Thread by @kimmythepooh

GA suspect claims no racial motivation in shooting that killed 8, including 6 Asian women,bt experts say it's impossible to divorce race from discourse, given the historical fetishization of Asian women,which has made them uniquely susceptible to violence
nbcnews.com/news/asian-ame…

A report on hate incidents released Tuesday by the reporting forum Stop AAPI Hate revealed that among 3,800 incidents were reported over the course of about a year during the pandemic, 68 percent of respondents were women.

Even apart from the pandemic, research shows that 21 percent to 55 percent of Asian women in the U.S. report having experienced intimate physical and/or sexual violence during their lifetimes, according to the Asian Pacific Institute on Gender Based Violence.

Sung Yeon Choimorrow, executive director of the nonprofit @NAPAWF, said what's often lost in the discussion is how Asian women experience a very specific form of sexism, which she said shouldn't be conflated with the misogyny that other groups, like white women, may confront.

Choimorrow said many of the attacks and much of the sexual misconduct can be traced in part to the rampant perpetuation of stereotypes around Asian women as exotic, hypersexualized and submissive.

Such stereotypes create a perception that Asian Americans are therefore less of a threat and easier to take advantage of and that they aren't going to fight back. Echoes of other archaic beliefs can be found in statements authorities attributed to Long, @CCenizaChoy

"Killing Asian American women to eliminate a man's temptation speaks to the history of the objectification of Asian & Asian American women as variations of the Asian temptress, the dragon ladies & the lotus blossoms, whose value is only in relation to men's fantasies & desires."

The beliefs have been shaped by legal code, America's history of imperialism and the prevailing culture, said historian @ellendwu. One factor that helps explain the toxic environment for Asian women is the type of labor they were relegated to in the U.S. in the 19th century.

Wu said one of the first exclusionary policies was the Page Act of 1875, which banned importing women "for the purpose of prostitution."

The legislation may have been intended to mitigate prostitution, but immigration officers often weaponized it to keep any Asian woman from entering the country, granting them the authority to determine whether a woman was of "high moral character."

"Fast-forward, then, through the 20th century. These associations Americans already have of Asian women being engaged in this 'lewd and immoral' type of behavior gets amplified as the US begins a series of imperial excursions, essentially, or wars in the Asia Pacific region."

"It's hard not to connect it to this other pattern, which is the US' fighting these terrible wars in the Asia Pacific & really treating Asian lives as if they're completely disposable," Wu said, saying the gunman "considered these women, these people's lives disposable."

.@phiunguyen litigation director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice — Atlanta, said the hypersexualization of Asian women, which has been normalized, in part helped create the conditions for white supremacy, aggression and violence.