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After the killing of eight people including six Asian-American women in shootings in Atlanta on Tuesday night sent shockwaves across the United States, the Biden-Harris administration is focusing on making the community feel safe and helping them heal from the tragedy.
President Joe Biden announced that American flags at the White House and on other federal buildings will be flown at half-mast as a mark of respect for victims of the shooting. Additionally, President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are scheduled to be in Atlanta today. Though their visit was initially supposed to be in connection with the Covid relief programme, it will now be oriented towards meeting families of the victims and members of the Asian American community.
Even though the shooter, 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long claimed otherwise, the racist undertones of the attack cannot be ignored. Asian-Americans as well as those hailing from the wider Asia Pacific region including Pacific Islands, have faced tremendous discrimination in wake of the Covid-19 outbreak that was dubbed by the Trump administration as the “China Virus”, thus placing people hailing from a wide variety of Asian backgrounds in the crosshairs of racists and bigots.
This is not very different from when people from north eastern states were targeted across India and blamed for spreading the Coronavirus. The discrimination ranged from being turned away from shops, even while making essential purchases, to street harassment to being spat upon as reported by SabrangIndia.
All this, because they belong to easily identifiable ethnic groups, something that racists and bigots use as justification for their ‘othering’ and discrimination. In the case of the Atlanta shootings, even if the shooter claimed that he was killing the women to eliminate the temptation they posed to him, it is clearly a case of exotification and fetishisation, and therefore inherently racist.
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