Ravi Zacharias, the Atlanta Shooter, Anti-Asian Hate, and Misogyny
Brad talks with Adrian Gibbs, co-host of the Dirty Rotten Church Kids and an ex-evangelical of Filipino descent, about the connections between Ravi Zacharias' abuse of spa workers of Asian descent and the killing of six Asian women of Asian descent at day spas near Atlanta next week. They discuss the themes of misogyny, racial otherness, and purity culture as ways to understand why both cases involve Evangelical men carrying out violence against women of color.
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My name is Brad Onishi, faculty in religion, Skidmore College, and our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB.
Today I want to talk about the events in Georgia where a young man of 21 years old killed multiple people, including half a dozen Asian women who worked at various massage parlors.
As you can imagine for Asian Americans and those of us in the community, it's a tough day, it's a tough set of events There's an immense amount of sadness and anger and other emotions.
I wanted to talk about how all of this sort of fits together in terms of Christian nationalism, racism, anti-Asian sediment, and patriarchy.
This morning I wrote this on Twitter.
Killing a half a dozen Asian women and attributing it to sex addiction, not racism, is Christian nationalism in a nutshell.
So somebody could say, purity culture made me feel bad about my sexual needs, so I eliminated the temptation.
What does race have to do with that?
What I'm referencing there is that the killer here attributed his actions to sex addiction rather than to race, and the sheriff in charge of the investigation said today that he had a bad day.
He was tempted by visiting these massage parlors and lashed out after being fed up.
How does this relate to Christian nationalism?
Well let me try to tie those threads together.
Let's start with anti-Asian sentiment and anti-Asian racism.
This is a long and sordid history in this country.
There's a kind of way that it's covered over in popular culture by the idea that Asian Americans, especially East Asians, are the model minority.
And the model minority myth is used to sort of, at times at least, depict Asian people as the right kind of neighbors, good citizens, quiet, hardworking, and a model for all of the other minorities out there.
And yet, at the drop of a hat, as we've seen throughout American history, Asians are used as scapegoats, as those who are to blame for the country's problems, as a horde infesting as those who are to blame for the country's problems, as a horde infesting the nation, and so
My colleague, Wendy Lee at Skidmore, always says that Asians and Asian Americans in this country are either a pet or a threat, Or either your pet model minority who you pat on the head and treat as if they are a docile, submissive, good person of color who just acts the right way or a threat who is infesting the country.
And we've seen that.
We've seen it with how Donald Trump and others have talked about the COVID-19 as China virus and used other slurs.
This has drummed up anti-Asian sentiment.
And so we've seen a rise in hate crimes and violence against Asian people, especially older Asian people and women.
Numbers are somewhere around a 68% increase in these incidents since the pandemic began.
As I said, though, this is not new.
There's a long history here.
And let me just quote a few passages from Erika Lee's America is for Americans.
She sets up in the chapter, The Chinese Are No More, the fact that anti-Chinese and anti-Japanese sediments on the West Coast really set up the immigration system in this country for most of the 20th century.
And so here's what she says on page 81.
on page 81.
The nearly 139,000 Chinese who entered the United States between 1870 and 1880 were only a small fraction of the total number of immigrants, nearly 3.2 million mostly from Europe, who also arrived in the country during the same decade. nearly 3.2 million mostly from Europe, who also arrived in So in that decade, you have 3.2 million immigrants, 140,000 of them come from China.
Nevertheless, Lee says, their presence sparked some of the most violent and racist campaigns in US history.
So it was not about the numbers.
Right.
We have 3.2 million people coming and we have 139,000 Chinese immigrants.
It was about something else.
It's about the idea that Asian people are unassimilable, that they will never be true Americans, and that they are an infestation that needs to be rejected from the country's body.
Okay.
She goes on to explain the various measures and acts that led up to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.
So, she says that a Chinese police tax was levied on all Chinese people living in California in 1862, and over the next decade various laws barred Chinese people from testifying in criminal or civil cases.
There was the lodging Lodging house ordinance or cubic air ordinance which required every lodging house to provide at least 500 cubic feet of airspace for each lodger Which was of course intended to prevent Living spaces with multiple generations and and many people living in them
In 1870, the state legislature passed a law forbidding the landing of any Mongolian Chinese or Japanese female for criminal or demoralizing purposes, a law that the State Commission of Immigration used to deny entry to all Chinese women.
So we need to sort of put a pin here that there's this idea that Chinese women and Japanese women and Mongolian women are criminal and immoral.
Okay, five years later in 1875, The Page Act barred Asian women who were suspected of prostitution.
This law was broadly used to deny entry to all Chinese immigrants, especially women.
Both the 1862 and 1875 laws would become important blueprints in the eventual exclusion of all Chinese laborers in 1882.
In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed and it prevented the entry into this country of all people from China.
On page 93, Lee talks about the effects of this, this way.
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