Grace Kao - Will Atlanta shootings spur action on anti-Asian hate crime laws?

March 31, 2021

Yale University Sociology Department chair Grace Kao, an expert on Asian American studies, said it was hard to disentangle race from the killings. 

The shooter had targeted Asian American women, and given how ”Asian American women have been viewed as exotic and feminine objects in U.S. mass media and suspected of prostitution from the earliest U.S. immigration restrictions,” the suspect could easily have viewed Asian American women in the same manner, she said.

“If you talk to the average Asian American woman, most of us have been subject to varying degrees of sexual harassment that targets our gender and racial identities,” Kao said. ”They do not exist separately in the lives of individuals.”

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