Toronto, ON — As we commemorate International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, we at the Philippine Women Centre of Ontario urgently call on all progressive forces to heighten our resolve in fighting to end racism and violence towards people of colour, most especially women of colour. We reaffirm our unceasing commitment in opposing and exposing all forms of racism at the systemic and surface levels. As progressive Filipino Canadians, we will continue to be steadfast in combating the Canadian state’s white settler colonial agenda of normalizing the marginalization, exploitation, precarity and endangerment of Asian-Canadians, Indigenous peoples, Black and racialized communities.
We express our deepest condolences to the families and friends of the murdered victims of the spa shootings that occurred on March 16th in Atlanta, Georgia. As women of Asian ancestry, we condemn the shootings as a vicious racially motivated and gender-based hate crime. Anti-Asian racism has long been part of American and Canadian history. But it is no coincidence that violent attacks on Asian communities have spiked in recent times during the pandemic as former President Trump’s racist rhetoric spewed anti-Asian hate messages referred to the COVID-19 virus as the “Chinese virus”. The Trump presidency was built on blatant racism and spared no moment in peddling extreme Sinophobia and dangerously emboldening the backwards subcultures of male and white-supremacy in both the United States and Canada to act on their hate. We stand in militant solidarity with our Asian sisters and community members in the United States and in Canada fighting to put an end to racist hate crimes and violence against women and all forms of misogyny.
In the U.S., the Centre for the Study of Hate and Extremism reported over 3,800 hateful incidents and attacks on Asians between 2019 and 2020. In Canada, a number of Chinese-Canadian and Southeast Asian organizations have partnered to collect data from across the country through online reporting and as of March 2021, more than 800 racist incidents have been reported occurring mostly in Vancouver and a number of incidents in Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto. Many of these attacks included physical violence in public places and targeted vulnerable members of our communities who were most frequently women and the elderly.
Asian women in particular face unique and compounded forms of violence stemming from a long history of racism, misogyny, economic and sexual exploitation. As anti-imperialists, we have identified that the racist and misogynistic violence that is inflicted on many Asian women in North America have deep roots in U.S. imperialism, militarism and plunder of our ancestral lands. Historically and concurrently, areas where U.S. military bases are scattered across Asia in countries like the Philippines, South Korea and Vietnam saw rampant increases in prostitution, human and sex-trafficking, rape and murder of poor women forced into the sex trade. The onset of Asian “comfort women” as sexual slaves in this context of conquest, especially of women’s bodies as “spoils of war”, normalize the hyper-sexualization of Asian women as sexual commodities to be consumed by sex tourists and sex buyers.
This has further bred an ideology of white male entitlement to Asian women’s bodies among so-called “incel” (involuntary celibate) groups of women-hating men who place blame on women for their inability to fulfil their sexual desires. Last year, a 17-year old male was charged with murder-terrorist activity after attacking a massage parlor in Toronto and killing 24-year old Filipina, Ashley Noelle Arzaga, influenced by incel ideology that deliberately encourages violent attacks on women. The shooter of the Atlanta spas, Robert Aaron Long, while self-labelling himself as a “sex addict”, more accurately acted on intense racial and gender prejudices targeting Asian-run spas, and intently blamed and killed the women for his “addiction.” These were premeditated attacks propelled by wrong, hateful, twisted and dangerous ideas of racial supremacy and morality, and not the result of the killers’ mental incapacity as a number of media outlets excuse them to be.
These attacks on women are not isolated events, but are abetted by patriarchal, market-driven, social and cultural constructs that are fundamentally racist, sexist, and misogynistic. They are heinous crimes that need to be called for what they are and treated as racist hate crimes and acts of terrorism. In these crucial times, we are called to unite and build larger solidarity against a patriarchal and exploitive system that profits off our work and our bodies. It is for our sisters, murdered by patriarchy and white supremacy, we continue unreserved, our fight to end systemic racism and violence against women enacted on us, and across our communities.
Stop the racist and hyper-sexualization of Asian women!
End Violence Against Women!
End systemic racism!
##