Atlanta

By restricting the conversation, we inhibit our own growth and understanding

AP Photo/Candace Choi

It already feels like months ago, but just over two weeks ago, a man slaughtered eight people in a multi-stop killing spree through Georgia. The news cycle has already moved on but I still want to talk about it—because as a nation, I think we have really screwed up talking about it. We missed yet another opportunity for a better understanding of ourselves and each other, to reduce the chances this ever happens again… and frankly, the victims of this massacre deserved more. The ways we screwed it up reflect the ways we keep screwing this up: the ways we keep putting blinders on our understanding of human beings, our society, and the interconnected nature life.

I want to start with two simple ideas. Every event has multiple causes: there are always multiple contributing factors to any event, and it can be extremely difficult to accurately disentangle the relative weight each factor has. Every event has multiple effects: depending on your perspective, you might consider some of these effects to be good and some to be bad. These concepts seem simple enough, but we often forget them, focusing instead on a single primary cause for events in question and arguing with those who refer to a different cause; we will focus only on the positive effects of our own choices and the negative effects of the ideas proposed by those who disagree with us. Understanding how our mind decides which causes and which effects to focus on requires a bit of psychology.

In the introduction of his book “The Righteous Mind,” (which I highly recommend) Jonathan Haidt describes our minds as such:

Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning. If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you. But if you think about moral reasoning as a skill we humans evolved to further our social agendas—to justify our own actions and to defend the teams we belong to—then things will make a lot more sense. Keep your eye on the intuitions, and don’t take people’s moral arguments at face value. They’re mostly post-hoc constructions made up on the fly, crafted to advance one or more strategic objectives.

The central metaphor … is that the mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant. The rider is our conscious reasoning—the stream of words and images that hogs the stage of our awareness. The elephant is the other 99 percent of mental processes—the ones that occur outside of awareness but that actually govern most of our behavior. 

In the aftermath of the Atlanta shootings, the moral intuition elephants dominated the conversation. For those who’ve spent the last year or more investing emotional labor into combatting racism, our moral intuition told us loud and clear this was another tragic example of racial hatred unleashed. For the most dominant elephants, the rider found plenty of evidence to justify the intuition that this was the shooter’s primary motivation. As additional evidence surfaced, the rider justified minimizing it because of the potential negative effects of broadening the discussion. But in the end, we all lost out. We lost out on a clearer understanding of reality and each other.

A horrific tragedy

Soon Chung Park. Hyun Jung Grant. Suncha Kim. Yong Yue. Delaina Yaun. Paul Andre Michels.  Xiaojie Tan. Daoyou Feng.

They deserve far more than being summarized as group of “eight victims, six of whom were Asian women.” Every single one of them was a multi-dimensional human being, a person who loved and was loved by others. They were parents, grandparents, friends, neighbors. They had stories, they had lives, they had things they still wanted to see and do in their years ahead of them. Their stories deserve to be heard. Their families deserve to be heard, supported, comforted. Their killer deserves to face justice; there is no doubt about who committed this heinous crime, and little doubt that he will spend the rest of his life behind bars, or possibly face the death penalty.

The massacres murders came in the midst of a national increase in discrimination and crime perpetrated by non-Asians against Asian American victims that seems to have begun after many on the right began referring to Covid-19 as the “China Virus.” This rise in hate crimes and bigotry, though difficult to quantify, had been simmering below the surface of the national psyche condemned by advocacy groups and garnering think pieces and op-eds, though not quite dominating the headlines. The death of 84-year-old Vicha Ratanapakdee flew below the radar for many, perhaps because his suspected assailant being black complicates the anti-racist, anti-Trump perspective. The grisly murders in Georgia, and the killer who fit the white, male, conservative stereotype of a racist extremist, served as a catalyst to bring this conversation into the spotlight.

And yet, as the details about the murderer started to come to light, they did not quite fit the narrative. The killer, who was captured alive and is in police custody, claimed to be a sex addict motivated by attempting to “eliminate temptation.” His roommate described him as “religious to the point of mania and who felt deep shame,” asserting that racial hatred did not seem, to him, to make any sense as a significant motive. A police captain giving a press conference recounted the suspect’s explanation, which aligned with his roommate’s: that he claimed to suffer from “sex addiction.” The captain also stated that the killer “had a really bad day,” unclear whether he was attempting to simply recount the suspect’s telling of the events or was adding his own take on them, but he faced immense pushback for minimizing the atrocity and was removed as spokesperson for the case. The captain’s removal was also undoubtedly tied to Facebook posts he made last year showing an offensive t-shirt linking Covid to China—revealing to many that he harbored strong anti-Asian biases himself and could not possibly be an impartial actor in the investigation of this case.

The Anti-Racist Lens

For those who advocate from within or alongside the Asian American community, there are ample, genuine reasons for their focus on the role that racism likely played in the Atlanta shootings. This commentary from several researchers at RAND does an excellent job of conveying the genuine and valid concerns of anti-racists, which I would summarize with these quotes:

• “[The killer’s claims of sex addiction] make it possible for some to deny that racism played a role in the attacks, or that systemic racism against Asian Americans still exists in this country.”

• “Racism against Asian Americans is deeply rooted in the history of the United States. Enduring stereotypes about and bias towards Asian Americans, as well as lack of concern about them, have had long-standing harm on Asian American lives and livelihoods.”

• “Reports of violence against Asian Americans are likely to be underreported. Many Asian American groups include significant numbers of immigrants, who may want to keep their heads down, choosing instead to live with racism, xenophobia, and language-based discrimination and violence as a price in pursuit of the American Dream.”

• “What's worse, engaging in speculation over the killer's motives in last week's murders shifts the focus away from the victims themselves, flattening them to familiar stereotypes, such as being fetishized as “exotic,” or that of an Asian sex worker.”

These are all very understandable justifications for focusing the discussion on racism and take a skeptical stance against discussions about the killer’s self-proclaimed motives. The authors are right that stereotypes abound about Asian Americans, and the fetishization of Asian American women is a particularly pernicious stereotype that we risk reinforcing by focusing the discussion on these women’s alleged activity. The authors are right that hatred and violence against Asian Americans are rising and yet still likely to be underreported. Advocates are justified in insisting that we have a national conversation about the fear and pain that Asian Americans are feeling in this time.

Unfortunately, many advocates have gone beyond just warning about pernicious stereotypes and attempted to actively stigmatize open consideration of alternative factors. This piece in The Lily is representative:

During a news conference on Wednesday, Baker said the shooter claims his violence was not racially motivated, citing his “sex addiction” and a desire to “eliminate” places of business that had been a “temptation.”

Major media outlets should not be elevating those statements, Li said.

“The machines are working to minimize Asian lives, and present this guy in the best light possible — as a ‘sex addict.’ ” The only people Li fully trusts to cover these issues, she said, are Asian and Asian American women.

I’m attempting to make a case to be made for balance. Can we condemn and combat anti-Asian racism, but also have an open-minded conversation about the motive behind the Atlanta killings? Can we make room for multiple factors? Why must one assume that the killer was only motivated by racial bigotry in order to show support for Asian Americans? Why must we stigmatize understanding?

Understanding is not the same as defending

We owe it to ourselves to pause and reflect. If we plan to advocate for culture change, we owe it to the victims to understand, as fully as possible, all of the interacting factors that led to this happening. We owe it to the marginalized members of society, the ones most vulnerable to the feelings of rage and inadequacy in others, to get this right. How can we be advocates for social change if we don’t fully understand the social dynamics at play? Why is an attempt to understand all of the killer’s motives as accurately as possible considered to be akin to defending his atrocious acts? Is it possible that people who advocate for restorative justice have tagged “… except for white conservative men” to the end of their position statement?

I would be very surprised if the killer in this case held zero racial biases about Asian American women. As is often discussed in anti-racist discourse, the majority of Americans unconsciously adopt stereotypes about others and can perceive others through these filters. Did he see these women as less valuable lives that others due to their race? Did he frequent these establishments because he fetishized these women? I would not be surprised. But we are talking about a man who committed mass murder. How is his assumed unconscious bias remotely on par with the very clear atrocity he just committed? We do not need to read his mind in order to condemn the man or his acts. To be clear, there are men who are so motivated by racial hatred and bigotry that they commit mass murder in order to drive terror into the hearts of a group of people, intentionally. These killers make no secret of their race-based hatred. By all accounts, this does not appear to be one of those cases. As unconscious bias does not seem to be a remotely sufficient explanation for this crime, those of us who want to understand are left still searching.

Understanding is not for “them,” it’s for “us”

As I acknowledged above, part of the resistance to discussing the killer’s self-proclaimed motives lies in the legitimate concern that it will further stigmatize the female immigrants from Asian countries, perpetuating the pernicious stereotype that they are often sex workers, or promoting the sexual fetishization of Asian women. This concern is totally understandable. In this case, it can even feel like “blaming the victim”—"if these women didn’t work in these spas, they wouldn’t have died, therefore their deaths are their own fault.” This is a horrific line of thinking, and to be clear, I reject it outright. No one ever deserves to be brutally murdered. Nothing these women did merited their dehumanization in any way. Speaking more generally, sex workers are human beings, worthy of love and respect and dignity.

The next reason to object to engaging with his claims is, I believe, darker. We are angry at him, and we want to continue to be angry at him. We want to dehumanize him. We want to believe that our intuition is correct, that he was a vile bigot, and any evidence to the contrary paints him as more human and less despicable. As Li implies above, it feels like a favor to him, something he doesn’t deserve. Something that might lead to leniency, forgiveness. We want him to suffer, and we want anyone like him to Learn Their Lesson. And the most vile crime we could possibly charge him with, after mass murder, is racist bigotry. Anything else is a step down, a consolation he is unworthy of.

And yet… the understanding is not for him. Sure, maybe he would appreciate it, in some hypothetical, metaphysical imagining of the world. But the truth is he will spend the rest of his life behind bars regardless of what you and I think about him. So let’s be selfish. What’s in it for us?

The gains, as I see them, are threefold, and they are immense.

1. By seeking to understand, we gain clarity about the dynamic, systemic nature of the problems we face, and we are more likely to develop effective courses of action to affect the change we desire and avoid negative unintended side effects

2. By seeking to understand, we humanize the other, which reduces our fear of them and paves the way for psychological liberation

3. By seeking to understand, we learn more about the nature of humanity itself, see ourselves in others, and learn critical lessons about how we can avoid the same traps they fell prey to.

I will start at the end.

Purity Culture

In a recent post on French Press, David French wrote about a subculture within Evangelical Christianity called Purity Culture, in which the killer was apparently deeply absorbed. French’s piece is worth reading in its entirety. In it, he describes “purity culture” as “the elaborate set of extra-biblical rituals and teachings that became popular in the 1990s and were designed to build safeguards and ‘strongholds’ of sexual purity in Christian communities.”

While some purity teaching was both orthodox and beneficial, other teaching kept lurching towards the same extremes. Time and again purity acolytes repeated the same themes. Sexual sin is a defining sin. Women bore a special burden to protect young men from lust and (later) satisfy their husband’s desires.

In one particularly pernicious ritual, youth pastors and summer camps would show Christian teenagers two pennies (or other coins), one brand new and others that had been in circulation. The brand new penny was “pure.” The dirty pennies were “handled,” and the more they were “handled,” the dirtier they became. 

The key idea to me is that within purity culture, sexual sin is a defining sin. More damning than greed, anger, hatred, envy, sloth. It isn’t just something you do; once done, it’s something you are. Teens and young adults who were drawn in to this worldview became obsessed with maintaining their purity in both body and mind. Their virginity became a core part of their identity. Lack of conformity in others led to harsh judgement, which fed the judger’s own sense of pride. Lack of conformity in oneself led to secrecy or shame. One has to imagine that the more they tried not to think about sex, the more they thought about it, the more shame they felt, the more they retreated to their purity efforts, in a vicious cycle. After spending a very small amount of time learning about this world from someone who has lived close to it (David French), it becomes easier to imagine that an especially deranged subscriber, one trapped in a vicious cycle of self-loathing and obsession, might come to the tragically flawed conclusion that mass murder was a logical solution to his problems; something he even felt morally obligated to do to save others from his damnation.

To avoid exploring this worldview is to miss out on seeing the potential parallels with one’s own worldview. In reading the purity culture description, I immediately and viscerally understood the logic and ramifications. This is “woke” culture. The singular obsession with one sin above all else. The idea that, having committed this sin, your true nature is permanently revealed (you are not someone who once did something racist—you are a racist, full stop). The idea that racism is a viral mindbug that we are morally obligated to dedicate our lives to suppressing, and yet the lack of acknowledgement that our very obsession could be fueling the fire. The idea that one person in an interaction is solely responsible for the thoughts and feelings of the other person. The loss of purity that comes with violating dogma. The mental anguish that befalls all parties in its path. The rare but extreme figure who is so wholly consumed by a cause that they are willing to commit mass murder for what they see, through their horrifically warped lens, as the greater good. The parallels are there. To pin the killers motives solely on his potential racial biases is to miss out on the opportunity to see elements of his flaws in ourselves.

Liberation

I must, at this point, check my privilege. I am fortunate enough that I have never experienced oppression in any real sense. I’ve never felt the sting of racism, systemic or otherwise. Despite being a woman in a male-dominated field, I’ve never faced significant sexism. And being born as an American citizen in an English-speaking middle-class family afforded me advantages that people the world over couldn’t dream of. I’m lucky as hell.

And yet… with reflection, it is possible to empathize with others. Empathy is imprecise—no one can literally feel what someone else is feeling. But as a humanist, I believe that our ability to temporarily shed our own life experience and attempt to truly sit with someone else’s is what makes us human. To illustrate my point, I’ll point to Cat Rakoswski’s story. She recounts, in painful detail, the teasing she endured as one of very few Asian American children in a predominantly white school. Not all of us can relate to being a racial minority in our school and then being teased about it, but almost all of us can relate to the pain of being teased, and then imagine that pain being amplified exponentially as it cuts to the heart of who we are. Cat briefly shared this experience in a tweet that garnered, at this moment, over 21,000 likes.

Cat Rakowski @catrakowski

I wonder if the kids who pulled their eyes at me and mercilessly yelled "ching chong" at me on the bus even remember doing it. The two worst offenders are both parents now. I wonder what they teach their children. I feel ill today. #StopAAPIHate #StopAsianHateCrimes

Then, something happened. She decided to contact the now man who had teased her as a child. He replied, and shocked her. He apologized sincerely for the pain he’d caused. He said that he did not want to make excuses and owned up to having been an asshole. He gave some context about personal struggles he was going through at the time (details she redacted). And he apologized again. In allowing herself to consider him as a human being, 20 years of pain were lifted off her heart. In a (far less-liked) follow-up tweet, Cat said poignantly, “I'm further determined not to give up on people, even on a dark day like this. Open your hearts, and remember that, in the best of cases, accountability and grace go hand-in-hand.” 

Cat Rakowski @catrakowski

I'm further determined not to give up on people, even on a dark day like this. Open your hearts, and remember that, in the best of cases, accountability and grace go hand-in-hand. #StopAAPIHate

To be clear: no one can make someone who is the victim of violence, rage, or hatred, be ready to enter into a state of understanding and grace, nor should they pressure them. But we can de-stigmatize it, for there is great power in choosing to go there. It is a major piece of restorative justice (though critically, not the entirety of it). In finding common humanity, realizing we’re all carrying around our own demons and flaws, the world is a much less frightening place. “My heart healed more in an instant that I thought possible,” Cat said. If our goal is to end the pain and oppression felt by so many, why have we stigmatized the critical step of humanizing our enemies?

Clarity

The Atlanta killings were immediately framed in the context of mounting number of recent anti-Asian American hate crimes. Unstated but strongly implied is that the primary problem is anti-Asian American bias among white people. A report from Stop AAPI Hate, an advocacy group, lists details of 18 different attacks, and specifically refers to the assailant as white in five of them. A plethora of articles are available to make the connection (bolstered by President Biden himself) to Donald Trump’s blaming of China for Covid, and the eagerness of his supporters to adopt such epithets as “The China Virus.” A clear picture is painted: White supremacy, and the white conservatives who perpetuate it, are to blame for these crimes.

And yet… the story is not so clear. As Scott Alexander, AKA Slate Star Codex, termed it once, this is a case of “framing for heat instead of light.” You can choose details, data, anecdotes, and string them together in a way that ignites the passions of your target audience. Or you can do it in a way that brings clarity to the underlying system dynamics. And blaming this crime wave on white supremacy brings heat, not light.

With light, the situation is far more complex. The criminals committing the crimes against Asian victims are not entirely white; in fact, black perpetrators are overrepresented. Apparently this trend goes back at least a decade in San Francisco, and like in Atlanta, assuming the criminals were all motivated by racial hatred seems likely to be a gross oversimplification. Yet there is an understandable hesitancy to turn this into a black vs. Asian issue. The less understandable tendency is to argue that not only is white supremacy to blame for white-on-Asian crimes, it is also to blame for the black-on-Asian ones. (The rider has to work extra hard for the strongest elephants.)

I don’t particularly want to dwell on this point. Emphasizing the race of criminals tempts us to adopt the most damning or forgiving explanation for the crime we can muster, pending who we’ve chosen to align with. And by choosing a side, we’re choosing an enemy, and amplifying racial animosity.

In the past, I might have felt like the racial animosity was already there, and putting it under the spotlight was the only way to fight it. But I was wrong. Too often, I was assuming racial animosity on the part of others, then justifying my own animosity in return. Media outlets have caught on to the fact that pieces that feed this urge get a lot of clicks, and they are giving the audience what it wants with dozens and dozens of stories on the crime wave. This is not a victimless phenomenon. In echos of 2001’s “summer of the shark,” wall-to-wall news coverage of rare events can exacerbate genuine terror in the hearts of the public. It is just plain cruel and misleading to amplify threats and downplay mitigating information. We have to be able to learn, understand reality, and do better.

Doing Better

What does doing better look like? Maybe it’s spending more time listening to the stories of the victims. Spending more time trying to understand the complexity of society with an open mind. Spending more time admitting what we don’t know, or admitting when we were wrong. Standing up for people who are being subjected to violence. Ensuring the public gets accurate information, even if it’s not what they want to hear or what drives clicks. Speaking out against stereotypes of all kinds. Practicing agape love for all, even when it’s hard.

I’m hopeful we can get there.