3/18/2021
How Racism and Sexism Intertwine to Torment Asian-American Women
Historians in the Newstags: womens history, sexism, Asian American History
After eight people, six of them Asian women, were fatally shot this week in a rampage near Atlanta, a law enforcement official said that in the gunman’s own words, his actions were “not racially motivated,” but caused by “sexual addiction.”
The official, Capt. Jay Baker of the Sheriff’s Office in Cherokee County, where one of the three massage businesses targeted by the gunman was located, cautioned that the investigation was in its early stages. But the implication was clear: It had to be one motive or the other, not both.
That suggestion was met with incredulity by many Asian-American women, for whom racism and sexism have always been inextricably intertwined. For them, racism often takes the form of unwanted sexual come-ons, and sexual harassment is often overtly racist.
....
The fetishization of Asian women was reinforced in popular culture, most notably with the lines spoken by a sex worker in a scene in “Full Metal Jacket,” a Vietnam War movie, as two soldiers try to bargain down her price: “Me so horny. Me love you long time.”
Divorced from their origin, those lines have become a come-on used in what Ellen Wu, a historian at Indiana University Bloomington and the author of “The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority,” called a “racially specific type of catcalling.”
“A few words pack an entire history into a sentence,” she said.
Several advocates said they had spent the last year combating the notion that hate and violence against Asian-Americans, and particularly Asian-American women, were something new.
“There are many women who have died because of sexual violence directed at them that was also racialized, but it has never been at the scale where the whole country is watching and talking about it,” Ms. Choimorrow said. “And what really upsets me is that it has taken something this tragic for me to be able to tell the story.”
comments powered by Disqus
News
- The Debt Ceiling Law is now a Tool of Partisan Political Power; Abolish It
- Amitai Etzioni, Theorist of Communitarianism, Dies at 94
- Kagan, Sotomayor Join SCOTUS Cons in Sticking it to Unions
- New Evidence: Rehnquist Pretty Much OK with Plessy v. Ferguson
- Ohio Unions Link Academic Freedom and the Freedom to Strike
- First Round of Obama Administration Oral Histories Focus on Political Fault Lines and Policy Tradeoffs
- The Tulsa Race Massacre was an Attack on Black People; Rebuilding Policies were an Attack on Black Wealth
- British Universities are Researching Ties to Slavery. Conservative Alumni Say "Enough"
- Martha Hodes Reconstructs Her Memory of a 1970 Hijacking
- Jeremi Suri: Texas Higher Ed Conflict "Doesn't Have to Be This Way"
Trending Now
- New transcript of Ayn Rand at West Point in 1974 shows she claimed “savage" Indians had no right to live here just because they were born here
- The Mexican War Suggests Ukraine May End Up Conceding Crimea. World War I Suggests the Price May Be Tragic if it Doesn't
- The Vietnam War Crimes You Never Heard Of