There are a over a hundred years of propaganda and policy behind the idea that sex workers and immigrants “infect” communities. Asian women in particular have been fetishized and demonized, becoming the first targets of anti-prostitution and anti-immigration laws in the United States.
When Ah Toy immigrated to the US in 1848, she worked openly as a sex worker in San Francisco, California. She, often successfully, defended herself against fraudsters and threats of violence by going to court. But in 1854, People vs. Hall declared that Asian people, like Black and Indigenous people, could no longer testify in court. Racist rhetoric, laws, and daily harassment reached a tipping point. The press and the public turned on Ah Toy, and others like her.
In 1875, the Page Act barred Asian women from entering the country, for presumed “lewd and immoral purposes,” and police officers began arresting droves of Asian women for prostitution. US officials openly hoped that by driving out Asian women, they could prevent Asian people from settling and starting families here. Less than a decade later, the U.S. passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which is exactly what it sounds like.
ADVERTISEMENT
In the build-up to World War II, anti-Japanese sentiment swept the country with some states barring “Aliens” from owning land, and exclusionary immigration laws targeting Japanese laborers. During the war, of course, Japanese Americans were placed in internment camps.
And abroad, American soldiers in that war and then the Korean and Vietnam wars fed a demand for sexual services that created a culture of racist fetishization and commodification in predominantly Asian countries. The hypersexual, docile Asian woman became, and has remained, an American-made media trope as prostitution and promiscuity continued to be aggressively policed and prosecuted in the United States, especially in immigrant communities.
It’s history that America never entirely moved past.
On Nov. 25, 2017, Yang Song leapt to her death to escape officers during a repeat NYPD vice squad sting where she worked. She had just recently been raided and arrested and reported being sexually assaulted by a police officer or someone pretending to be a police officer.
In 2018, Robert Kraft, the high-profile owner of the New England Patriots, was arrested as part of a coordinated sting on over a dozen Asian-owned massage parlors in South Florida that was widely reported as a rescue operation. More than five law enforcement agencies held press conferences after the fact, framing themselves as heroes for breaking up an international sex trafficking operation. All of the women now have criminal records while Kraft was finally cleared of misdemeanor charges.
We cannot disentangle the sexualization and commodification of Asian women, the criminalization of sex work, and anti-Asian racism. The answer to this violence is not the further criminalization of sex work, immigrants, or unlicensed masseurs. The police do not, and have never, protected criminalized people from violence; they perpetuate it.
Last Tuesday, March 16, a white domestic terrorist bought a gun, traveled to Atlanta, and shot nine people at three massage parlors. He targeted places he knew to be operated by Asian women, migrants, and sex workers. One woman was there for a couples massage with her husband. Eight people died; one remains in critical condition at the time of writing. The perpetrator was on his way to Florida to target the “porn industry” when his parents saw his photo on the news and turned him in.
This mass murder occurred while sex workers are being erased and displaced from their communities both online and in places targeted by police raids.
This murderer is part of a long and gruesome history. And his attack came one year into a major uptick in violence against Asian Americans amidst a racist campaign to blame the community for the ongoing global pandemic. This attack comes at a moment when domestic violence and femicide rates are rising, and women all over the world are being told to stay in and behave themselves—to avoid sexual harassment, assault, and being gunned down at work.
As bad as all this is, it’s nothing new. This is what sex workers are talking about when we say stigma kills.
When Jack the Ripper was killing poor women while they slept on the street, the London press pretended that these women brought their own murder on themselves, by being poor and by becoming prostitutes. By going out at night by themselves. And then we believed that story for over 100 years.
A lot of people still believe it. Earlier this month, in the U.K., it appears a police officer raped and murdered a woman while she was walking home. In response the police went door to door asking women to stay home for their own safety. And then, those same police attacked women who were demonstrating for their literal liberty. The police have never protected us. They work to eradicate us from public space, with arrests and deportations an inevitable result of “an abundance of caution” as the NYPD and other forces are describing their efforts to reassure the AAPI community with security theater. But I’m sitting in meetings with immigrants, sex workers, members of the AAPI community who have been arrested. The police do not make us feel safe, because they have always been part of the problem.
