The Atlanta shootings have awakened a ferocious anger and grief among Asian Americans

Delaina Yaun, the mother of a 13-year-old son and an 8-month-old daughter, had a date with her husband Tuesday afternoon at a spa outside Atlanta, Young’s Asian Massage. Soon after they arrived, Yaun was shot dead. So were Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, and Paul Andre Michels. A gunman had attacked the business. In total, he killed eight people at three spas and critically injured another. Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Yong Ae Yue were also killed. Six of the victims were of Asian descent. Seven were women.

The Atlanta killing spree has provoked something enormous, something untamed from within the Asian American community: a kind of ferocious anger, exasperation, horror, and desperation that have long been dormant in our collective consciousness. The feelings we hadn’t given ourselves the space to feel—the capacity to grieve our people and reckon with our experiences as Asian Americans—have now inevitably, painfully surfaced. And it’s about time.

On Wednesday morning, as I re-read the line “eight people, including six of Asian descent,” a deep, vacuous pit began to form inside me. Not only because multiple Asian women were killed, but because the media was resistant to calling the killings a racial attack. The suspect, a 21-year-old White man, denied that his rampage was racially motivated. The media, police, and other authorities swiftly focused on economic instability and sexual addiction as potential factors. Others evoked the “lone wolf” trope, denying the possibility that the killer is part of a larger system of intertwined racism, sexism, and colonialism in which they too are complicit. Later in the day, a witness at one of the shootings reported hearing the shooter yell that he was going to "kill all Asians.” But the narrative had already been set.