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
