By now, you’ve probably heard about the mass murder committed by a conservative Christian in the Atlanta, Georgia area. Because the killer was a white, conservative man, he was taken alive by the police. The killer informed police that he had targeted his victims based on his belief that they were sex workers, saying that he has “sex addiction” and that they were a “temptation he wanted to eliminate“.
Upon hearing his claim that he had targeted his victims based on his belief that they were sex workers, the police declared that a hate crime had not been committed. Meanwhile, the liberal mainstream press is insisting that it was a hate crime because most of the victims were Asian.
First off, targeting sex workers is, in fact, a hate crime. Sex workers are among the most popular targets for violence — at least partially because people seem to think violence against them isn’t as bad as violence against other people. That the police so quickly relaxed when they chose to trust the mass murderer’s statement that he had not targeted Asians is yet another window into just how sick American society is. Moreover, when women who are sex workers (or are perceived to be sex workers) are victims of a hate crime, it affects all women.
Second, the liberal mass media’s fixation on trying to make this into a hate crime against Asians (and not about sex workers) is just as disgusting. Liberals are always trying to separate race from class because they are comfortable with economic inequality. They fully support discrimination based on a person’s economic situation. They may not like that poverty exists, but they believe it must exist and they blame poor people for poverty. Because of all this, they miss the fact that systemic racism is inextricably linked to poverty and the very reason why a mass murderer targeting sex workers in a particular place might find that he has just killed a bunch of people who belong to a particular ethnic group.
What really happened here is that the extreme sexual repression placed on all of the congregants of an extremely conservative church broke one of those congregants, and instead of destroying himself, he chose to go on a rampage. While the bulk of the blame belongs with the murderer, his parents, church, and all of conservative society are also to blame. All this does dovetail with prejudice against Asians, just not in a straightforward way.
Advocates say this reveals the way racism, sexism and anti-sex-work sentiment work together to produce anti-Asian violence: no matter what, they say, his crime was ultimately one against sex workers. “Even if they were providing non-sexual massages, this ends up being a sex work issue,” said Esther K, a co-director of Red Canary Song, a grassroots Chinese massage parlor worker coalition. “The women are de facto being seen as sex workers and being scapegoated as such.”
‘A specific kind of racism’: Atlanta shootings fuel fears over anti-sex-work ideology by Marie Solis
Not only is race inextricably related to issues of class, but western societies have a long tradition of sexualizing and even fetishizing the marginalized people that they are oppressing. Then, they occasionally lash out against the people they’ve sexualized, as if their sexuality is an existential threat to society. One example of this that comes to mind would be 14-yr-old Emmett Till, who was brutally murdered by white people in Mississippi in 1955 for the crime of having flirted with a white woman; years later, the woman recanted, saying that Till had done nothing wrong at all.
Sex addiction is not an officially recognized disorder, though some destructive sexual behaviors (like hypersexualism) are associated with legitimate disorders, many of which can be caused by an abusive upbringing. Regardless of whether the killer has a legitimate psychiatric condition, he is essentially using sex addiction as a way to blame the women for their own murders. The conservative narrative of “sex addiction” tends to be frighteningly similar — and just as destructive — as their narrative for homosexuality, with perfectly healthy human behavior painted as self-destructive and sinful. The killer was a member of the Crabapple First Baptist Church in Milton, Georgia, which is a Southern Baptist church. The Southern Baptists have a long history of discrimination against gay and lesbian people and support gay conversion therapy. The killer’s framing of the murders as necessary to save himself from sexual temptation is quite similar to the “gay panic” defense frequently used by violent conservatives — sometimes with success.
We might eventually learn that the killer’s “sex addiction” excuse was merely cover for his hatred of Asian people generally. The United States has had a year of intensified racial violence against Asians because many are unjustly blaming them for the COVID-19 pandemic, and people are understandably concerned for the safety of Asian people in the US. Although reports that the killer’s social media contained such claims appear to have been false, there’s certainly a high correlation between the killer’s conservative culture and hatred of Asian people. Regardless of what the killer’s true motivation was, this was clearly a hate crime.
Update:
We’ve just learned that the killer probably did receive treatment for sex addiction according to a man who claims to have been his roommate at a halfway house. The man also said that the killer frequented massage parlors for the explicit purpose of sexual activity. This doesn’t change the inextricable link between class and race, but does confirm that liberalism is failing once again to accurately understand reality. (Reuters)