The cloak of racism

Robert aaron long did not simply “have a bad day”

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about operational decentralization as the friend of racism. In the wake of Robert Aaron Long’s murder of Soon Chung Park, 74; Hyun Jung Grant, 51; Suncha Kim, 69; Yong Ae Yue, 63; Delaina Ashley Yaun, 33; Xiaojie Tan, 49; Daoyou Feng, 44; and Paul Andre Michels, 54, in Atlanta on March 16, I have been particularly perplexed by what cloaks racism and hides it so that it might live on in darkness to kill, steal, and destroy. I acknowledge that as an African-American and descendant of the Mattaponi, Pamunkey, and Chickahominy, racist acts of violence and white supremacy are not foreign to me or my people. Yet, simply because it is not foreign does not mean it is natural. I also acknowledge that acts of violence exist within the confines of racist, sexist, and classist realities which are themselves socially-constructed, not innate.

We must reject the notion that sticks and stones may break our bones, but words will never hurt us. When Captain Jay Baker of Atlanta stated that Long, a 21-year old man who murdered eight people (six of whom were Asian women), had a “bad day,” he used two, mono-syllabic words to describe what deserved much more perceptiveness and thought. Language is not a passive act that is immune to afflicting pain. How we tell the story of what takes place, especially in matters of life and death, will either heal or destroy us. Moreover, we’ve learned the old adage that those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it. Yet what is missing or possibly implied in this statement is the notion that we cannot forgo repeating history when we are not consistent in our linguistic assessment of history or when we operate in denial about the source and motivation driving what we tell in history. Robert Aaron Long is a white supremacist and one of many in America. His murdering of Asian women was not motivated by a “sexual addiction,” rather his fetishization of Asian women is a product of his racist beliefs—like a weed, without soil it would not grow. Just because it may take thinking to approach the truth, does not mean we should give up or sacrifice more words for a sound bite or quick response. Long’s choice to murder must be contextualized and any effort to divorce race from Long’s murderous act is itself an act of violence.

However, I do not presume to be surprised by Baker’s choice of words. He is not alone in failing to speak truthfully about racist violence. As a country, we still sit in the stink of four-hundred years of violence because we have lied about what happened on this land so much so that when we see white supremacist terror we marvel. There is a distinction between marveling at the unnatural display of violence and marveling at its happening. In America, people who are ignorant by choice or by consequence tend to be marveling because of the latter. Yet, thinking about American history; from the forced removal by white colonizers of people who were indigenous to this land to the genocide by white colonizers of men, women, and children to occupy the land for country; from the kidnapping and enslavement of millions of Africans as chattel by white colonizers to the persistent presence of slavery in the American prison industrial complex; from the federal and state exclusion of people seeking help at our man-made borders to the dehumanization of immigrating people that would normalize placing them in cages; from the violent acts of citizens to the cloaking that singles them out as individuals and not the spitting image of the country they love—all this and more may help to usher clarity in why Baker said Long had a “bad day.” When forced to confront American history, time and again, America has opted more on the side of having “bad [days]” than taking accountability and responsibility for both de jure and de facto violence it has perpetrated for hundreds of years.

In her 1993 Nobel lecture, Toni Morrison writes of the woman who provides focus to her piece, “being a writer she thinks of language partly as a system, partly as a living thing over which one has control, but mostly as agency – as an act with consequences.” As users of language we determine whether these “consequences” liberate us or leave us more shackled, more bound, more trapped in cycles of violence. When we talk about Atlanta on March 16 we must talk about race. When we talk about the lives that were lost and the grief beset on a city, a country, and the world, we must talk about race. And when we talk about race it is imperative we strive toward comprehending the mystifying properties of its ancient hold on our way of life. If we do not think about it, our language will hide racism like a thief in the night. And though we may not live to see liberation and the employment of truthful language as common practice, there is one thing I am sure—we will not arrive to that place if we give up.