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][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
Of course it's relevant.  But it's directly confounded with the type of business he targeted.  So it could be a racial target or it could be the type of business being targeted that was the motive and so far there is more evidence for the latter.  The bolded is scary and it is not consistent with living in a liberal society. [/quote]
The type of business he targeted is heavily associated with a negative stereotype of Asian women. This is confounded by the fact that some owners and traffickers play into that stereotype by staffing these kinds of businesses with predominantly Asian women.

It's not either/or. It's complicated. You want to talk about Long's motives. Some people want to talk about the overall culture of anti-Asian bias, which is a contributing factor to why 6 Asian-American women were killed in a city with relatively few Asian-Americans. Whatever fetishes or biases that Long has are somewhat irrelevant, IMHO, to the bigger question questions of: i) why Asian-American women are associated with sex work, ii) why so many Asian women ending up working at these types of places, and iii) why someone decides that the best way to deal with their sex addiction is to commit mass murder. I think we can never know if the answer to iii might be linked to i and ii, to the extent that the people who are associated with sex work are also people who are viewed as "other" by American culture. But choosing not to talk about it is choosing to deny the potential harms of racism.[/quote]

[b]I have never in my life heard that Asian-American women are associated with sex work[/b]. But I do know that some sex workers are Asian and many massage parlors are Asian run or staffed. But no one I know, Asian or otherwise, generalizes these practices to all Asian women.  I see you are interested in sex work and racial dimensions of it and I applaud you in learning about it and wanting to do something about it.  I know for a fact that some trafficking of sex workers starts in China and the workers get sent here.  The crime is horrible and we can't see eye to eye on how to view this specific event.  That's OK.  We seem to both agree that trafficking is wrong and this crime was horrific.  That's good enough.  [/quote]
I don't know what to say about this. [b]It's a common trope in Western media[/b]. It's even something Asian-American actresses talk about with respect to the roles they get to play. It's something that plays out in the data of, for example, dating sites and which people get responses and for what stated reasons. I don't really need you to "applaud" me for anything...but, thanks, I guess.

Anyway, I shared this earlier, maybe it would help: https://www.vox.com/22338807/asian-fetish-racism-atlanta-shooting

FWIW, it's not good enough for me that we both agree this was a bad crime. I don't know what you're trying to do, but you are playing into the hands of people who want to minimize the broader social implications of this crime by limiting it to the very detailed specifics of this one incident. That's how anti-BLM propaganda works as well. Point out the flaws in whatever most recent case has led to mass protests, ignore the broader patterns of police brutality. I wish that broad discussions about racism and bigotry didn't have to happen in the aftermath of horrific crimes, but it seems like the only time anyone is open to the discussion. But this pattern also leaves the discussions vulnerable to being too easily dismissed when the specifics of the crime turn out (as they always are) to be more complicated than, "I killed them, because I'm racist." Most mass murderers are not Dylann Roof, and their story is nuanced. If you don't want to see racism, you can easily dismiss it. If you do want to see racism, you can easily find it.

I don't care about Long. There is racism against Asians and Asian-Americans. This crime touches a nerve, because it is entangled with some of the ways that racism plays out in the US. If you can't see that, it's only because you don't want to see it.[/quote]

That's western media, like Chinese fortune cookie.  Fortune cookie is a SF invention.  It's not Chinese.

And I don't know how much of western media is true or not.  But in some parts of Taiwan, massage is a typical business, totally unrelated to sex.  If you are looking for sex shops, the best ones are in Las Vegas.  They are totally legal there.  [/quote]

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