We were shocked and saddened this past week to learn about the murder of eight people, six of them Asian American women, in Atlanta, Georgia. We were even more appalled by the inability of local law enforcement to recognize and condemn the obvious white supremacist and racist motivations of this horrible event. To avoid doing so ignores the clear intersection of race, ethnicity and gender experienced by Asian American women, one that leads to stereotyping and violence. 

According to the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, more than half of Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) women have experienced anti-Asian racism in the past two years. This spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic, in which hateful rhetoric around the origins of the virus left AAPI people, especially women, to deal with new stereotypes and violence. However, this doesn’t erase the racism Asian American women have always had to face in this country, apparent in this most recent tragic event. 

Local law enforcement in Atlanta announced this past week that the shooter was motivated by a “sex addiction”. When we heard this news, we wondered why it seemed like the police, and our society as a whole, would be more comfortable accepting a crime based on sexuality than a crime based on race. Is it that we are more comfortable condemning sexual violence than racial violence? Or is it that we continue to fail to be able to understand how race and gender interact to create an experience of marginalization all its own? 

This interaction of race and gender often manifests in the form of fetishization for AAPI women. Fetishization, defined in an article concerning the topic by Forbes.com, is “the act of making someone an object of sexual desire based on some aspect of their identity.” While perhaps intended to be flattering, this act objectifies people and reduces them to their sexuality. Additionally, fetishization has been used in the past to justify violence towards a group, such as the sexualization of African women by European colonizers that the men used to dehumanize the women and justify their enslavement. Fetishization of identity, especially AAPI women, can be seen in porn as well. Videos are marketed based on the AAPI women they film, resulting in a continuation of racist stereotypes. 

Fetishization of AAPI women can also manifest itself in casual conversation, inside comments and microaggressions, or pick-up lines that are supposed to be “compliments”. Our campus is not immune from these acts of racism. AAPI women, especially East Asian and South Asian women, regularly deal with fetishization of their identity, contributing to their feeling of marginalization and discrimination on our campus. 

The intertwined nature of sexism and racism for AAPI women is what we mean when we talk about intersectionality. Intersectionality is not the compounding of oppression, or a math equation of additive marginalization, but the unique experience of a people whose identity is multifaceted, whose various traits interact with each other to create new forms of expression and conversation, but also stereotyping and violence. Crimes committed against AAPI women, or any women who are marginalized based on another part of their identity, cannot be boiled down to a gender- or sex-based crime. Until we can call these crimes what they are, we will continue having one-dimensional conversations, running into barriers to solutions, and by omission perpetuating violence that takes lives.