Please Acknowledge Their Names

Say Their Names!!

1. Delaina Ashley Yaun

2. Paul Andre Michels

3. Xiaojie Tan

4. Daoyou Feng

5. Soon Chung Park

6. Hyun Jung Grant

7. Suncha Kim

8. Yong Ae Yue

Tuesday’s horrific murders in Atlanta, in which 8 people were killed including six Asian-American women and seven out of the eight were women, were a stark reminder of the racist misogynist violence that besets society. We must call these attacks exactly what they were: anti-Asian, anti-woman, white supremacist violence.

Almost 48 hours after the shooting and we still don’t know ALL their names and we know almost nothing about any of the victims (names have been updated as of 3/20/21). Where are the long, heartbreaking vignettes that emerge up after every other mass shooting? Is it because they were perhaps sex workers, because they were mostly Asian?

They were subjected to sexualized violence stemming from the hatred of sex workers, Asian women, working class people, and immigrants. This harassment targeted at the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities (AAPI) community spans multiple intersections of race, gender, socioeconomics and age. Vulnerable communities like the elderly, immigrants, and sex-workers are being targeted in horrific ways and Asian-American women report hate incidents at 2.3 times the rate of men.

We cannot let law enforcement or any entity gloss over these horrific incidents as we saw yesterday when the white man who committed these crimes was characterized as having a “very bad day.” This open season on Asians and our AAPI communities led by a former president who used the Covid pandemic to target these communities.

Philadelphia NOW is a cross-racial community and we have seen and felt first-hand the pain of both the violence and the attempts to minimize the violence. We know that it is not enough to condemn violence, but to call it what it is. These shootings were the result of racism and misogyny, prevalent in our country. We are committed to continue our work on fighting racism as one of our six core issues: Economic Justice, Reproductive Justice, Gender Equality, Combatting Racism, Ending Violence Against Women and Constitutional Equality.

Words that my daughter, Joya Ahmad wrote in a SAALT Blog series ring true today as they did in 2013. They were written to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Oak Creek massacre in Wisconsin where members of the Sikh community (usually of South Asian ethnicity) worshipping innocently at their gurdwara (temple) were gunned down by a white supremacist.

“I ask us all to reflect on what we can do moving forward. It is not enough to be angry on our own. It is not enough to think about what needs to change. We must take action. We must create change.

We must demand the justice that we deserve. In the name of progress, we must refuse to back down.” (https://tinyurl.com/ys2mujmy)

In Solidarity and on behalf of Philadelphia NOW,

Nina Ahmad, Ph.D.

Proud AAPI of Bangladeshi heritage.