Opinion | The Atlanta Shootings and a Religious Toxicity - The New York Times - 0 views
-
I’m a Scholar of Religion. Here’s What I See in the Atlanta Shootings.
- ...28 more annotations...
-
As a child I asked my parents why we did this. They explained that who we are is inseparable from who loves us and whom we love.
-
Who are you? Where are you from? What do you believe? To move through this world as an Asian who is American is to exist under the gaze of white supremacy.
-
In other words, we have to constantly give an accounting of ourselves to justify and explain why we are here.
-
Was it racism? Was it deep-rooted misogyny? Was it a fetishization of Asian women in particular? Was it toxic theology — an extreme fear of God and an equally extreme self-loathing?
-
The Asian who is American is an accessory — the one you want for your group projects, or the one who makes your farms yield more.
-
And the Asian woman who is American is simultaneously translucent, a mirror and a looking glass; she is a ghost, invisible, unknowable, stripped of her identity, making her both desirable and expendable. How else to explain how easily she is attacked?
-
All the moments I’d kept hidden for years suddenly rushed to the surface: the attacks, the looks, the vandalism, the endless stream of questions
-
The long history of anti-Asian racism is rooted in the history of American expansionism amid wide-ranging legal, cultural and military projects across the Pacific.
-
These colonial projects hypersexualized Asian women, through forced sex and sex work, casting them as docile creatures that brought comfort
-
They also shaped Asian men as submissive and feminine, objects to be conquered, dominated and consumed.
-
Even the humanitarian interventions and the religious outreach that helped to shape much of white imagination about Asian women’s bodies overseas were then continuously reproduced here in America.
-
When I looked in the mirror, I saw the divine in myself and in the faces of those around me. This changed everything. The God of grace I proclaim from the pulpit lives in us, loves every single one of us, and this was liberation.
-
Absolute moral ideals of virginity or marital sex have long been linked to conservative white Christian attempts at what is sometimes called “sexual containment” or more popularly known as purity culture.
-
Though more and more people of faith have questioned the psychological impact of purity culture, shame around sex persists.
-
The Asian women murdered in Atlanta were an explicit threat to the purported ideal; their perceived entanglement with sex work justified this violence.
-
“I just don’t see you as Asian.” Proximity to whiteness is seen as our saving grace, but we are still dying.
-
Xiaojie Tan, Delaina Ashley Yaun Gonzalez, Daoyou Feng, Paul Andre Michels, Soon Chung Park, Hyun-Jung Grant, Yong Ae Yue, Suncha Kim