Unworthy Victims & Excused Murder
Why are police, the media, & politicians of both parties making excuses for the Atlanta mass-murderer?
Eight people, six of them Asian women, were murdered this week in Georgia. If you listen to police accounts and the stenography that passes as media reporting based on them, those murders are everyone else’s fault but the White, Christian fundamentalist man who has admitted to the murders.
Every phenomenon is to blame except for structural racism & sexism. The murdering White man’s voice, opinion, and analysis are amplified and centered while the perspectives of his victims, their families and communities’ are ignored by English-language media.
As Herman and Chomsky teach us in their landmark analysis of mass-media, “Manufacturing Consent”, in American mass media compassion is only reserved for victims deemed “worthy.” Victims like, say, Asian women, and sex workers, are either explicitly or implicitly deemed “unworthy,” and so therefore have little to no compassion reserved for their suffering.
The White man who murdered them is a worthy victim, at least according to the police who arrested him. It has taken no time at all for police and their pliant media to already begin working on the admitted mass-murderer’s defense in the public sphere.
A Captain of the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office, Jay Baker, sanitized the targeted mass-murder of Asian women by saying the admitted murder “was pretty much fed up and at the end of his rope…Yesterday was a really bad day for him, and this is what he did.”
It was not surprising to learn that Baker himself is a public and vocal anti-Asian racist.
Sheriff Frank Reynolds also chimed in, saying that the murderer was simply “lashing out” at the women and spas that he attacked.
Police are, in a coordinated and consistent way, going to great pains to soften the characterization of mass murder, of reigning down terror, in a targeted way, on women and Asian people. Most of the beat media covering them are doing their part to do precisely the same.
Characterizing the mass-murderer’s crimes as him “lashing out” at women who tempted him, as not racist, as motivated merely by sex, focusing on how the day he murdered so many was a bad day for him implicitly places blame on the victims. Police and their captive media are, effectively, already working on his defense in the public sphere.
Contrast this with the way police and media usually characterize alleged perpetrators of crimes from other genders and races. Black and Brown kids who maybe committed petty theft are “monsters,” unarmed minority minors are threats to the lives of everyone around them simply for existing, but this White, Christian fundamentalist was simply having a bad day, and lashed out, his snuffing out the lives of many people is reduced to his Christian desire to battle sexual urges and “eliminate temptation.”
Police and media are letting the admitted mass murder frame his own crimes, including denying he’s racist, simply because he told police that he isn’t. Never mind the ignored reports from Korean-language outlets that have documented the mass-murderer’s past anti-Asian racist statements.
Police and media instead repeat what the admitted mass-murderer tells them as though it is offered in good-faith, saying his violence was about a dubiously self-diagnosed “sex-addiction,” as though the sexual fetishization of Asian women isn’t always and necessarily an example of racism. Police and media are atomizing and separating intrinsically connected things to make the attacker look better, excusing murder and blaming victims they want to render nameless and faceless, implicitly indicted by their multiple marginalized statuses (women, Asian, sex workers, etc.) .
It’s an abomination, it’s a violent compounding of the murderer’s own violence. This monotone symphony of callous disregard for the experiences and suffering, indeed slaughter, of marginalized peoples from police and the media is what produced the murderer’s violence. It is a quite American cycle.
Even some of our finest journalists, like Glenn Greenwald, have gone out of their way to deny that this crime is a part of systemic racism, because they individualize and pathologize racism, instead of realizing that it is systemic and has very little to do with individual people’s opinions. We are in the midst of a surge in violence against Asian people as leaders propagate hate speech against them.
Meanwhile, the perpetrators of these attacks, like this most recent one, have openly admitted that they specifically want to target Asian people, yet Greenwald, police, the media, and even President Joe Biden say things like that there is no evidence that these is a part of racism, or that these crimes are racist, or that whether or not racism was a motivation for the murder is yet unknown.
We can never know what’s in individual’s minds, but when we see patterns in society and understand the context in which they happen and the history of a colonial settler-state like ours based on nascent capital which used racism in service of it, and is thus based on racialized chattel slavery, genocide of indigenous peoples, systemic exclusion and internment of Asian peoples, among other monumental crimes, we know what trends in violence directed at Asian people means – that Asian people are being targeted for being Asian. To any honest dealer, that is clearly a manifestation of racism.
Still, journalists deny it, police deny it, all because the man they all say committed the latest murders say he wasn’t racist. He was having a bad day.
He was sexually frustrated. He has an “addiction.”
The women tempted him. We don’t create context to favor other, non-White, male mass-murderers.
The same police officer who told us that the murderer isn’t racist and was merely having a bad day is himself an anti-Asian racist, who likes to take to social media to spread racist memes against Asian people. Congress met Thursday to discuss anti-Asian attacks and some congress members used the opportunity to say that violence against Asians doesn’t deserve special consideration.
They also took the opportunity to celebrate lynching and spew more fear-mongering claims against China. The corporate media is, largely, going along with it all.
Even in the face of historic anti-Asian violence, a mass-murder of Asian women and others, we’re told that we can’t be sure if racism is to blame, we’re told that the attackers were just “at the end of their rope,” and that the victims’ existence was a “temptation” for the frustrated White, Christian man who was obsessed with purity. Oh, and also, that China is scary and poses existential threats to us.
Whenever the corporate-owned satirical outlet, “The Onion” provides some of the best analysis and commentary on an issue or event, we know we’re in trouble.
Of course these were racist and sexist crimes, but that’s really a small part of the equation. Racism and sexism aren’t about individual motivations, thoughts, or actions – they are about systems and structures.
Did racism and sexism “motivate” this latest man to attack Asian people? Of course – he’s said so, and the fruits of those words bear out believing him.
Much more important to recognize than what specific thoughts were in the mind of this one individual, however, is that a racist society produced the conditions for these crimes to happen. Racist and sexist thoughts didn’t just “motivate” this attack - a racist, sexist nation produced it.
These same systemic forces of bigotry are now at work occluding the aforementioned fact as well as minimizing the actual damage by focusing on the perpetrator instead of his victims.