The president at a taxpayer-funded university in Washington sent an email to students telling them that being silent about the murder of six Asian women in Atlanta is “choosing the side of evil, hatred, racism, and violence.”
David May, the interim president at Eastern Washington University sent an email to the student body after “racist graffiti,” allegedly aimed at a black student athlete, was found on campus. The president took the on-campus incident to simultaneously dub the murder of six Asian women in Atlanta a “crime of hate.”
“As I send this to you, university flags are being lowered to half-staff to remember the victims of the anti-Asian murders in Atlanta where six women of Asian descent were senselessly shot in a horrific crime of hate,” May wrote. “The backdrop to this message is a year of increasing violence against racial and ethnic minorities nationwide.”
May proceeded to claim that what happened in Atlanta was due to the “normalization” of white supremacy and white nationalism. There is no evidence to support this theory, thus far.
“It is a backdrop of growing normalization of white supremacy and white nationalism in our national culture,” May wrote. “It is the backdrop of years and generations of violence against black and brown people in the United States.”
The email came after law enforcement announced that a 21-year-old gunman confessed to killing a total of eight people in the metro-Atlanta area, six people of Asian/Pacific Islander descent, and two white people. The murderer said his motive stemmed from a sexual addiction.
The university president told students that the murderer killed people because they were Asian, not because he was a “self-declared sex addict.” The note fails to address the two white people who were murdered in the same shooting spree.
“I want to say this to everyone: Choose a side. There is no middle ground. There is no room for equivocation or justification,” May said. “Six women were not killed yesterday because someone was having a bad day or because he was a self-declared sex addict. They were killed because of who they are, Asian-Americans.”
He concluded by saying that, “choosing silence in this moment is choosing the side of evil, hatred, racism, and violence that this attack represents.”
May’s email is part of a larger cultural push to connect the senseless violence of the Atlanta shooting to white supremacy. The rhetoric connecting white supremacy to an increase in so-called “hate crimes” committed against Asian-Americans comes from a study conducted by the Stop AAPI (Asian-American Pacific Islander) Hate Youth Campaign.
The study found that one in four young Asian Americans has experienced “anti-Asian hate” amid the coronavirus pandemic. The study specifically links the hate to the moment when former President Donald Trump used the phrase “Chinese virus” in a tweet.
“After March, 10 when the president first used the phrase ‘Chinese virus’ in a tweet, Stop AAPI Hate saw an exponential increase in reported anti-Asian hate incidents,” the study reads.