ABSTRACT
On March 16, 2021, eight people, including six Asian women, were murdered by a White man in the Atlanta area. How does the role of race influence our understandings of what happened during the Atlanta Massacre? This chapter applies critical race media literacy as theory to the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings to interrogate how media did, and did not, depict Asian women as victims of murder, targets of hate crime, and deserving of empathy. This chapter uses critical discourse analyses to examine journalistic accounts of the Atlanta incident, with particular attention paid to the visibility of Asian women in terms of their race, gender, employment, and victim statuses. These intersectionalities were used as biases in Western journalistic reports of the murdered Asian women. At least three stereotypes help to explain why empathy toward Asian women might have been lower than expected: Asians as diseased and immoral as encapsulated by “yellow peril,” Asians as assimilated and White adjacent by the “model minority myth,” and Asians as objectified and fetishized as synopsized by “yellow fever.” Educators may use themes examined herein as a model for the application of critical race media literacy as theory to examine how media depictions of Asian women are seen as perpetuating or refuting stereotypical portrayals.
