A mentally deranged gunman went on a killing rampage in Atlanta, killed eight people, six Asians and two whites, and everybody is shouting like Chicken Little as if the sky has finally tumbled down on America. Even the number of the dead in Atlanta pales in comparison to other mass killings in America including Sandy Hook Elementary, Pulse Night Club, Columbine and Fort Hood, yet the generated outrage over it seems to surpass any other. It must be an abomination of some sort to kill Asians because Asian lives are more sacred than other lives being daily wasted in America and therefore off limit to mass killings. This must be the reason Joe Biden and Kamala Harris tag team hurriedly visited Atlanta to console the Asians but have refused to similarly visit Boulder to console the whites; and have also never deemed it fit to visit Chicago to console with the black community over the killings of black folks.
ICHEOKU says nobody is celebrating or rejoicing that some Asians were among the Atlanta dead, but the generated hysteria is rather unnerving and unreasonably too high. The rest of the world watching from outside might just think that America is the unsafest place for Asians to be in the world and that there is no parallel to what happened in Atlanta any where in America. But instead of calling it for what it is, just another nut job with a gun gone cuckoo, the narrative is that Asians are being targeted in America for elimination by white supremacists because of the Chinese coronavirus and these narrators completely ignored the fact that two of the victims are white people and that all Asians are not Chinese. It is condemnable and it should be condemned for festering the seeds of racial discord in America and for needlessly creating untoward fear and panic within the Asian American community.
However, equity demands fairness and the need for equal treatment of all Americans makes it imperative that every life in America should be valued equally; they should matter equally, regardless of their skin color. The government must show the same level of empathy and compassion to every community in America any time people of their race are killed, regardless of the skin color of the killer. It seems that it is only when a white person kills a person of another race that there is outrage in the country but not the other way round or when other races kill each other, which somewhat seems to normalize killing of white people and same race killing of each other.
America needs to stop this seeming acceptance of blacks killing blacks as a tragic normalcy in America. People generally hurt whenever their loved ones are killed. Blacks are people just like the Asians who are currently mourning their loved ones who were killed in Atlanta; ditto the white families of the two white victims. We can do better as a country and we can start by lowering the temperature on race relationship because it is tearing America apart and a house divided is bound to fall. May the souls of the Atlanta and Boulder murdered as well as all other lost to violence souls now rest.