Misogyny, Racism, and the Intersectional Face of Hate
by Rachael Fugardi
Rachael Fugardi is a Programs Specialist at the Anti-Defamation League where she works on projects related to extremism and countering hate through education. She recently graduated from King's College London with her MA in Conflict, Security, and Development. Her research has focused on gender, extremism, and the Middle East.
On Tuesday evening, March 16th, 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long opened fire at Young’s Asian Massage, killing four and injuring another. Long then embarked on a rampage targeting two more spas in the Atlanta area, killing a total of eight people in less than an hour. All but one of the murder victims were women. Six of them were Asian American women. Officers quickly intercepted and arrested Long, who was en route to Florida where he reportedly hoped to continue the violence, this time targeting the porn industry. Long claimed responsibility for the attack blaming his sex addiction and insisting that it was not racially motivated. In a press conference, public officials appeared to agree and explained these spas were “targets of opportunity” rather than racial targets. But given the victims, can we really accept the killer’s word at face value?
These salons were not merely random “targets of opportunity”. Long’s violence occurred across 30 miles and multiple jurisdictions where he carefully selected spaces associated with Asian women. While Asian women only make up two percent of Georgia’s population, they accounted for 75 percent of the victims. According to Captain Jay Baker, the perpetrator viewed these spas as “a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate”. This explanation is rooted in toxic masculinity, where women are dehumanized objects and violence is an appropriate tool to assert one’s manhood when faced with shame. However, his misogynistic motivations cannot be isolated from his racial ones. It is necessary to view his overwhelmingly Asian victims in the context of the wider spike in anti-Asian hate crimes. The dehumanizing anti-Asian rhetoric and hyper-sexualization of Asian women undoubtedly played a role in Long’s belief that these women were intentionally tempting him by simply existing in their bodies. If law enforcement is still unconvinced, I suggest they investigate Long’s porn history. I suspect it is filled with sexual violence targeting Asian women. The Atlanta salon shootings must be understood as an act of intersectional hate which reflects a broader theme within extremism overall.
Hate crime statistics highlight how deeply interconnected race and gender are. Stop AAPI Hate reported 3,795 incidents of hate against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the past year. Of those incidents, women were the targets more than twice as often as men. Similarly, women are consistently found to be the primary victims of anti-Muslim hatred and harassment. According to the Human Rights Campaign, nearly eight out of ten victims of fatal violence against transgender and gender non-conforming people were women of color. Perhaps women are viewed as easy targets because stereotypes assume they are gentle, submissive, and unlikely to fight back. Women are also disproportionately the targets of sexual harassment in public spaces. Some research suggests men are more likely to harass women in public when they are well educated but unable to meet their own high aspirations. This same idea of relative deprivation has long been used as an explanation for hate crimes and race-related harassment.
Moving from hate to extremism, opportunistic leaders strategically use misogyny as a pathway into white supremacy. White supremacists align their message within more mainstream beliefs that feminism and social justice activism are destroying society and ruining the lives of (white) men. Once this idea of victimization is internalized and feminists are seen as the enemy, it becomes easy to apply that same framing to other perceived enemies, including liberals, immigrants, and Jews. Andrew Aurenheimer, a popular white supremacist, illustrated this phenomenon, arguing, “Few people have personally had their life harmed by a Jew (in a direct, personally observable sense) but every single breathing man has had it fucked up by multiple selfish, scheming hookers (likely starting with their own mothers)”. This pattern is also clearly seen in the case of Anders Breivik and the 2011 Norway attacks. While Breivik claimed his attacks were part of a necessary defense to prevent a Labour Party assisted Muslim takeover of Europe, a quick reading of his manifesto highlights feminism as his primary hatred.
Racism and misogyny are also deeply intertwined in far-right themes and narratives. White genocide is a far-right conspiracy that the white race is dying due to growing non-white populations and forced assimilation in the West. This fear has been a central theme in extremist manifestos from New Zealand to Germany and across the United States. While the racist intent behind this conspiracy is immediately visible, there is a dual misogynistic implication. Adherents of this ideology are hyper fixated on birth rates and interracial relationships and thus are focused on controlling women’s bodies. Women are considered breeders and feminism is often blamed as one of the key drivers of the impending white genocide. White supremacists seek social dominance over women as well as minorities. Misogyny and racism work together, escalating the perceived threat and justifying the use of lethal violence.
The Atlanta shooting fits into a much larger framework of misogyny and racism within extremism. Women are disproportionately the targets of harassment and hate crimes in public spaces. Additionally, opportunistic leaders strategically use hatred for women to indoctrinate new members into white supremacist ideology. Finally, conspiracy theories such as the white genocide interweave racism and misogyny to create compelling messages of hate and fear that drives people to commit violence. Law enforcement has suggested we focus on the shooter’s misogyny rather than the clear racism involved. In other cases, the attacker’s misogyny has been downplayed to focus on the potential racist motivation. While convenient, this strategy of trying to isolate racism from misogyny is ultimately unhelpful. We must choose to understand the intersection of both and the combined threat that they pose if we want to effectively combat extremism and keep all people safe.