You’ve probably heard about the recent events of March 16 in Atlanta, Georgia. By now, your newsfeed and social media is likely exploding with posts aboutanti-Asian discrimination or gendered-violence against Asian women.This discrimination has roots in xenophobia that can be traced back to the very first wave of Chinese immigrants that arrived in the 1850s. The Chinese were met with hostility, as many white Americans felt threatened by the immigrants’ slow or often refusal of assimilation.
This hostility was just the foreground for what would become the status of modern day Asian Americans’ as perpetual foreigners. This idea of the perpetual foreigner, along with the history of relations between the Asian sex work and the U.S. military, incubates the exoticism or mystery often associated with Asian women. This, left to sit with little social repercussions, snowballed into a dangerous and violent fetishization that motivated the horrific events that transpired in Georgia. This week, the Polici team attempted to better understand into the discrimination against Asian women, the perpetuation of their fetishization and, in some disheartening cases, violence.
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