ACRS Statement on Georgia Shootings

For Immediate Release:  March 18, 2021 
Contact:  Liza Javier, 206-774-2460, lizaj@acrs.org 

SEATTLE – On March 16, eight people were murdered in a coordinated series of shootings at three different spas in Georgia. Six of the victims were Asian women. Delaina Ashley Yaun, Paul Andre Michels, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Julie Park, Park Hyeon Jeong were their names; two of the victims’ names have yet to be released.

Like many others, we are devastated and heartbroken by the news and our deepest thoughts, care, and love go out to the families of these victims. This tragedy has been one of the deadliest amid an already traumatic time for Asian American communities, which have been facing an increase in racist violence over the past year. The anti-Asian violence we are seeing is neither unprecedented nor coincidental – it is very much a manifestation of white supremacy and structural racism. While the rise of anti-Asian violence is certainly in part due to an intentional and racist scapegoating of our community by the last administration, it is not inconsistent with this country’s long and storied legacy of racism.

We must acknowledge this most recent event was perpetrated against Asian women working low-wage jobs at massage parlors. Recent data from Stop AAPI Hate shows Asian women are the majority of victims of anti-Asian violence, with 68% of reports coming from women. This is a sobering and important reminder that anti-Asian violence, like all structural violence, often occurs at the intersections of misogyny, racism, classism, and U.S. imperialism. To look at interpersonal violence as separate from these compounding systems of oppression is a disservice to the people impacted who hold multiple identities.

Thus, to honor the women killed in Georgia and the thousands of victims and survivors of anti-Asian violence, we must address the root causes that harm our communities every day. We need language-accessible mental health and crisis intervention resources. We need unemployment benefits and robust safety net programs available to all regardless of immigration status. We need public school education that teaches our children about multi-racial solidarity. We need resourced community safety programs that are led by us. We need so much more from a system that has failed us time and time again.

ACRS takes this opportunity to reaffirm our commitment to divest from our criminal legal system that polices, prosecutes, and incarcerates Black and Brown communities and instead turn our capacity toward community-based solutions. We refuse to applaud or support elected officials and decision-makers who offer us band-aid solutions that put more police in our neighborhoods and perpetrators in jail. If these solutions kept us safe, our communities would not be grieving right now. We instead ask our state and city to uplift, amplify, and invest in the work that our community is already doing to keep us safe.

Asian Counseling and Referral Service (ACRS) offers hope and opportunity in over 40 languages and is a nationally recognized nonprofit organization working for social justice and offering a broad array of behavioral health programs, human services and civic engagement activities for Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders and other communities – immigrant, refugee and American-born – in Washington.