Call It What It Is
On Tuesday, March 16, a white man walked into three different Atlanta-area spas and killed eight people. Six of them were Asian women. Once apprehended, the suspect allegedly told investigators that he had a sexual addiction and saw the businesses as “a temptation that he wanted to eliminate,” according to news reports.
The fetishization of Asian women clearly seems to have been the motivation for these murders. And yet, as recently as Sunday, federal and local law enforcement claimed they have found no evidence of a federal hate crime.
The spokesman for the Cherokee County Sheriff’s office, Captain Jay Baker, said the suspect was “pretty much fed up and kind of at the end of his rope. Yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did.”
Shortly before I learned of what had happened in Georgia, my editor sent me an article about an initiative called “Media 2070.” Subtitled “An Invitation to Dream Up Media Reparation,” the project features a 100-page essay detailing the long-term harm done by U.S. news media, which has been complicit in white supremacy and anti-Black racism. Aside from blatant examples like printing ads for the sale of enslaved people, the instrument of that harm has largely been in the language the news media uses to report events.
The Swarthmorean is not immune or exempt from this. In the March 12 issue, Laurie Bernstein shed light on how the Swarthmorean participated in this history of “accepting the racial status quo” in its coverage of local segregation.
When the news media demonizes the victims of crimes, they legitimize the violence perpetrated against those victims. This does harm. When the news media characterizes suspects of color as “terrorists,” “dangerous,” or “super predators,” but treats white suspects as “lone wolves” or people who just “had a bad day,” they do harm.
When we don’t call something what it is, we do harm.
What happened last week in Georgia was a horrific hate crime perpetrated against members of the Asian American and Pacific Islander community. We need to hold our news media accountable for the ways they contribute to white supremacy and racist violence. We cannot hope to eradicate hate if we won’t even call it what it is.
Satya Nelms
Associate Editor
