On March 16, Robert Aaron Long, a 21-year-old white man, killed eight people during three separate spa shootings outside Atlanta. He cited “sexual addiction” as his defense, which started a sort of media tug-of-war about Long’s motivations, especially after Atlanta Police reported that Long told them the killings weren’t “racially motivated.” 

However, seven of the gunman’s eight victims were women; six were identified as Asian and at least four of those killed were of Korean descent. Their names were Delaina Ashley Yaun, Paul Andre Michels, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Soon C. Park, Hyun J. Grant, Suncha Kim and Yong A. Yue.

Despite the denials, the killings are a hate crime that exists at the intersection of misogyny, xenophobia and racism, and underpinning it is the toxicity of Evangelical purity culture. Long was a longtime member of Crabapple First Baptist Church, a Southern Baptist Church in Macon, and reportedly told police that he viewed the people who worked at the spas as “temptations” he needed to “eliminate,” indicating that he set out with the intention of attacking Asian women whom he perceived to be sex […]