Cat March discusses the murders in Atlanta through a historical, gender, and racial lens. Cat March (they/them) is a Gender Studies and English scholar. They have a personal passion for Asian American histories, especially Japanese internment camps in the United States. They are currently the student advisor at the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership at Kalamazoo College and finishing up their graduate program in higher education.
Transcript:
Paige:
Another intricate layer of gendered and racialized violence informs a shooting in Atlanta. The history of US imperialism in sexualized violence allows white supremacists and patriarchal thinking to believe there’s an ownership over Asian women’s bodies. Cat March is a gender studies and English scholar. They have a personal passion for Asian-American histories, especially Japanese internment camps in the United States. In this episode with Cat March, we explore the gender and sexual analysis of the Atlanta shooting. Cat discusses US imperialism abroad, specifically us soldiers, sex worker entanglements, and rape as a weapon of war.
Speaker 2:
Welcome to Radical Futures Now. On this podcast, we connect with social justice leaders around the world to talk about how to organize, how to be a movement, and how to build radical futures now.
Rhiki:
Cat, thank you so much for joining us today. To start us off, can you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?
Cat March:
Thank you so much for having me, Rhiki. So yeah, as Rhiki just mentioned, my name is Cat. My pronouns are they/them/theirs. I am currently working at the Arcus Center. I’m the student leadership coordinator. I’m a grad student and I’m about to graduate at the end of this month. And I know that this episode is going to be dealing with a lot of history, a lot of historical information, but honestly, I’m not a historian. I mostly describe myself as a nerd with a hobby. I’m just really interested in Asian American history and the historical interactions between East Asia and Southeast Asia and the United States, and particularly the United States history with imperialism and racism in interactions between the United States and Asia.
Rhiki:
So to kind of start this episode off, I just want to ask you the question. When you heard of the attack that happened in Atlanta, how did you feel in your body in that moment? How did you process the information you were getting? And yeah, what was happening in your body at that time?
Cat March:
So that’s actually a particularly interesting question coming from someone who was raised with a Japanese upbringing in particular because whenever something really big and difficult happens to our community or even to us individually, the first response is not really a responsive processing, but more of a responsive armor and sort of shutting down for a short amount of time so that you can do what you need to do to survive and move on. So where I was, I was at work as I usually am during the week. And I was honestly just checking my social media really quickly. And it was one of the first things that popped up on my feed. And my first response actually was just sort of shut down because I was like, okay, another one. Do I have to engage with this today? I have things to do. I know that clicking on this article is going to hurt me.
Cat March:
So I actually had to recheck in with myself and resist that urge because when a traumatic event happens to people who you feel kinship with, you can’t just ignore it and push it away. You have to, in certain ways, in safer ways, open yourself up to it and sort of unpack it with your community, with your friends, with people who you trust. And so after that initial knee-jerk reaction was over, I went back. I looked up more information about what had happened about the women, about the context of the shooting. And I kind of froze and sat down by myself and took some deep breaths for about 10 minutes or so. And then throughout the rest of the week, just taking a little bit of time here and there by myself to sort of cry and grieve and mourn, and also check in with my loved ones. I immediately texted my mom and my sister.
Rhiki:
Thank you for sharing, Cat, that whole intimate process with us. I really appreciate you being vulnerable with us in this moment.
Cat March:
I mean, of course. I think that one of the biggest parts of community is vulnerability. And again, as someone raised by a Japanese parent, vulnerability can sometimes be difficult. We literally have a word in Japanese that I’m going to pronounce really badly, so I’m not going to do it, but it means sort of lean into that stoicism, sort of let it roll over you, ignore it, put it away for later. We have a word that literally means that. So vulnerability in community is something that I’m learning that I’m trying to practice every day.
Paige:
Yeah. I think your first reaction of wanting to ask yourself like, do I even want to engage with this because I have things to do today was very relatable. I think I had a similar feeling because I was about to go to sleep when I saw it.
Paige:
And I was like, if I look into this, I’m not going to be able to sleep as well. But I think part of that is also a self protection to wait until you have what you were saying later, the kinship and community and people you trust to be surrounded with you when you do have to engage with that moment.
Cat March:
Oh, definitely. And it’s so hard to consent to that experience of engagement with the existence of social media. You can just be minding your own business on your Instagram or Twitter and see about 20 posts of people being like, “This horrible thing happened and I have to post about it.”
Paige:
Yeah. That’s such a good way to put it. The content portion of social media is not there, to say the least, for sure.
Rhiki:
Yeah, that’s true. It’s almost like if you want to kind of… I don’t want to say protect, but guard the intake of different things that come in and out of your surroundings, you either have to disengage completely, which means that you’re going to be out of the loop and not know anything, or you have to engage and know that you have no control over the content that may come across your feed. That’s tough.
Cat March:
Yeah. It is.
Paige:
I’m so excited to have you on because I think you will bring a really strong historical analysis. I know you don’t call yourself a historian or anything, but I think you definitely have the knowledge and the skill to be able to relay that information to us today. So can I start with my first question? Can you talk a little bit about what is the hypersexualization of Asian women? Because that’s a big part of this conversation specifically with the Atlanta shooting, and I think it would be a good groundwork thing to know.
Cat March:
So just like anything, a phrase like the hypersexualization of Asian women is going to mean different things in different areas, but for the context of Atlanta and what has been happening now in this 2021, so the hypersexualization of Asian women is the… Whether it’s false or not is obviously up to the woman herself, but the notion that just because someone is Asian, just because someone “appears” or looks Asian, that person is automatically assigned a certain level of sexuality.
Cat March:
Asian women are often perceived to be hypersexual in a subservient way in the sense that the existence of the Asian woman is meant to serve the sexual needs of the white man. That’s kind of how historically this dynamic has been set up and how it’s kind of perceived in the present. I even think of… So my least favorite thing is weird, nerdy white men who are into anime porn. That kind of thing as well is something that’s really common nowadays. And they don’t even realize because it’s kind of like, “Oh, it’s a cartoon,” but like, “Okay. But that cartoon image is meant to represent a certain type of woman, a certain type of body, and the way that it’s stylized connects to Asian women.” And so again, through media, through films, even through literature, Asian women are often portrayed as these sexual beings.
Paige:
Yeah. That was a great definition or working definition that we have today. Yeah, definitely. Can you talk a little bit about the history of that too? You mentioned the notion that Asian women’s sexuality is used to serve the white man, like the existing of Asian woman’s sexuality. Where does that understanding and that construction of the Asian woman’s sexuality come from historically?
Cat March:
So the easiest and most tangible example that I can think of is Western imperialism in Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam. So what happens is you send in your US troops and what you get popping up around those army bases are sort of sex work industries cropping up all around US army bases. Again, that’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with sex work or that sex work is the dirty profession or anything like that. But if you are a sex worker, one of the… And historically, it’s a US Army base invading Vietnam. An Army base is a pretty lucrative place to start a sex work operation.
Cat March:
So what happened is these white men would have never interacted with any Asian women until coming to Vietnam, coming to the Army base. And then they would say, “Oh, well just because like this single one individual Asian woman that I met in Vietnam, I paid her for sex, because of that, all women who are Asian are immediately associated with sex labor.” Because historically, basically wherever you have the US military, you have Asian sex labor. Another instance of that even earlier than Vietnam would be in World War II, and the root of this actually is… Japan also has a responsibility in this as well, but basically Japan kidnapped women from China, Korea, and the Philippines, and then Japanese soldiers sent these women to the US military. These were called “comfort women”. And if you want to look into the history of comfort women, there’s plenty of resources available. But yeah, that’s a couple of the sources of this stereotype.
Paige:
Yeah. I think that’s one thing that when people talk about Asian American histories or Asian American racial problems that we have within the US, people often forget that our histories are really entangled globally and really entangled with war and imperialism from the US, specifically.
Cat March:
Yeah, exactly. And there’s also instances, of course, before that, too, and in this instance, it’s actually kind of convoluted how this history begins because it actually begins with the exploitation of Chinese men’s labor by the US in the 1840s and 1880s with the building of the Transcontinental Railroad. So what ended up happening is white people exported a bunch of Chinese men over to work on their railroad and pay them next to nothing.
Cat March:
And then these men were lonely. They wanted to send for their families. They wanted to send for their wives, but white US laborers felt threatened by cheap Chinese labor and didn’t want a continuous stream of Chinese folks moving into the United States. So they developed something called the Anti-prostitution Act of 1870, which basically asserted that any Chinese woman trying to come into the United States could be declared a “prostitute” and denied entry. And that was kind of another one of the initial roots of the stereotype that Asian women are hypersexual beings.
Rhiki:
I’m really just trying to process all the information that you’re giving us. There’s really a lot to it. One of the things that I hear in a lot of the things that you’ve been saying is this phenomenon of overgeneralization, right? Coming into contact with one person who holds these identities and then assuming that because this one person is this way or this small portion of people are doing this thing that we can then generalize that to the whole group of people that may share those same identities with that person. So yeah, that’s something I’ve been hearing. And I think that’s something that we have realized that has been happening in America and across the world with how we view people with different identities. And it is still a problem that I think we haven’t talked about as much but we might need to bring up again. I want to kind of talk a little bit more about how some of the things that you mentioned, so some of the Anti-prostitution Act and some of the other-
Paige:
Okay. I think not just overgeneralization of these military men coming to war sites and building up war troops and stuff like that. But it’s also a tool of colonialism and imperialism to rape and pillage the villages of the places of war. There’s sex work that’s happening, but it’s also a tool of war.
Cat March:
Oh, absolutely. Yes. The weaponization or sort of… Okay. It’s really interesting when we talk about that in connection with colonialism because one of the literal concepts of colonialism is that the sort of white invading force is framed as this masculine force coming in and sort of invading and transforming the feminized, effeminate land, and that sort of aspect of the conversation, it makes you realize how intentional and purposeful this sort of overgeneralization becomes because colonialism doesn’t work if the people that you’re colonizing understand that they’re people, fully. Colonization is something that gets in people’s heads and sort of warps thinking in the mind. And so if you sort of intentionally create an environment where you sort of utilize sexualization as a weapon, then the association almost becomes automatic and implicit.
Paige:
Right. Because it works with the fundamental discussion that these people aren’t human.
Rhiki:
I also think it’s just interesting when we think about the dynamics between masculinity and femininity and how femininity is often seen as this thing that is subservient and something to be conquered ,and how that plays a role in all of this. Yeah. I don’t know.
Cat March:
Yes, because subservience is another aspect of the Asian woman stereotype. She’s supposed to be quiet and serve her husband and do whatever the white man tells her to do. And another dynamic of that actually that is kind of branching off and goes in a completely different direction, so we don’t go down that path too far, also is that this is connected to the effeminization of Asian men as well.
Paige:
Right. Because one can’t exist without the other. You can’t have the hypersexualization of Asian women without the feminized Asian man.
Cat March:
And then once you create the effeminized Asian man, then it’s so easy to see why the white man feels entitled to the bodies of Asian women because it’s like, “Oh, well, their ‘men’ won’t protect them.”
Rhiki:
So I kind of want to dive into this next question and it touches a little bit on some of the things that you brought up, Kat, about imperialism and fetishization of Asian women. But I want you to talk more about how those historical things that you mentioned play a role in what we’re witnessing today. So how are they’re tied more to what we’re seeing today.
Cat March:
How those laws tie into what we’re seeing today?
Rhiki:
Yeah.
Cat March:
Okay. So what we’re witnessing today, first, we have to kind of define what we are witnessing today. What is it that we are talking about? What is it that connects back to these exclusionary laws, to the sexual imperialism of the United States and the Western world in Asia? So what we are looking at, there’s a couple of different threads here that we’re going to have to follow. The first thread is, of course, the presumption that every Asian woman is sexual or a sex worker. And particularly, this association comes with massage parlors because the eight women who were attacked in it, who were murdered in Atlanta, worked at massage parlor. So particularly in Florida, there are massage parlors that operate as sites for sex work and sex workers.
Cat March:
Again, nothing wrong with that. If women are engaging with this consensually and are doing it as their line of work, then that’s totally fine. But the problem comes in when the rights of sex workers are severely limited. And I don’t want to speak for sex worker communities and communities of sex workers because this is not an identity that I hold, but I do want to sort of… underlying the thread that hyperpolicing and police raids and sort of the excessive pressing of the law onto women and women’s bodies, particularly Asian women and Asian women’s bodies is not the answer because what happens when in this long history of raids in particularly Florida, is that the police will come in and arrest mostly the women themselves, some of who are undocumented, a lot of which who may or may not understand the situations going on or how to get legal help.
Cat March:
So the women are arrested in vastly larger numbers than for example, the men who were paying for their services. And this is exactly what happened in the instance with Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots. His charges were dropped, but the women that he paid were themselves charged and fined and convicted. And so this connects to a history of hyperlegalization, a long list of laws pertaining to Asian women and their bodies because when we’re used to regulating bodies that come in and out of the United States, or when you’re used to regulating bodies, what those bodies stand for, how we perceive those bodies, then we assume that we can continually police those bodies.
Cat March:
And eventually, we use the guise of protection. At first it’s, “Oh, we’re protecting our women, our communities.” And then it’s like, “Oh, well, we’re protecting these Asian women who have fallen into sex work.” Like, “No, you’re just continually and continually stripping the agency away from these women through the process of legalization.” I can’t remember. I think it was in 2019. There were… I think it was photographs released of Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots. And he was caught paying money for women in a Florida massage parlor to have sex with him, perform sexual acts on him.
Cat March:
And there’s a whole thing. A quick Google search in the news will reveal tons of articles about it. But as I mentioned before, what ended up happening is that Robert Kraft got off free. His charges were dropped after the trial and the women that he paid were charged and convicted and were essentially blamed as the source of the issue. That’s how you view legal conviction in the United States. And this is a pattern. Oftentimes, even beyond the realm of just Asian sex workers, when there’s a big police raid, a big police bust, it’s often the women who are charged and arrested and then everybody else gets to go home.
Rhiki:
That blows my mind. When you think about the efforts towards sex trafficking and stopping sex trafficking, you think they would target or go after the people that if it’s not consensual and women are being forced to do this, or not just women, just anybody are being forced to do this type of work, you think you would go after the person that’s forcing them to do it. But yeah, oftentimes, you see that it is the workers, the people that you’re claiming you’re trying to help that are the ones that are being convicted and prosecuted.
Cat March:
And well, the other thing is that the number of trafficking cases is actually fairly small in comparison to women who are just doing sex work as a form of work. Those are much smaller numbers than… If we’re looking at the massage parlors in particular, for example, so there’s a research article that I referenced specifically in the resource list that I sent you all. It was by John J. Chen and his research team. It was endorsed by Congresswoman Dr. Judy Chu. And it shows that the number of women who’ve been trafficked or coerced is extremely small compared to women who are willingly engaging in sex work as a form of employment. So the police have been a much bigger problem for these workers than violence from customers or robberies. And especially when we think of cases with women who English is not their “first language”, or when you don’t understand the language of the legal charges, the legal fees, the lawyers.
Cat March:
So the most helpful thing to do then in this case is to destigmatize sex work. But nobody wants to do that. Oh, and another issue as well is that if these women are not documented and they get picked up in in a bus in a police raid of a massage parlor or a place of sex work, then what are you going to do? But I think that the craziest thing here, of course, is that the eight women that were murdered were not even sex workers. The correlation, the presumption, the assumption of entitlement to body is so strong that it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t even matter the “actual reality” of the situation.
Rhiki:
So I think another thing that’s happening is often when we see racialized acts like this, we see that where there’s a person of color as the victim and a white perpetrator, we see that there’s this thing that the media does, or not just the media, but a lot of different forces that play a role in this. They kind of destroy the narrative and the character of the victim. So in a lot of instances where there were attacks on the black community, you see that they dig into whatever type of history they can find on the person to make them seem less of a good person and almost make it seem like it was a crime, but it wasn’t that bad because they were a bad person anyway, type of thing. So I think this is also what we’re seeing here, where we have these victims that identify as people of color. And so we’re digging into whatever we can to try and devalue their character to make the crime seem less egregious than what it is.
Cat March:
Yep. And that is so supremely messed up because then the idea is first of all, that the discreditation of these women is a viable thing to do. But second of all, what does that say about how people view communities of sex workers, that the method of defamation is just to say, “Oh, well, this is an association…” these women weren’t even sex workers themselves. The mere association with sex work is enough to sort of dirty someone’s image. That’s so messed up.
Rhiki:
But then that also has me thinking about the conversation that we had [inaudible 00:26:35] too about there is this urgency when something like this happens from the people who are in community with the victim to hurry up and get ahead of the narrative. But oftentimes, like what Cat was saying earlier, sometimes we need to process. Sometimes we might need to step back. Sometimes we might need to prepare ourselves to engage in this conversation. The whole trying to get ahead of the media doesn’t allow us to fully do what we need to do in our bodies to not just be organizers and activists and historians and what have you, but just to be people who also feel something because the situation happened, who need to grieve, who needs to heal, who need to feel and process and do all of these things. We’re robbed of that time because we’re so busy trying to get ahead of narratives.
Paige:
I think that reminds me of the conversation we were having with [Nica 00:27:39] about why it’s so important to try to put out your own narrative and put out what happened in your own language and in your own voice within your own people because it is something that you’re always up against is the media if you try to be against it.
Cat March:
And another important thing I think for us to remember is that while we’re trying to figure this out, there are communities, people, organizations who have got this, who have been doing this work for a long time already. And I say this because I do want to speak specifically about an organization that’s been getting a lot of media attention recently because of what happened in Atlanta. So a lot of folks are referencing Red Canary Song, which is the… I think it’s the most prevalent organization right now in the United States for supporting women who are sex workers and also Asian migrants. So that intersection of identity right there.
Cat March:
And something that I think really speaks to the importance of this work is that it formed in response to the 2017 murder of a massage worker from Flushing named Yang Song who was killed during a police raid. So again, this is not the first time that this has happened. I think that especially with anti-Asian violence, violence against Asian women in particular, a lot of white folks in particular who are trying to enter into this conversation for the first time don’t realize the long and extensive history, don’t realize that this is something that has been happening for a really long time.
Paige:
I guess for me, I’m curious because I know Cat is working in a lot of higher education, a lot of student development. Also really passionate about sharing histories of Japanese Americans in the US. Yeah, I guess I’m just curious about what you’re looking forward to and what you’re hoping to do in the next couple years as you graduate from your grad program and all that.
Cat March:
Well, I definitely want to link this back to the conversation that we’re having right now so I’m not just talking about myself. But what I hope is that… I know that when eight women are dead, there is no way to say that there’s anything good that comes out of that. But what I hope is that this opens up a conversation… Not a conversation, a realization for a lot of people that race and racism is a lot more complex than we think that it is, that there are a lot of angles and elements that people may not have even heard of, may not have even been on the horizon. Because when I think about in higher education, the anti-racism trainings predominantly, the anti-racism trainings that I’ve sat through, that I’ve like taken part in, it’s a very binary presentation of what race is and what race looks like.
Cat March:
It’s like there are white people and there are people of color, or sometimes it’s even there are white people and there are black people. And then the conversation ends there. And while that is a vital conversation to have, I don’t want to sort of delegitimize the importance of uplifting anti-racist conversations that have to do with the treatment of black people in the United States. I also do want to highlight the fact that without that nuance, our conversations about anti-racism or anti-racist actions can only go so far. So what I hope is that as higher education changes and transforms in the wake of so many painful events throughout the past couple of years, that we see more of this authentic restructuring in the wake of… I don’t know, y’all. I’m kind of just sitting here waiting for a higher ed to crumble so that we can rebuild and start again.
Rhiki:
It’s crazy because I’ve been waiting for the same thing.
Cat March:
Maybe it’s COVID that’s done it. Maybe we’re good.
Rhiki:
Yeah. We just need a new way of educating people. We need a new system. This system, COVID has shown it isn’t working till its fullest potential and fullest capabilities, but that’s just because the structure is not made to expand in the way that we need it to. So we just need a completely new system. And I feel you, Cat, as far as anti-racist trainings not really embracing intersectionality and not having the capacity to talk about things in very nuanced ways. We’re complex human beings. We’re nuanced. We’re not just straight one thing or another thing. We’re many things at all times, and some of those things even change over time. And we need spaces where we can have conversations about race but also be our full selves in those conversations. And I haven’t found one yet that is fully able to do that completely. And I just can’t wait to the day where we can start having those conversations and not shy away from them just because they may be a little complex.
Cat March:
Yeah. Well, what I’m looking forward to also is more sort of anti-racist activities, trainings, whatever you want to call it, that center people of color instead of centering white people so that people of color with multiple intersecting identities, coming from various backgrounds, can talk about race without white people in the room because I feel like that conversation would also be really cool. And it’s really hard to find a space where you can have that conversation because a lot of the time, anti-racism trainings are designed for white people.
Rhiki:
And I would say I don’t totally agree with that. I think there are a lot of anti-racist trainings out there that do center people of color, but oftentimes, you don’t find those in higher education spaces. And that’s the problem I think is that you really have to go outside of certain institution to just to access those resources. But yeah, institutions like higher education, like colleges and universities that are recruiting people of color and everybody in the higher ed world is trying to be more diverse and inclusive and have equity practices, and yet a lot of the things that they bring into the space that are supposed to tackle those things are for white people. So I think that’s where the real problem is.
Cat March:
There’s a lot of development and learning for white people at the expense of students of color. And I don’t know. We’re not learning opportunities. We’re just here to go to school.
Rhiki:
Yeah. I feel that. So Paige, what stood out to you today?
Paige:
I think listening to Cat mention a few specific cases I actually hadn’t learned about before, specifically the Song case, the woman that was murdered in Flushing during the sex raid. I think all the historical laws and policies and colonialism histories that we talked about remind me that this has been an ongoing thing, but that to me feels a lot closer to home because it’s such a specific instance that’s so similar. And I think I also realized how much I don’t know about sex workers’ struggles in the US. So I’m leaving this conversation wanting to learn more about the sex worker community and their issues or our issues as a community with sex work. What reflections and thoughts are you having after the conversation, Rhiki?
Rhiki:
I think similar to you, I just really learned a lot during this conversation. So I’m leaving it wanting to learn so much more. Like you, I don’t know a lot about the sex worker community and how to be in solidarity with that community. So I want to learn more around there. And then also another thing that stuck out to me was this idea of femininity. And specifically the thing that I felt was really interesting that I want to learn more about is the feminization of Asian men. Cat mentioned it, and they mentioned how there’s this thing where white men feel entitled to Asian women’s bodies, and that is connected to the feminization of Asian men. So I’m really walking away from this conversation just wanting to dive deeper into all of the topics that we talked about today just so that I can be better aware, and I make sure that I don’t have some of the same stereotypes or prejudice or biases that we’re seeing occur today in the reason why that Atlanta shooting was a thing.
Paige:
Definitely. I think I hear you on the solidarity question loud and clear too. Just for me, I definitely want to learn about sex workers’ stories and histories and all of those things.
Speaker 2:
And that’s it for our episode today. The Radical Futures Now podcast is housed under the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership at Kalamazoo College. Special thanks to Trevor [Lodium 00:37:19] Jackson for our music and [Eliany 00:37:21] Quinones for our graphics. Be sure to follow us on our Instagram at Arcus Center. See you next week.