reported about twice as many incidents as men. A Stop AAPI Hate mental health survey, published a couple of months after the Atlanta shootings, shows that a fifth of Asian Americans victimized by racism “display signs of racial trauma”, such as anxiety, depression or hypervigilance.
Some of the initial hostility may have been triggered by Trump’s anti-China rhetoric early on in the pandemic, but Stop AAPI Hate’s co-founder Russell Jeung noted that the persistence of violence under a new administration indicates that “the racism is really deep rooted, that a lot of people still continue to direct their anger and their fear coming out of the pandemic towards Asians.”
Defining anti-Asian violence can be complicated. While Stop AAPI Hate’s surveys reveal a pattern of civil rights violations, according to Jeung, “only a small proportion of the racism that we’re documenting are actually crimes for which people would be arrested”. Moreover, many abuses suffered by Asian Americans might not meet the legal definition of hate crime, which generally entails an explicit motivation of prejudice. Such intent can be difficult for prosecutors to prove without clear evidence that a victim was targeted specifically due to their race.
When the Atlanta-based Center for Pan Asian Community Services (CPACS) hosted community dialogue sessions in the wake of the Atlanta shootings, participants voiced feelings of longstanding trauma. CPACS’s president, Jung Ha Kim, said this was especially noticeable among people of Korean, Vietnamese, Hmong, Lao or Filipino ethnicity, which she attributes in part to the residual impact of histories of conflict in their home countries – a psychological phenomenon that researchers attribute to historical trauma ingrained in Asian migrant and refugee communities. The community dialogue has also surfaced some internal tensions.
Kim believes that the spa shootings should compel the Asian American community to reckon with its own biases, as spa or massage work, which is stereotypically associated with sex work, is often dismissed as “not a respectable occupation”. The incident, she said, revealed that “even within the AAPI [Asian American Pacific Islander] community, these women, the victims, were silenced – maybe an invisible population in our own community as well”.
The community remembrance actions that CPACS is coordinating, culminating in a rally for “Justice for AAPI Women” at the Georgia state capitol on the anniversary of the shooting, are an opportunity to “lift up women’s history, women’s stories in the Asian American community to remember these victims. So this gender issue, and the intersectionality of class and race, needs to be talked about”.
Structural violence
Although attacks have prompted local and federal politicians to call for strengthening law enforcement responses to hate crimes – including an anti-hate-crime bill passed by Congress weeks after the spa shooting – progressive Asian American organizations have focused on non-carceral approaches to public safety, particularly in light of the Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality and institutional anti-Black racism. After the shooting, the civil rights group Advancing Justice Atlanta and about 2,000 other organizations issued a statement urging policymakers to focus not on policing but rather, on “addressing our communities’ immediate needs, including in-language support for mental health, legal, employment, and immigration services”.
Phi Nguyen, Advancing Justice Atlanta’s executive director, cautioned that the structural violence that Asian American communities face may be overlooked amid headlines about individuals being victimized. Immigration policies that lead to detention and deportation, for example, do not elicit the same public shock as a mass shooting, but are nonetheless experienced as a form of state-based trauma in Asian American communities.
In response to interpersonal racial violence, Nguyen said, “sometimes the kneejerk reaction is to call for increased policing and greater fortification and reliance on the criminal legal system. But these are systems that have been historically racist and have not really facilitated safety for Black and brown communities, so I think that we, as a community, need to think about: what are the solutions that can bring safety to all of our communities, our Asian American communities and also Black and brown communities?”
Margaret Chin, a sociologist at Hunter College, said that to address the root causes of anti-Asian racism, policymakers need to understand the history of Asian Americans, which is fraught with exclusionary immigration policy, mob violence and segregation, as well as the sexual objectification of Asian women in popular culture. It starts with education: most of the youth who will become future leaders in their communities, she noted, “have not been exposed to Asian American studies at all” in school or college. “They don’t know how these [issues] actually affect our society … if everybody has this as part of their education, I think that we might have a different outcome right now.”
Peterson, who is a medical sociologist, said both systemic and interpersonal violence against Asian Americans “can’t be fixed [by] putting this one perpetrator in jail or dealing with a particular criminal act, but it’s going to take a social response, an institutional response”. That includes not just education but also encouraging the community to “speak up … and be seen and heard, tell our story and listen to other stories”.
He tells his own mother’s story to illustrate how his family, which bridges Atlanta’s Black and Asian American communities, reflects both the complexity and the commonality of their American heritage.
“What I think people relate to [in] my mother and these other women and victims is that what they wanted was universal. My mother just wanted to work and provide for her family,” he said. “My message is that my mother was my mother, but she also could have been your mother.”
