Ethel mermania wrote:A-Series-Of-Tubes wrote:
People keep saying that. They don't tend to say how they know.
If he was targeting prostitutes primarily, and went to 3 different parlours, the parlours nearby would have to be 87% Asian for there to be even a 50% chance of it being a co-incidence. (This may be wrong, however the fact that he went to 3 parlours to get his fill of killing makes it unlikely that Asians, OR Prostitutes were targets of opportunity ... or "coincidences" ... and astoundingly, he targeted Asian Prostitutes.)
It's still plausible that Asians were the only kind of prostitute he'd ever frequented, either because of price or some dehumanization on his part, and he fixated on the 'type' as being more abhorrent than either race or role.
Spanish whore houses primarily cater to the Spanish, the vast majority of these places that are accessible are Asian.
Just cause people want to make it about yet another white man hating on Asians, doesn't make it true.
They're not mutually-exclusive though. Stereotypes all come from somewhere and are reinforced by societal circumstances. Just because the majority of massage parlours in this Atlanta area allegedly doubling as peddlers of prostitution are run by Asians and the majority of employees there are Asian, doesn't mean the attack can't be both motivated by race and prejudice against sex workers. Racial disproportionality amongst sex workers makes it even more likely that that is the case. This attack happened in a country with a very pernicious and frightening history of the systemic fetishisation of East Asian women as submissive sexual objects who exist for the sexual gratification of white men, and if its in fact true that the "vast majority" of the workers in such places that are "accessible" to consumers are Asian, as you've said in your post, that would only serve to reinforce that negative stereotypes and association in the mind of the Atlanta shooter.
Like I've said already in this thread, I'm not a mindreader, no one can say for certain whether this was racially-motivated or not. But given the historical and cultural context, and the negative and racist associations between sex work and Asian-Americans that are often perpetuated by precisely the social facts you are referencing here, one can't really just dismiss this as a case of "crazy activists wanna make this about a white man hating on Asians" for 'no good reason' whatsoever. Conversations about racism are naturally sparked by tragedy. And racists don't often give open confessions of their hateful or prejudiced views. That doesn't stop us from examining the historical and cultural context behind prejudicial attitudes and the relevance they have in shaping the worldviews of persons acculturated in that nation, where that context is plainly relevant to the attack in question.