On Buffalo, Atlanta, and Racist Love
Like many of you, I'm mourning the 11 Black lives who were killed by a White supremacist gunman in Buffalo over the weekend. I'm also mourning the 3 Korean American women killed earlier in the week in Dallas's Koreatown. The past week has definitely felt heavy with these & other state-led violations of bodily and territorial sovereignty.
In reading & watching the news about Buffalo, I noticed something...troubling. Driven by the White gunman's use of the "Great Replacement" theory, some writers & pundits have linked the Buffalo shooting with other race-based mass shootings: Charleston, Oak Creek, Pittsburgh, El Paso. When I saw the sadly long list of cities, I was a bit surprised to see the omission of Atlanta. Why isn't it included, I wondered?
At first I thought, it makes sense if they're focusing on those mass shootings where the White supremacist shooter was a known subscriber to the "Great Replacement" theory. In short, a focus on shooters driven by "hate": hatred of Blacks, Sikhs, Jews, Mexicans. There's usually plenty of evidence to support such a charge, typically offered by the gunman's own performative archive: manifestos, social media posts, live-streams of the massacre.
Atlanta, on the other hand, seems a bit more ambiguous. From what I know, the shooter didn't subscribe to the "Great Replacement" theory. He didn't belong to any known white supremacist groups. He didn't post racist memes to 4chan. In fact, he frequented the very spaces he targeted & interacted with the very women he murdered--an interaction he described as a "sexual addiction."
It should also be noted that East Asian Americans in particular are sometimes generalized as accomplices to White supremacy, including by some of these Great Replacement murderers (the Buffalo shooter apparently praised East Asians as worthy partners in a White-dominated world). What does it means when some on both the right and left agree that all East Asians & East Asian Americans are "honorary Whites" or enjoy a "proximity to whiteness"? Because, as the Atlanta Spa Massacre showed, the 6 murdered Korean women were low-wage, immigrant sex workers vulnerable to state and individual gendered violence. They didn't seem to reap the model minority benefits from any "proximity to whiteness." In fact, they seemed to be violently exposed to a different kind of proximity to whiteness, one wrapped in an intimate form of institutionalized racist love*.
This is the problem with the frame of "hate," as others, most notably Connie Wun, Ph.D., have powerfully argued. "Hate" depends on an individualistic, narrow, & limiting understanding that excludes how other racialized feelings, such as desire, pleasure & even love are in close, deadly proximity to hate. What I'm talking about is "racist love," coined by Asian American Movement writers Frank Chin and Jeffrey Paul Chan in 1972 to describe the process by which stereotypical "model minority" figures of Asian Americanness, such as Charlie Chan, invite "positive" feelings such as admiration & attraction. Returning to the Atlanta shooter, his gendered & sexualized "racist love" of the low-wage, immigrant Korean women who were reduced to the fetishized objects of his attraction doesn't fit a neatly-consumable, neatly-reproducible narrative of "racist hate." And so, Atlanta, the 6 murdered Korean women, and by extension, (East) Asian Americans are excluded from who counts as viable targets of White supremacy.
This is why we need a deeper, more expansive understanding of violence--violence that includes a range of feelings, even those that seem "positive," that are shaped by dehumanizing notions of whose lives count as worthy, and thus, grievable. Because racist love can easily turn into racist hate as quickly as a trigger can be pulled.
(*For more on “racist love,” check out Dr. Leslie Bow's new book, which I just started reading: https://www.dukeupress.edu/racist-love)
