Wow, Adlham, that quote. The weight of all of those assumptions and expectations is heavy. The entire situation is extraordinarily complex. So it makes sense that the feelings you're grappling with are similarly complex.
I can't link, but I'm posting some excerpts from an NPR interview here because I think they might be helpful. At least for me, this helped put into words the very circular nature of the discussions surrounding racism, misogyny, classism etc.
Atlanta Killings: Sex Worker Advocate Sees Deadly Consequences Of Overlapping Hatreds
For Yves Nguyen — an organizer for Red Canary Song, a New York City-based group that supports Asian sex workers and allies — whether the women victims provided sex services is beside the point. To her, the gunman's target was clear — and part of a history of race and gender-based violence against Asian women, immigrants and sex workers.
"If these women weren't sex workers, the person who killed them certainly thought that they were," Nguyen said in an interview with Weekend Edition's Lulu Garcia-Navarro.
"It is a reality that some people who work in massage businesses do engage in sex work ... and obviously some people don't," she said. But the racist and fetishistic perceptions around women of Asian descent, she said, especially immigrant Asian women involved in low-wage work, "make it so that people think that they're sex workers anyways."
"If they were not Asian women, they probably wouldn't be viewed as sexual objects of desire, and they wouldn't be automatically assumed to be sex workers," Nguyen said. "There's a hatred for both sex workers and immigrants and being Asian and being women, and they all intersect. It would be irresponsible to not talk about all of those parts."
As more information surfaces about the mass shooting, sex worker advocates like Nguyen are uneasy about how law enforcement and the news media might reinforce dehumanizing stereotypes of the victims and their work, considering the entrenched stigmas that exist around sex work and massage businesses.
"People want to be like, 'Don't assume that they're sex workers,' because they think that there's shame attached to it," she said, "even though we're simply naming the very expansive harm of criminalizing sex work and criminalizing immigrants."
"Say that one of those women was a sex worker, then is that person meant to be shamed in their death? Would they have deserved it? The answer is no."
My guess is, Adlham, that this is where some of your pain lies. The impulse to say "But they weren't sex workers! It's bullshit to assume that they were!" And then the immediate feeling after that of "Shit, who cares if they were! I shouldn't need to defend that anyway!"
It can be simultaneously true that 1) it is Bullshit with a capital B that that they are automatically assumed to have been sex workers AND 2) if any of them were sex workers, that doesn't justify killing them.
You're seeing the "Model Minority" myth vs. the hypersexualization/fetishization/dehumanization loop play out in real time. It's a circular argument meant to keep you on the hamster wheel. You're damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Like Dee said, it's like asking what the rape victim was wearing. Or asking the wife with the black eye if she did in fact burn dinner.
You know another layer that makes this even more fucked up? He was able to go out and buy that gun THAT MORNING!
Another layer. He sat in his car for nearly an hour before going in to the first location (maybe even a little over an hour, I don't remember the exact time stamps). That's thousands of moments where he could have chosen differently, and didn't. I know we're all familiar with the mindfuck of that knowledge, that they could have done differently but chose not to.
8 murder charges aren't enough. This case is literally what the hate crime statute was written for. He deliberately attacked members of at least two protected classes. I truly hope they do their due diligence in this investigation. The prosecutors owe it to the victims to make hate crime charges stick.
