Reply to Why won't people address the massage shootings as the mental health issue rather than racism?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Most crimes show indifference to the victims humanity and subjectivity. PP are you saying they’re all unconscious hate crimes? And if you believe it’s unconscious does it meet the legal standard of a hate crime?

Some posters here think of you believe and intellectually justify assumptions, even logical suppositions, enough they will become facts. Maybe so the narrative fits a larger agenda.  I don’t understand why the agenda is so important but it won’t be deterred by logic apparently.

Others need evidence to accept something as fact. We won’t agree. Maybe it’s just different ways of thinking about things but a court of law requires a fairly strict standard of truth. [/quote]
DP here. And while it seems you think very highly of your intellectual approach to the world, you seem to be missing there are two different (and somewhat irreconcilable) approaches being used on this thread.

One group of people seems focused on whether explicit racism can be attributed to Long, and a key for them to resolving that question seems to be whether he specifically targeted Asian spas, or if it just so happens that the places that offer sexual massage happen to be Asian-run/-staffed. There's a different group of people who say that individual intent doesn't really matter. The fact that sexual massage parlors tend to be Asian-run/-staffed is a result of 100+ years of racist tropes. The first group says, well, take that up with the Asian owners who play into those tropes. That the victims happened to be Asian doesn't mean Long was a racist. The second group says, whether there are some Asian people who try to capitalize off the racism against them has nothing to do with whether there is racism, and the point is that it doesn't matter whether Long was explicitly targeting Asians. We can't know how he would have handled his sex addiction if the people who primarily staffed these parlors were white and/or weren't associated with hyper-sexuality as well as docility. [i]Ad nauseum.[/i]

Personally, I think that if we want to truly understand racism, we have to separate the legal questions surrounding crimes like this (which will necessarily be very narrowly-defined) from the social and moral ones. Legally, it will probably be hard to answer whether Long was targeting racists. Socially, though, it's relatively easy to answer whether Asians are associated with sex work and whether someone who is targeting people he thinks are sex workers is likely to associate a certain image of a docile yet hyper-sexual Asian woman with sex work. So, how did this all play out in Long's addled little mind? Who knows...and personally I don't care. Why is the societal conversation talking about anti-Asian hate in addition to mental illness? Because of this backdrop of historical and ongoing racism. To ignore this fact is to try to deny that there is racism. Personally, I'd prefer we not have to have these types of discussions (i.e. ones about societal racism) only in the aftermath of horrific crimes is unfortunate...especially since it allows for deflection away from the societal issues to the specific unknowns of a particular case. But, it's the only time these conversations seem to happen.[/quote]

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