Words have consequences. And many lawmakers said as much on Capitol Hill Thursday, in the first House hearing on discrimination against Asian Americans in more than three decades.
As California Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu put it:
“I served in active duty so you can say whatever you want under the First Amendment, you can say racist stupid stuff if you want. But I’m asking you to please stop using racist terms like ‘kung flu’ or ‘Wuhan virus’ or other ethnic identifiers in describing this virus. I am not a virus and when you say things like that, it hurts the Asian American community.”
Lieu was responding to Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy, who used “an old saying in Texas” describing lynching, saying Americans “want justice” for victims but that he had concern about “the policing of rhetoric in a free society.”
New York Democratic Rep. Grace Meng responded in kind:
“Your president and your party and your colleagues can talk about issues with any other country that you want, but you don’t have to do it by putting a bull’s-eye on the back of Asian Americans across this country, on our grandparents, on our kids.”
Violence and discrimination against Asian Americans have spiked over the last year, with more than 500 reported instances of violence in the first two months of 2021, according to a recent report from the organization Stop AAPI Hate — and likely even more unreported.
While there is no set motive in the Atlanta shootings yet, six of the eight victims’ Asian ethnicity drove concern over yet another example of seemingly random violence against an entire ethic group. The gunman told police he believed he had a sex addiction, police say. But advocates say this feeds directly into a major issue — and oft-perpetuated stereotype about Asian women.
“The fact that he’s even characterizing this as eliminating some sort of sex addition problem is dehumanizing and directed at the women who worked in this industry,” Georgia state Rep. Bee Nguyen told CNN’s “New Day.”
However, “sex” is a hate crime category under Georgia law. The shootings don’t have to be racially motivated to constitute a hate crime in the state.
“Six Asian women are dead,” Nguyen said. “And you simply cannot separate the fact that there’s hypersexualization of Asian women. It is interlinked to sex-working industry, and you cannot separate the misogyny, the racism and gender-based violence.”
The Point: With an issue this noxious, language matters — and so does action.
