as a black person, I definitely feel the pain over what happened to Latasha and over the horrible relations between the black and asian community but this does not mean that those poor women in atlanta deserved to be murdered, or that asians as a whole have chosen a side due to the horrible actions of one asian person a few years ago.
i also definitely identify with the crappy experience of watching the way that some asians have conflated black issues with asian issues / have tried to make their support for our issues conditional on us supporting them vs them supporting us because its the right thing to do period.
we definitely have some healing to do, but saying all asians choose a side, and that that is somehow a justification for the horrible racist and misgonystic murder that happened is wrong and racist
yes there’s a lot of tension between the two communities that definitely shouldnt be swept away. I find it frustrating when people usually wave away the tensions between blacks and asians as an op, or as something being solely perpetuated by white people. Black and asian people are taking active part in these community beefs.
But looking unflinchingly at the tension between the communities doesnt mean being racist. You can be critical about how historically asian identity has been weaponized by whites against blacks / is sometimes weaponized by asians themselves against blacks, without making blanket statements about all asian behavior or intentions. (which I think you get now since you admitted it was racist)
And beyond that, even if asians were all bad, what happened in ATL is still wrong and still racism.
In terms of the conversation around this acknowledging that these women were sex workers, I’ve actually found that to be a huge part of the discourse i’ve seen on this (although I understand that is only ancedotal. I was actually just telling a friend that there seems to be an extreme effort to intersectionalize why the victims were targeted, to include their class, gender, occupation and race that seems different than how black victims are usually discussed —with their blackness being a reason to be targeted first, with their other identities coming second).
I imagine that the sex worker aspect of this will be an even huger part of the discussion now that the murderer has said he targeted these women because of their sex work instead of their race (spoiler alert that dude is lying, but itll still have an effect on the convo)
But regardless of how this is being talked about, its pretty clear that all of these women’s identities (asian, sex worker, working class, the fact that they are women) are relevant to what happened to them
I’m just gonna say the Asian community shot Latasha Harlins
One particularly racist Korean business tyrant shot Latasha Harlins.
they shot at black people in the LA riots
Largely a myth perpetuated by racist-ass white supremacists, who want to justify the police brutality that kicked off the LA Riots to begin with. No one was killed by “Roof Koreans”. And, in the moment, a great deal of the outrage among Korean residents was aimed at the LAPD which had its own long sordid history of abusing and neglecting Koreatown residents.
for all intents and purposes Asians have chosen what side they are on
Jesus fucking Christ, this is a monstrously bad take.
Even after you get off events thirty years in the rear-view mirror and specific to a single community of migrants in a single city, it implies some homogenous attitude among “Asians” that’s laughably false. Some of the worst bigotries in Asian communities are between different Asian communities (mainlander Chinese versus Taiwanese/HKers, Koreans versus Japanese, Japanese versus Chinese, Japanese versus Vietnamese, Basically Everyone against Indonesians and Malaysians).
they shot at black people in the LA riots, for all intents and purposes Asians have chosen what side they are on and they chose poorly.
not just a shit take but pretty racist too, wtf is this garbage?
Uhh yeah why don’t you expand on that, motherfucker? What does that have to do with your remark about how Asians chose poorly—with the context being a discussion about a hate crime/mass shooting of Asian women?
