I am so tired of all the anti Asian racism that has been escalating in the last year, and now six Asian women have been shot and killed. With all of the anti Asian racism that has been culminating, this has really been inevitable.
The last year Trump and the GOP has been repeating racist statements referring to the corona virus as the Chinese Virus or Kung Flu blaming Chinese people for the corona virus. This rhetoric has been responsible for a lot of the anti Asian hate crimes that have been going on. Asian people being sprayed with air freshener, the attacks on our elders, people going to areas of higher Asian populations to purposely cause trouble.
Regardless of how long we been in this country, we are continuously thought of as outsiders. I am tired of being asked where I am from. Even though so many of us have been able to have respectful white collar jobs such as doctors or engineers, we are not allowed to advance too high nor are we allowed to lead. They don’t want to give control to an outsider. We are just forever viewed as foreign workers. Skilled foreign workers maybe but still foreign workers.
We are praised for our ability to assimilate and they call us the Model Minority. They want us to stay hard working and submissive so that we can be easily controlled. And then they use this title to use us to shame other communities of color, pitting us against each other so we don’t combine our strengths to combat white supremacy.
I grew up getting teased and bullied for being Asian. The kids would use their fingers to slant their eyes, they gaslighted me saying my country didn’t exist because it wasn’t China or Japan, they would sing taunts of rhyme that I still can’t get myself to type here because it hurts too much.
So many people would come up to me and tell me the few phrases that they know in Korean. The majority of them are just curse words pronounced so poorly such that I couldn’t make out what they are saying. They don’t care about our beautiful languages, they only want to be able to use key phrases as a joke. While European accents are considered to be sexy Asian accents are mocked. “Ching Chong” they would say to me and laugh about it.
Being seen as such an outsider and made to feel so different, I have secretly wished that I would have been white myself as a child.
Mocking our culture, people would bow to me while walking down the street.
Stopping by a small town to get gas while on a long trip and feeling the eyes of people looking at me.
Asian men not being considered manly, nor are they considered to be desirable to date, while Asian women are hyper-sexualized and fetishized. Being trans I have experienced this both ways, not being considered datable before transitioning and then being fetishized by guys. The number of times guys told me that they had a thing for Asian women, as if it is a complement to date me for my race and not for who I am as a person.
And after all of this, the police were so eager to tell his narrative about how it wasn’t racially motivated. He was just a sex addict. He was a victim of sex addiction. Never mind the fact that he went specifically to 3 separate Asian businesses to target Asian women who’s bodies were too much temptation. The police humanizing this murderer while dehumanizing the murdered Asian women for potentially being sex workers. Just because it is a crime against sex workers doesn’t mean it wasn’t also racially motivated also.
Yes it was a hate crime. But he was just at his wit’s end and having a bad day so…
*In this post when I say Asian, I mean East and South East Asian. There are many other people who are Asian but often they are referred to differently in the US. These people also get their own types of racism but it is not my place to talk about them.