This commentary is by David M. Roth, a Burlington resident and entrepreneur.
Last Tuesday’s shooting rampage in Atlanta was a premeditated act fueled by hate, racism and misogyny. The inclination to whitewash the shooter’s white supremacist murder spree as the result of a “bad day,” a troubling relationship with sex, or anything else is improper, incorrect, insulting and vulgar.
The rampage in Atlanta was not an isolated incident with isolated context, nor does it have isolated repercussions. Instead, it fits a pattern of violence toward women and people of color that has vast historical context and current resonance in the United States.
As Vermonters committed to equality and liberty, the physical distance between Georgia and Vermont must not prevent us from using last week’s events to look inward and ensure we are doing all that is necessary to protect, honor and serve all the residents of all our communities. In a sense, we must start at the beginning by recognizing, identifying and condemning hate in all its dangerous incarnations wherever we see it, whenever we see it.
Although at the state level Vermont has led and continues to lead in the writing and implementation of effective hate crime legislation, it is critical that each one of our state’s elected leaders be as vocal as possible as often as possible in their own sustained condemnation of the hate perpetrated last week outside our borders (and that occurs less visibly or violently every day, sometimes inside our borders).
What happened in Atlanta could have happened anywhere, and Vermont’s ability to lead also relates to our ability to empathize with and speak out against hate no matter where it is found in our nation. As NAACP President Derrick Johnson said, “These acts are the visible manifestation of hateful words birthing hateful acts. An attack on one is an attack on all.”
We need to look no further to explain the dramatic rise in these racist crimes during the pandemic than to the former president’s hateful rhetoric and lies relating to the pandemic itself. The first known case of the Spanish flu of 1918 was in Kansas, not Spain, and the novel coronavirus that has devastated so many families around the world this past year might or might not have had its origins in China (there is significant question as to its actual origin, according to the World Health Organization).
The point is that, whatever the place of origin, neither the citizens who live in China nor anyone of Asian ancestry should ever be personally blamed for the spread of the virus. As Congressman Ted Lieu said in response to a particularly vile monologue by a House member from Texas last week, “I am not a virus.”
According to the Atlanta chapter of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, “the shootings happened under the trauma of increasing violence against Asian Americans nationwide, fueled by white supremacy and systemic racism. According to the most recent data, hate incidents targeting Asian Americans rose by nearly 150% in 2020, with Asian American women twice as likely to be targeted. … That the Asian women murdered yesterday were working highly vulnerable and low-wage jobs during an ongoing pandemic speaks directly to the compounding impacts of misogyny, structural violence and white supremacy.”
Hate is insidious and thrives when it is hidden away from scrutiny. The vast majority of American towns and cities report having zero hate crimes year over year. Remarkably, a city as diverse as Miami reported exactly zero hate crimes between 2012 and 2016 — despite over a thousand police reports that would indicate otherwise.
We must call hate by its name and fight it, prosecute it and legislate against it with all our hearts and souls because people’s lives truly do hang in the balance.
Fortunately, Vermont is leading the way legislatively from Montpelier, most recently with the House passage of revised hate crime legislation that removes unnecessary barriers to the enforcement of the state’s laws. Even as a relatively small state, we can and do assert an outsized presence in the national conversation because of our long tradition of tolerance and fair-mindedness. From that position, we should also lead by insisting that the causes of violence do not get camouflaged by convenient narratives seeking to explain them away.
We must name the crime committed last week in Atlanta for what it was — a hate crime. Only then can we aspire to the reality described by President Biden when he visited Emory University on Friday — that the United States must be a place where “hate can have no safe harbor.”
