Were the Atlanta murders motivated by racism?

On March 16, 2021, eight people were murdered. Their names are

·      박순정, 74

·      김현정, 51

·      김선자, 69

·      유영애, 63

·      谭小洁, 49

·      冯道友, 44

·      Delaina Ashley Yaun, 33

·      Paul Andre Michels, 54

A further victim, Elcias Hernandez-Ortiz required intensive care, but as of this writing, thankfully it appears that he will recover.

To many observers, including myself, it was obvious that the shootings were motivated by racism against Asians, especially Asian women. 

However, some of my dear friends have strongly challenged this explanation. 

As I have listened to their voices, I believe they felt that making an accusation of ‘racism’ involved leaping to conclusions before the facts were known. In other words, it reflected badly upon me: this accusation revealed a judgmental heart that sought to confirm a loaded narrative independent of a concern for facts or truth. It was a bad “hot take” – motivated by passion but not by reason. 

As I have continued to listen, I sense that my friends are not alone. For instance, a similar approach was taken by Bret Stephens. He wrote in The New York Times:

Now we have a rising rate of anti-Asian hate crimes, and a horrific crime in which the perpetrator is white and most of his victims were of Asian descent (although two were white). The powerful ideological temptation is to treat this as yet another shooting in the vein of Pittsburgh and El Paso — or, as one CNN headline put it, “White Supremacy and Hate Are Haunting Asian-Americans.”

Tempting — but mostly baseless.

On a contentious issue like this, I recognize the temptation to use labels, create framings, and utilize other rhetorical devices that further polarize us into respective groups. To resist this, I have prayed over my reflections and sought to remove every word and phrase that might set up a barrier or sound like an attack.

If at any point you sense that my posture is setting up division rather than inviting dialogue, please know that is not only an unintended consequence but one that I actively tried to avoid. Whatever you may feel about me and my perspective, I want you to know that my heart is motivated to write in the tender mixture of love and grief as we all recoil at this tragic loss of life. 

I also believe— at least about anyone in my circle of friends — that those who disagree with me are intelligent and compassionate people. I don’t think we have to agree with one another to listen, to care, and to love. 

With this context in mind, here is the question I want to discuss:

Clearly, the shooter is guilty of murder. But is he also guilty of racism?

If you think the answer is ‘no, these shootings weren’t racist,’ then this article was written for you.

To me, the evidence of six dead Asian women, each individual a bearer of God’s image, provided more than sufficient evidence. But why?

I’ll try to explain as we go along.

Objection 1: The murderer’s words

One objection is that the murderer himself said he was not motivated by racism.

As Captain Jay Baker of the Cherokee County Sheriff’s office said, “he does claim it was not racially motivated.” 

Further, a classmate of the shooter agrees with this assessment. Zac Summers of CBS46.com reports, “The classmate recalled an incident involving a video that surfaced of a student calling a school resource officer racial slur. He said [the shooter] spoke out against the racist behavior.”

What are we to make of this?

First, once someone has murdered eight people, and shot another, my trust in their self-defensive explanations sharply declines. 

Second, while it is possible that the shooter was only culpable of sexual immorality and murder, and scrupulously worked to avoid any racism in his heart, that seems unlikely. The evidence does not suggest a man whose heart was self-controlled, much less one that was sweetened and humbled by God’s gracious love. 

Third, humans are complex. We can be anti-racist at one point and racist at another point. While I can believe the shooter once spoke out against a racist slur in high school, I don’t believe that provides significant insight into what motivated him to murder eight people and severely injure another person last week.

We also need to balance these reports against the eyewitness testimony reported by Hwang Ji-yoon:

On the 17th, the Hankook Ilbo, Atlanta, quoted an employee A, a member of the 'Gold Massage Spa', a massage parlor where the shooting took place, and said that the suspect at the time of the crime said that he would 'kill all Asians'.

Objection 2: Only a sex addiction

Another argument I heard is that the murderer was only motivated by guilt over his sex addiction. 

I agree that the shooter appears to have been disturbed by his habit of visiting these businesses for sexual gratification. And the murderer has admitted to this sin.

However, the effort to compartmentalize his behavior into discrete boxes is unpersuasive. 

As Ray Ortlund has written,

Our sins are connected deep inside us, more than we intend or even see. We compartmentalize. We tell ourselves we can sin in one area and it will stay contained in that area. It’s easier to rationalize that way. We can keep a feeling of control.

But the reality of what we are and how we work is more subtle, more interrelated, more inevitable. When the Corinthian church was bouncing off the walls with quarreling, jealousy, anger, hostility, slander, gossip, conceit and disorder, and when Paul probed deeper, what he found down underneath the other mess was unrepentant sexual sin.

Bible-believing Christians should not be surprised that unrepentant sexual sin is often connected to other sins—including the sin of racism.

Objection 3: Racism against white people?

After I stated that these murders were motivated by racism, my friends asked me about a variety of thought experiments to see if I would so easily see racism in different scenarios. 

For instance, if the same person had gone into some white-collar office buildings in Atlanta, and shot the people in a few different businesses, the body count might primarily be white men. Would that be racist?

Or, if his sexual interest had been targeted at runaway, white teenage girls, would that be racist? 

Or if a highly qualified white man is passed over for tenure at a university, due to a mandate to ensure more faculty diversity, is that racism?

Or if a white business owner is not eligible for a government contract, on the basis of his skin color, is that racism?

My first observation, upon hearing these thought experiments, is that they seem to reveal a way in which white people are attuned to what it feels like to be discriminated against on the basis of their ethnic identity. Further, I’ve observed that sometimes when white people share their stories of discrimination, they are discounted, perhaps because they happened to white people. The feeling that one’s own experiences are being invalidated can lead to frustration, anger, and even retaliation.

I’m not going to try to adjudicate all of these stories and their interpretations at this moment. But I do want us to listen to and grieve whenever someone experiences racist treatment. I do believe that white people are sometimes discriminated against because of their skin color.

Likewise, I want to invite us to listen to our Asian and Asian American brothers and sisters when they tell us their stories of racism. I want us to give the same consideration to our Black neighbors, our Native American neighbors, and our Latino neighbors.

I think if we will empathize with one another’s stories we can make progress in this difficult conversation. When we acknowledge the reality of hurt — including the hurt of experiencing racism — in whatever direction it goes — we experience healing and restoration together.

I have felt that this can be a disorienting experience. As someone who grew up in a relatively white bubble in Atlanta, the Buckhead enclave, I have often found myself in shock, anger, disbelief, and even distrust as I have heard the stories of my friends from different ethnicities. Particularly heartbreaking was hearing some of the family stories they grew up with, which were so different from my own.

And as I have studied these issues in historical perspective, I have had many sleepless nights. I’ve been haunted by the stories of Native Americans who walked the Trail of Tears, the torture endured by African American slaves, the forcible relocation of Japanese Americans to internment camps, and many other voices. My experience has been that hearing the painful cries of the past has provided important context to the contemporary discussion.

In any case, it seems to me that the entry point of love is listening.

Objection 4: Unfairly accused of racism

At the same time, as I continued to listen to these thought experiments, I sensed a further concern: that the charge of ‘racism’ can be inconsistently and unfairly applied against white people. What I hear my friends saying is that this can be a particular kind of racism: to be called a ‘racist’ just because of the color of your skin.

I’ve heard and grieved stories of my white friends being unfairly charged as racists.

However, that doesn’t imply that this accusation of racism is unfair. 

The shooter didn’t, for example, unintentionally cause offense and then, once he realized the hurt that he had caused, immediately try to make things right.

No! Far from it! He intentionally murdered six Asian women!

I understand that putting this plainly may cause offense, but please give me a hearing on this one: in the aftermath of six Asian women being murdered, I would suggest that it is ungracious to turn the conversation to discussing unfair accusations of racism against whites.

At the same time, I’ve attempted to empathetically represent this concern because I think it does provide an opportunity to better understand the Atlanta shootings. If we can articulate what it feels like to experience racism, then we are in a better position to grieve when we hear someone else share their story of racial discrimination.

Objection 5: Just statistics?

Another argument I heard is that because the shooter had decided to kill workers at a spa, the statistics were weighted towards Asian women being murdered.

Further, given the poverty that many Asian women endure in their home countries, they are particularly vulnerable to sex trafficking, and their economic situation is the primary reason they are then forced or coerced into providing massages as well as sexual services. 

Again, what I notice is a desire to compartmentalize explanations. By contrast, it is more accurate to see that oppression can be simultaneously motivated both by economic power imbalances and racist dehumanization. 

Further, once a social system is established and maintained that oppresses a certain group of people, a decision to participate in that oppressive social system makes one… innocent of the oppression? 

Surely not.

Just because a system that sustains sex trafficking itself discriminates against economically vulnerable Asian women does not absolve the murderer of his responsibility to avoid participating in that system. If anything, in such a situation, we have a heightened responsibility to protect the vulnerable and to be a voice for the voiceless.

As Samuel Perry describes it,

By frequenting these establishments, he’s already expressing a racialized fetish for Asian women. He walked in that door, knowing that they would be Asian faces he would be shooting. He had dehumanized this entire group of people… He fetishized, objectified and dehumanized Asian women in particular, and that plays a role.

When the murderer first chose to seek out Asian women for sexual services, that in itself was a violation of their dignity. He was already down the road of dehumanizing women and Asian women in particular.

As James 1:14-15 says, “But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.”

This is the reason why I did not feel that I — or many others — had “jumped to the conclusion” to view these murders as a hate crime.

The pattern of abusing Asian women for his sexual gratification inherently involved a racialized dehumanization of these individuals. And yes, this habitual sin was also misogynistic. And it was also taking advantage of their economic vulnerability. 

As we read in James 2:1, “Show no partiality as you hold the faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory.”

The sin of partiality, like light going through a broken diamond, scatters along all the dimensions of our human experience. 

What is the human heart like?

Conservative evangelicals generally believe that human beings are sinners in need of God’s grace. As Malcolm Muggeridge once said, “The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact.”

Personally, I’m in a cross-cultural marriage and am the father of mixed-race kids. I serve in a multi-ethnic church under black pastoral leadership. I regularly listen to the voices of friends and public figures from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds and cultural perspectives so that I can become more understanding, empathetic, and appreciative of the awesome diversity that God has created. I believe racism is wrong.

But to be open about it: sometimes I feel or act in racist ways. This isn’t a desire I cultivate; it is more an impulse that I find myself having, though I find it to be an unwelcome way to view a fellow image bearer.

In my experience, someone who is relying on God’s grace, in the fellowship of the church, to overcome a particular human tendency towards sin is less likely to claim that they have overcome it. And it seems to me that our default setting is to love ourselves and those who look like us. 

Because the Bible provides a bleak diagnosis about the human heart, it seems to me that the particular question under discussion is not whether or not the shooter ever had racist attitudes. No, the question is more specific: when the shooter murdered six Asian women, murdered two others, and shot a ninth person, was that motivated by racism? 

Listening to more stories

If I’ve emphasized one point, I think it is that an important dimension of this conversation is who we are listening to and learning from.

For instance, what voices have we heard from as we developed our understanding of American history? If we look at the Atlanta shootings from some perspectives, it can feel artificial — or false — to connect these murders to a broader pattern of anti-Asian racism. As an isolated event, who knows?

But before we reach that conclusion, I suggest we listen to a broader cross-section of eyewitness testimony, both contemporary and historical, about anti-Asian racism in the United States.

For instance, as Raymond Chang, President of the Asian American Christian Collaborative (AACC) states,

Anti-Asian violence falls in line with a long history of racism that we have seen against Asians who bear the image of God. The Atlanta-area massacre is a single link in a long chain of spiritual deformation that has plagued the church in the United States (emphasis added).

Dr. Gabriel Catanus, the Lead Pastor, Garden City Covenant Church, adds,

Lately, my conversations with pastors, ministry leaders, and professors have uncovered that many non-AAPI Christians are hearing about anti-Asian racism and violence for the first time— even though there are countless AAPI Christians on their staffs or under their care (emphasis added).

The more we listen, the more we will see these connections.

For instance, “Nancy Wang Yuen, a sociology professor at Biola University who specializes in race and ethnicity in media, told NPR that removing racism from the conversation ignores the history of hypersexualization and fetishization of Asian women in the U.S.” (emphasis added).

The more the historical context is known, understood, and remembered, the logical and painful link between these murders and long-standing patterns of racism against Asians and Asian Americans becomes clearer to see. 

The historical context is important because the experience of speaking up about racism and being ignored — again — is part of the pain that our Asian and Asian American brothers and sisters are currently experiencing.

It may be unintentional, but if we deny their perspective as legitimate, this hurtfully indicates that they and their voices are invisible, marginal, and not believable.

Because these people matter to us, as brothers and sisters in Christ, as friends, and as our neighbors, we all have a reason to hear and grieve their personal testimony about the reality and prevalence of anti-Asian racism.

Mourn with those who mourn

To sum it up, on the level of rational analysis, I am unpersuaded by a variety of arguments that attempt to compartmentalize the shooter’s actions as non-racist. 

And while I don’t believe that hurling the accusation of “racist!” is something to be done lightly, that just doesn’t fit this situation.

Please remember with me that we are mourning the murders of 박순정, 김현정, 김선자, 유영애, 谭小洁, 冯道友, Delaina Ashley Yaun, and Paul Andre Michels. We are praying for their families and friends. We are also still praying for the full recovery for Elcias Hernandez-Ortiz.

As you pray for them, would you also pray for yourself? We can pray, “God, what do you see in this situation? What do you want me to see and feel?”

I believe that God sees these people in all of their individuality — which includes their social context. For six of these victims, their life circumstances — and their deaths — were particularly shaped by their identities as Asian women.

Romans 12:15 advises us, “weep with those who weep.” As our Asian American and Asian brothers and sister in Christ weep in the aftermath of this tragedy, let us weep with them. They are affected because this murderous shooting spree has painfully reminded them that they are often dehumanized on the basis of their ethnic identity.

The dissonance between the value God places on their lives and the cold-blooded murder of these Asian women is part of what generates the particular anguish felt by Asian and Asian American men and women.

Let’s listen to their voices. Let’s hear their tears. Let’s sit and grieve together. 

Let’s weep with those who weep.