Three days after the horrific murders in Atlanta, we still haven’t seen the faces of four of the six women of Asian descent gunned down by Robert Aaron Long.
As someone who covered crime for many years as a print journalist, I remember the scramble to locate photos and bios of victims in the immediate aftermath of a multiple murder or mass-casualty event. Journalists are incredibly resourceful in tracking down this information, but all the firepower of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other esteemed news outlets hasn’t managed to bring the faces of these women before us, except for Xiaojie Tan, the woman who owned one of the massage businesses where the murders took place, and Hyun Jun Grant, a 51-year-old spa employee and single mother of two.
We do know, however, all about Robert Aaron Long, a 21-year-old white man who was having a “really bad day” when he decided to transfer the blame for his sex addiction to the women who worked in these massage spas. And I believe it is no coincidence that the victims of his murderous rage were primarily Asian women, whose faces we still do not see.
Public officials are questioning whether this was a racially motivated “hate crime.” That designation will ultimately hinge on legal definitions that are beyond my expertise, but it only takes a sliver of Biblical knowledge to see that Long’s actions were racist and hateful in profound ways.
Racism denies a person’s humanity—their inherent dignity and value as men and women created equally in the image of God. That is why American slave owners of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries denied the full humanity of Black people in order to justify their actions.
It is also why, in the year 2021, a young white American man conflated Asian, female, and sex worker as he sought to eliminate the supposed source of “temptation” for his sex addiction. These were faceless women, bearers not of the image of God but a stereotype—as sexually submissive Asian “exotics” who lived to service men. It is a specific form of racism, thoroughly drenched in misogyny. (Marie Solis of The Guardian and Shaila Dawan of The New York Times examine this here and here.)
Sadly, we know now that Long’s murder of eight people total traffics in American Christianity too, in ways that have become distressingly familiar. Long was nurtured in a conservative Baptist church that “appeared fixated on guilt and lust.” A self-described sex addict, he committed the murders at three massage spas; he had been a longtime customer at two of them, though it is not clear whether he obtained anything more than a massage there.
The killings took place amidst the backdrop of thousands of attacks against people of Asian descent in the United States during the pandemic—primarily under a president who called COVID-19 the “China virus,” and, at least once, “Kung flu.” My friend Dr. Shawn Okpebholo, a professor at Wheaton College, renowned music composer, and guest writer for this blog, nailed the connection with Trumpism right away after the Atlanta murders:
“Facts are not out yet, but I fully believe that this is another casualty of having a racist leader for four years—a former president who is worshiped by white supremacists and who is supported by those who don’t think they are white supremacists,” Okpebholo wrote on Facebook. “Yes, I’m talking about the former president, who, for the past year, spewed racist rhetoric against Asians and those who accepted his hate.
“For the same reasons—that is, again, the idol worship of a racist leader coupled with what seems to be the racist core of our nation—similar atrocities have happened to Muslims, Latino/as, Blacks, yes, pretty much all communities of color…”
We have much to mourn, and much to answer for, in our churches today. I know that God sees the faces of every Asian American who has been subjected to the racism we refuse to uproot in our American Christian circles, and in our nation. Do you see their faces?
