For many, the killings were clear acts of racism \u2013 and yet the notion seemed to draw pushback from authorities and critics on social media.\u00a0We\u2019re waiting for the evidence, they heard those institutions say. But the evidence<\/em>, they thought, is in our experience<\/em>. Experience reflecting centuries of white supremacy.\u00a0<\/p>\n Cherokee County Sheriff Frank Reynolds said Wednesday that the suspect, 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long, of Woodstock, Ga., told authorities that his actions were not racially motivated and that he had a sexual addiction. (Photo: Atlanta Police Department\/Crisp County Sheriff's Office)<\/span><\/p>\n The\u00a0situation seemed to echo a history of moments when others\u2019 perceived racist experiences \u2013 a police shooting of a Black person, policies that put\u00a0Latino migrant children in cages, a supervisor at work uttering a microaggression, a president smearing people from African nations,\u00a0and Meghan Markle\u2019s recent accounts of being attacked\u00a0during her time as a British royal \u2013 were downplayed\u00a0and\u00a0dismissed by detractors who call such concerns overblown or too emotional.<\/p>\n Despite what they saw with their hearts and minds, those who perceived the Atlanta killings\u00a0as the crescendo of a year-long wave of anti-Asian violence sensed the event\u00a0would instead be defined by the same white-dominated institutions that always called the shots.<\/p>\n Jesus Estrella, left, and Shelby stand in support of the Asian and Hispanic community outside Young's Asian Massage on Wednesday in Acworth, Ga. (Photo: Curtis Compton, AP)<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThose in power, and in this case those who are white and male, maintain their power partly by determining and defining what constitutes violations of these rules,\u201d said Charissa Cheah, a psychology professor at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County whose research focuses on families from marginalized backgrounds. \u201cWhat we are seeing is a key characteristic of institutional and systemic racism and misogyny.\u201d<\/p>\n The victims in the Georgia shootings\u00a0included a small-business owner, an Army veteran and a wife on a date with her husband. Some of the victims’ names had not been released as of Thursday afternoon;\u00a0others\u00a0were identified as Xiaojie Tan, 49, Delaina Ashley Yaun, 33, Paul Andre Michels, 54, and\u00a0Daoyou Feng, 44.\u00a0Elcias Hernandez-Ortiz, 30, was injured\u00a0but survived.<\/p>\n On social media, many people of color, including prominent activists, journalists, writers, athletes, entertainers, former President Barack Obama and others urged the nation to consider the role racism and America’s history of anti-immigrant, anti-Asian and anti-women violence played in the shootings in\u00a0Georgia regardless of the shooter’s stated motive.<\/p>\n \u201cMany of us can see through this racist mess that the police are trying to say isn\u2019t racially motivated,\u201d wrote religion and Africana studies professor Anthea Butler of the University of Pennsylvania in a thread posted Wednesday morning on Twitter. \u201cLet\u2019s be clear. This is terrorism. It\u2019s murder. It\u2019s AAPI hatred and vilification. It is racist.\u201d (AAPI refers to Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.)<\/p>\n Jennifer Ho, an ethnic studies professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said that while legalities often prevent authorities from labeling incidents as hate crimes early on, \u201cwhat seems indisputable is that even if you take race aside, he targeted women, and that alone should merit a hate crime. This is a crime of gender.\u201d<\/p>\n Long, of Woodstock, Georgia, told authorities his actions were not racially motivated, attributing them instead to sexual addiction. On Wednesday, Atlanta Police Chief Rodney Bryant said it was too soon to label the tragedy a hate crime.<\/p>\n “We are just not there as of yet,” he said at a news conference.<\/p>\n A boy joins a rally to raise awareness of anti-Asian violence at the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles. (Photo: RINGO CHIU, AFP via Getty Images)<\/span><\/p>\n But\u00a0the fact that the shootings came in the wake of a year of rising anti-Asian violence and the inflammatory\u00a0rhetoric of former President\u00a0Donald Trump\u2019s administration, which often referred to COVID-19 with loaded terms such as the “China virus” and “Kung Flu,” could not be neglected, according to many\u00a0Americans of color.<\/p>\n \u201cYesterday\u2019s tragedy must be investigated for what it appears to be,\u201d said legal and policy director Murtaza Khwaja in a statement issued by the Georgia chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. \u201cA hate crime.\u201d<\/p>\n Instead, what Americans\u00a0saw was Sheriff’s\u00a0Capt. Jay Baker of Cherokee County, where one of the three spa shootings had taken place, appearing to defend the shooter by saying he’d “had a bad day.”<\/p>\n That response, some said,\u00a0illustrated the structural challenges faced by victimized populations caught in a system in which the rules have traditionally not favored them.<\/p>\n Those systems exist \u201cbecause harm is often defined by people who have never experienced the actual harm,\u201d said Gregg Orton, executive director of the National Council of Asian Pacific Americans. \u201cOr they have a vested interest in maintaining their power.\u201d<\/p>\n At October\u2019s vice presidential debate, for example, then-Vice President Mike Pence denied systemic racism as an issue in the wake of widespread social unrest spurred by multiple high-profile deaths of Black Americans at the hands of police, as well as a pandemic and economic upheaval disproportionately affecting\u00a0people of color.<\/p>\n That same month, Louisville Police Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly, among the officers who fired weapons in a failed drug raid that took the life of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old Black medical worker in Kentucky, said the incident was \u201cnot a race thing like people try to make it to be.\u201d<\/p>\n And earlier this month in the United Kingdom, “Good Morning Britain” host Piers Morgan slammed Markle\u2019s \u201cincendiary\u201d charges of racism in her interview with Oprah Winfrey, including a claim that a member of the royal family prodded Prince Harry about the color of their unborn child. Morgan, who suggested that \u201ccuriosity\u201d rather than racism was behind the inquiry, was forced to step away from the show in the blowback that followed.<\/p>\n A protester holds a sign at a Black Lives Matter protest at Railroad Park in Haines City, Fla., June 12, 2020.<\/p>\n Downplaying the responsibility of those who are racist\u00a0perpetuates that system, critics\u00a0said.\u00a0With the Georgia shootings, it also minimalizes\u00a0the tragedy\u2019s victims.<\/p>\n Arturo Aldama, chair and associate professor of Latino and ethnic studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said victims in such cases often suffer two types of violence as a result: that of the act itself and their subsequent portrayal by law enforcement and the media.<\/p>\n In cases of police brutality and highly publicized shootings of unarmed people of color, for example, officers often claim a sense that their lives were in danger, while media portrayals criminalize the subject.<\/p>\n \u201cUnfortunately for Asian Americans, who have been part of the American fabric since the 1850s gold rush in California, there have been 171 years of \u2018bad days,\u2019\u201d Aldama\u00a0said.<\/p>\n The Atlanta-area shootings\u00a0recalled large-scale assaults on Asian Americans in the past, including the 1989 shooting of 32 Cambodian and Vietnamese children, five of them fatally, on a playground in Stockton, California, and 19th-century incidents in which dozens of Chinese were slaughtered in separate attacks, including the burning of a Chinatown neighborhood in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n Despite a significant presence in the United States\u00a0dating to the 1800s, Asian Americans still feel bound by two stereotypes \u2013 that of the high-achieving \u201cmodel minority\u201d and the perpetual foreigner. Both serve to minimize claims of racism by the community, experts said.<\/p>\n \u201cThe cultural view of Asians as foreigners and all of us being the same wasn\u2019t created by the pandemic,\u201d said law professor Gabriel Chin of the University of California, Davis. \u201cIt was released by the pandemic.\u201d<\/p>\n In a report released this week before the Atlanta killings, Stop AAPI Hate said it recorded nearly 3,800 anti-Asian incidents \u2013 including harassment, discrimination and acts of violence \u2013 between mid-March 2020 and late February 2021. Women were more than twice as likely as men to report such incidents, the report said.<\/p>\n Sarah Vinson, a forensic psychiatrist based in Atlanta, said the culture of fear created by the rising violence among Asian American communities made it only natural for people to see Tuesday\u2019s shootings in that light.<\/p>\n Esther Song joins a community rally to raise awareness about anti-Asian violence at Los Angeles Historic Park near the Chinatown district in Los Angeles on Feb. 20. (Photo: Damian Dovarganes, AP)<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWe have seen a rise in white supremacist acts and in violence against Asian people, so for people to see a shooting that has disproportionately impacted Asian victims and see a tie is the logical thing to do,\u201d Vinson said. \u201cThe idea that this has been allowed to go on and that there\u2019s not an outcry about how wrong it is \u2013 it does set the stage for someone to up the ante. There\u2019s a way that society can be complicit when it doesn\u2019t address these issues when they are smaller.\u201d<\/p>\n That many had failed to seriously acknowledge the effect of anti-Asian violence until recently \u201cgoes back to our society\u2019s messages and narratives about who is good, who is honorable and who are the desired groups of people to be in,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n While it\u2019s important not to jump to conclusions, Vinson said, it\u2019s also important to realize that white people are afforded certain privileges that others are not.<\/p>\n \u201cIf this had been an Islamic man with white victims, how would this be talked about?\u201d she said. \u201cThere\u2019s a reason for that. It\u2019s the inequity in how these things are promoted.\u201d<\/p>\n And while people of color are hampered by negative bias, the positive bias that benefits white people\u00a0can also be damaging \u2013 as the U.S. Capitol riots of Jan. 6 showed, Vinson said. The attack saw\u00a0crowds made up largely of white conservatives storm the building, some of them threatening to kill lawmakers.\u00a0<\/p>\n Rioters attack the Capitol on Jan. 6 in Washington. (Photo: Julio Cortez\/AP)<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWhat happened at the Capitol \u2013 there were indicators in place that it was going to happen,\u201d she said. \u201cBut people were so wedded to the idea that white people aren\u2019t dangerous that they didn\u2019t see it even when it was right there. So even positive bias can have negative implications for society because the risk of white violence is not properly accounted for.\u201d<\/p>\n Such biases are kept in place by an existing power structure that thrives on Americans\u2019 short memories and tendency not to look at the big picture, said the Rev. Laura\u00a0Cheifetz, assistant dean of admissions at Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville, Tennessee.<\/p>\n \u201cWe tend not to see systems or patterns but individual actions,\u201d said Cheifetz, who is of Japanese and white Jewish descent. \u201cSo every time there\u2019s a school shooting, rather than thinking\u00a0‘What are the larger systems and patterns that led to this violence?’\u00a0we think, \u2018Oh, that kid \u2013 he was bullied.\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cIt can feel malicious that others are unable to make what feel like really obvious connections. But that\u2019s how we\u2019ve been able to stand years of deaths through police brutality. It\u2019s scary to admit that\u2019s who we are and acknowledge how much work remains to be done.\u201d<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.gannett-cdn.com\/presto\/2021\/03\/18\/USAT\/663b06ed-b0f0-4686-af8e-f408289f6e2f-VPC_ATL_ASIAN_COMMUNITY_REAX_wide_ATL_PD_CRISP_CO_SHERIFFS_OFFICE.jpg?width=540&height=&fit=bounds&auto=webp\")
<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.gannett-cdn.com\/presto\/2021\/03\/18\/USAT\/d1318885-7a4c-48c2-85d8-f7f8a7e3c0d0-AP_Racial_Injustice_Georgia_Shootings_Reaction.jpg?width=540&height=&fit=bounds&auto=webp\")
<\/p>\nRacism often defined by those who have not experienced racism, experts say<\/h2>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.gannett-cdn.com\/presto\/2021\/03\/17\/USAT\/68f4529d-061f-4f6f-9823-f71f884a0a64-Asian_boy.jpg?width=540&height=&fit=bounds&auto=webp\")
<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.gannett-cdn.com\/-mm-\/2b62ec7da5a31a7170dfae7e3946352c55989908\/c=0-148-2264-3167\/local\/-\/media\/2020\/09\/09\/USATODAY\/usatsports\/ghows_gallery-LK-612009988-8e572602.jpg?width=180&height=240&fit=crop\")
<\/p>\nNearly 3,800 anti-Asian incidents reported in past year<\/h2>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.gannett-cdn.com\/presto\/2021\/02\/26\/USAT\/3aeb1702-5f9a-460d-8798-13bc93964232-AP_Anti-Asian_Violence_Awareness_1.jpg?width=540&height=&fit=bounds&auto=webp\")
<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.gannett-cdn.com\/presto\/2021\/02\/02\/USAT\/8a2d8981-10e3-498c-9723-c10f5ecc7a46-AP_Capitol_Breach_The_Road_to_Riot_1.jpg?width=540&height=&fit=bounds&auto=webp\")
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