Sex, Race, and Violence in Atlanta
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma
Just before 5 p.m. on Tuesday afternoon, Robert Aaron Long walked into Young’s Asian Massage, thirty miles northwest of Atlanta. He was carrying a nine millimeter handgun he had bought legally earlier that day. He opened fire, gunning down three women and a man. Less than an hour later, four more people were shot and killed at two spas across the street from each other in Northeast Atlanta. A pastor at Crabapple First Baptist Church in Milton, Ga., told the New York Times that Long was one of the church’s the most committed members. A former roommate said he would visit massage parlors once a month for sex, but that it “tore him up inside.” The six women victims were all of East Asian descent.
Commentators and activists have been quick to see the Atlanta tragedy as the latest in a long line of anti-Asian violence in America, though police—to the frustration of many—have been reluctant to characterize it as a hate crime. There is no doubt an uptick in anti-Asian bigotry and anti-Asian violence as non-Asians seek a scapegoat for the coronavirus pandemic that has cost America so dearly (and, ironically, was far more effectively controlled in China, Korea, and Japan than it was here). President Trump stoked racist feelings against Asian Americans. Our country has a long history of lawful discrimination against Asians starting in the second half of the 19th century with the Chinese Exclusion Acts and continuing through the Supreme Court’s shameful opinion in Korematsu v. United States, which permitted detention of Japanese-Americans based on nothing more than their ethnic heritage, in direct contravention of the plain language of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
But I think what happened in Atlanta Tuesday evening probably has more to do with sex than race. Our office represents people on all sides of sexual violence, including men who engage in destructive sexual behavior and women who are victims of sexual assaults, often at the hands of state officials. Like race, sex can be a powerful motivator for violence.
Long, 21, described himself as a sex addict and a Christian. He reportedly told the authorities that he targeted the massage parlors in retaliation “for providing an outlet for his addiction to sex.” Capt. Jay Baker of the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office said Wednesday that the spas were “a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate.” By this twisted logic, the conflict created by his faith’s repudiation of non-marital sexuality may have motivated Long, who was likely descending into religiously-fueled mental illness by the time he was ready to pull the trigger.
Baker himself rightfully took heat for callously describing Tuesday as “a really bad day” for Long, “and this is what he did.” Baker also reportedly promoted the sale of racist t-shirts on Facebook. His anti-Asian racism is no secret, and he is paid by tax dollars to carry a gun and prosecute others.
Long by contrast denied racist feelings but forthrightly admitted that the violence was motivated by sex. He used the language of addiction to absolve himself from responsibility for what he saw—probably needlessly—as sexual transgressions. From the police description of his post-arrest statement, it sounds as though he felt his sexual desires were out of control but his violence was deliberate and rational.
It goes without saying that the opposite was true.
Long’s Instagram tagline read: “Pizza, guns, drums, music, family, and God. This pretty much sums up my life. It’s a pretty good life.” That was a lie. By the time he gets to a jury, I hope he and his lawyers will understand that his sexual behavior was mostly harmless, but his violence was the product of extreme mental illness, not the other way around. God made him have sex; it’s the devil that made him kill.
It is dangerous to be Asian in today’s America, but it may be even more dangerous to be female. Most targets of anti-Asian discrimination are women. Gender violence against women is universal across all periods of history and all cultures. Sex workers in particular face exploitation and manipulation at the hands of their employers, their customers, and the police. Trans women face horrific violence, often by straight men who desire them. Women in prison face an omnipresent threat of sexual abuse at the hands of guards. About a million-and-a-half U.S. women and girls are victims of violent crime, including rape, every year.
Let’s see the Atlanta rampage for what it was: an outburst of violence against women in a country where discrimination based on race is present everywhere, especialy in law enforcement.