News

Sorry Cops, But Having A “Bad Day” Does Not Excuse Racially Targeted Murder

"Since when is a bad day and a porn addiction an excuse to murder eight people?"

by Michelle Rennex  18 March 2021
robert aaron long asian murder "bad day"

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Yesterday, a white domestic terrorist murdered six innocent Asian-Americans in three separate massage parlours across Atlanta, Georgia.

Robert Aaron Long, a 21-year-old white male, shot and killed a total of eight people yesterday, six of whom were Asian women and the other two white. After targeting and opening fire on three Asian-staffed spas across Atlanta, Long was arrested, admitted to his crimes, and was charged with eight counts of murder and one of aggravated assault.

However, despite Long literally going out of his way to target Asian women in massage parlours during his massacre, law-enforcement officials claimed the attacks weren’t racially motivated. Instead, Captain Jay Baker shared the idea that Long targeted these specific businesses because they “provided an outlet for his addiction to sex”.

“He apparently has an issue, what he considers a sex addiction, and sees these locations as a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate,” Captain Jay Baker said. “He claims that these — and as the chief said, it’s still early — but he does claim that it’s not racially motivated,”

“He had pretty much been fed up and at the end of his rope,” the captain continued. “Yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did.”

But people are fed up with publications and the police defending what is clearly racially-motivated attacks and acting as if there aren’t clear motives at play when white men literally go out of their way to target, and kill, specific races.

Cherokee County Sheriff Frank Reynolds claimed that they didn’t believe that Long’s murder of six Asian women was racially-motivated because “[Long] frequented these places in the past and may have been lashing out”.

But the idea that a murderer couldn’t possibly be racist because he had visited these specific Asian businesses before is laughable. As is the idea that one simply couldn’t be racist while killing six Asian women because he also shot two white people who were witnesses at the same location.

Similarly, a white man having a “sex addiction” and viewing Asian women as only sex objects he needed to “eliminate”, instead of as human beings, doesn’t justify murder. Nor does having a “really bad day” ever excuse murder — apparently, unless you are white.

Really, the motive of Robert Aaron Long isn’t “unknown” as many media outlets report. While Long can easily claim he isn’t racist to avoid hate crime charges, his actions — and the murder of six Asian women specifically — can, and easily does, refute this.

This is because while Long claims he was simply a “sex addict” trying to “eliminate temptation” it is no coincidence that he solely targeted massage parlours with Asian staff.

While it should go without saying, having a sexual addiction does not negate the fact that Long went out of his way to kill women of Asian descent by first targeting an establishment called Young’s Asian Massage, and then traveling around 40km to northeast Atlanta to target another two spas.

Sadly, Robert Aaron Long’s targeted attack isn’t the first time a hate crime has happened to Asians, nor is it likely to be the last.

Since the coronavirus pandemic started, attacks against Asian-Americans have skyrocketed with Stop AAPI Hate revealing that nearly 3,800 racist incidents had been reported by Asians in the last year. Worse still, Asian women had reported these hate incidents 2.3 times more than men.

But even on a more local level, Chinese-Australians have also been subject to similar racist attacks with 1 in 5 reporting that they had been physically threatened or attacked due to their East-Asian heritage.

Similarly, police and right-wing media coddling and protecting white shooters is nothing new, either. For example, in 2016 when Jason Brian Dalton, the Uber driver who killed six people in the Kalamazoo shootings, was arrested, police called the white shooter just “your average Joe”.

And just last year, right-wing outlets were slammed for their positive coverage of white teen gunman, Kyle Rittenhouse, “cleaning graffiti” as the same publications attacked innocent police shooting victim, Jacob Blake for having a “knife in his car” after he had already been shot dead.

Unfortunately, while it shouldn’t be hard for law enforcement and right-wing media to see the clear links between white men specifically murdering people of a certain race, and racism — it’s seems to be a problem that won’t be solved any time soon.