They said – it was not about the color of your skin,
or the fact that you were a woman, none of those things;
your death was simply
a tragedy, an accident, a sad coincidence
caused by someone with a mental illness.
Such an insult to your truth, to what it means to have a mental illness,
to your being an Asian woman in a world where you were seen as a woman, an Asian,
a person who was not white, not male, not anything
for whom the media so readily provides an excuse.
They choose the narrative that brings them the least discomfort,
not one that shows the darkness of the world in which you can be executed
by someone who had the audacity to claim his act of murder was about lust.
The killer lusted for blood, the same red blood in his veins,
only beneath a different appearance from his.
And yet so many of them are saying, no,
that is the self-victimization mentality.
They’re saying that to you who literally were the victim of a hate crime,
whose life was taken away – not even because you were at the wrong place at the wrong time,
but because the murderer invaded your space,
as if this earth were not big enough for everyone regardless of their gender, and race,
and everything else that makes us different and makes us one.
You are dead. Many of you died. Many of you will die, if they keep breeding the lies,
convincing themselves and others that this could have happened to anyone,
that they choose to not see colors when one of the colors were red, that of your blood
spilling over their head, their conscience – does everyone not have one?, their rhetoric.
But the truth is this:
this. is. a. hate. crime.
this. is. a. murder.
and anyone who claims otherwise is an accomplice
in an act against humanity, against what we all want for our country,
our children, our future.
And now every time I walk out on the street, I would wonder
if my mask and clothes were enough to conceal me, to protect me:
my woman’s body, my Asian skin, my identity
that should matter and not matter just as much as anybody’s,
but it doesn’t:
in Atlanta, just the other day,
people who looked just like me were murdered
just because of how they looked.
Lily Thanh 