On March 17th, Georgia prosecutors charged Robert Aaron Long with eight counts of murder stemming from a series of shootings at three Atlanta-area spas. Although six of the eight dead were Asian-American, the Cherokee County sheriff and the F.B.I. stated they did not believe the crime was racially motivated. Asian-American activists and Georgia politicians, including Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and Senator Raphael Warnock, have pushed back against that assertion. Stop AAPI Hate, a coalition fighting Asian American and Pacific Islander racism, has documented almost four thousand incidents of violence or threats directed against Asian Americans over the past year. Pawan Dhingra is a Professor of Sociology and American Studies at Amherst College who studies race issues.
Featured image: Asian American protestors at a 2014 protest in New York.
Marcela McGreal, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
