The Faculty of the Department of History condemns the murders of six Asian women and two other people in the Atlanta area on March 16, 2021. This is only the latest incident in a deplorable escalation of racist, xenophobic, and misogynist violence against Asians and Asian Americans in the US.
We endorse the fuller statements made by the UMass Amherst Asian & Asian American Studies Certificate faculty (including our colleagues Richard Chu and Sigrid Schmalzer) and by the American Historical Association, our national professional organization. We urge you to read them both. As the former statement notes, "Anti-Asian racism has never occurred in isolation and is always connected to other and existing forms of structural racism and inequality." The latter traces the long history of anti-Asian bigotry in the US, observing that "this hostility against particular groups because of their ethnic origins—expressed via cultural stereotypes, scapegoating, physical aggression, and bloodshed—has deep roots in our nation’s past," and concluding that "the racialized misogyny explicit in the Atlanta killings is the product of generations-long stereotyping and cultural denigration against Asian American women in particular."
We stand in solidarity with Asians and Asian Americans and express our deepest condolences by all those who have been affected by this and other incidents of anti-Asian bigotry and violence. We urge readers to take our colleagues' advice in their statement not only to deplore such acts when they occur but also to take concrete actions to prevent racism, xenophobia, and other forms of discrimination from being normalized.