The latest big news story describes a single man who killed eight people in Atlanta and a suburb recently. This chunk of coverage from USA Today captures well the horror of how too man people think about this set of crimes and other, very similar, crimes:
Police arrested a suspect in the shootings at three spas in Atlanta and a northern suburb Tuesday night. Atlanta police said Wednesday that it was too early to determine the motive; Cherokee County Sheriff Frank Reynolds said the suspect told authorities he had a sex addiction.
The police certainly should interrogate the suspect, but they should look with considerable suspicion on anything he says. He may be setting himself up for a defense of diminished competence, or “temporary insanity,” to use a more popular description. He may have a genuine mental illness that helps explain his murderous rampage. Certainly he needs a psychiatric evaluation. To engage in such acts is literally insane.
Which is entirely distinct from the very difficult question of what penalty he deserves for his crimes. We tend to believe that we should not punish people who manifestly lack the ability to understand rules, no matter how reasonable those rules are, but many people still direct considerable anger at anyone who commits a crime like this.
But apart from those difficult, important questions, there is value in looking at how various people, especially people with any authority over the response to the crimes, understand and discuss them. The answer is often really not pretty.
This from a person who is presumably very close to the suspect culturally and seems to suggest at least as much sympathy for the suspect as for the victims and their families.
It is not unreasonable for law enforcement to take an agnostic attitude towards the motive for a crime in the early stages of an investigation when they need to look at every angle and make sure that their ideas about what happened do not foreclose potentially fructive lines of inquiry.
On the other hand, we need to think through our understanding of motive. Even seeing this set of crimes as insane in some important sense, still they were the result of choices. Mentally ill people make choices. We may wish to say that a result of mental illness is often that people who suffer make poor choices, but they still make choices, and all human choices are necessarily the result of the culture the actor inhabits.
This is necessary. A society with no Asian people in it at all would have no murders of Asian people. In a society entirely of Asian people, the murder of Asian people would be unremarkable, at least in terms of the identities of the victims.
Context is everything. Humans make meaning for ourselves, and human choices and actions are always intimately bound up with the meanings we make, which, for most people, will derive heavily, if not exclusively, from the culture they inhabit. We can and should demand that law enforcement officers think creatively and thoroughly about these issues in order to understand well why crimes occur, if they have any genuine interest in protecting anyone.
We live, of course, in a society with a growing population of Asians and a long, ugly history of making distinctions among people on the basis of their skin color and their ethnic origins. In the past year, hundreds of thousands of people have died from a new virus that apparently originated in Asia, which is entirely trivial on its face, but which too many people have tried to make very important in our understanding of the virus and how to respond to the pandemic it has caused. It is just rank nonsense to suggest that such language could have had no impact on this man’s choices.
This is just idiotic:
Why are those two options disjunctive? Our culture has a surfeit of images of highly sexualized Asian women. There is a reason why lots of Asian women work in the types of “spas” involved in these crimes. Only a wholesale refusal to think carefully about or understand how human cultures work and how they inform human thought and motivation could produce logic like this.
This is hugely obtuse and fantastically stupid:
We need to be extremely clear that any law enforcement officer who sees “sexual addiction” and racism as disjunctive options is incapable of doing the job effectively. Every human act occurs in a specific cultural context and anyone who wants to understand human acts and their motives, which law enforcement officers at least claim to do, whether they realize it or not, needs to understand thoroughly the culture and history of the society they live and work in.
Um, if it is news to law enforcement that racism often manifests as sexual obsession, then they are woefully ill informed. Ignorance is the kind explanation. A very specific, very relevant, repeated manifestation of racism leading to sexual obsession was the habit of slave owners raping their slaves. We can and should loudly state that as a far more plausible explanation for this man’s behavior than anything they have currently articulated and only move on to suspecting cover sympathy for the suspect if they persist in their refusal to rethink their perspective.
We should allow no concern for the feelings of any participant in this or any other investigation to stop us from loudly adding our voices and our understandings of our culture and history to the prevailing explanation for mass murder or any other crimes.