A reveals that the man responsible for the deadly mass shooting at a shopping mall in Allen, Texas had strong anti-Asian sentiments.
Mauricio Garcia's notes, which were discovered on a Russian website, indicate
his deep-rooted racism towards Asians, self-hatred, misogyny, and a rejection of his own Hispanic identity.
The shooter displayed bigotry by
stereotyping East Asian men as undesirable and blaming them for COVID-19, while also using derogatory slurs against South Asians.
“Anti-East/South Asian racism constitutes a consistent thread,” the GNET analysis says of Garcia, who was shot dead by police at the scene. “
When talking about East Asians, his hatred coalesces around men in particular. He parrots narratives about East Asian men being undesirable, timid, and rejected by everyone, including East Asian women.”
In some entries, Garcia made East Asians out to be “
foreign invaders,” and blamed the Chinese people at large for COVID-19, the GNET study goes on. In others, he went on “tirades against South Asians (specifically Indians),” it says, noting those instances in which Garcia simply combined the two into “racist rants about both East and South Asians in the same paragraph.”
It all goes hand-in-hand with Garcia’s vicious misogynistic streak, according to GNET, as well as a strong resentment of his Hispanic identity. He described himself as
“deeply angry” with women, blaming them for his loneliness, while also writing that there was a “time when
I wished I was white.”
It is “crucial” to consider the
internalized racism embedded in Garcia’s writings, particularly the way he projected his own feelings onto East Asians in claiming that they are
“losers” who “want to be white.” This self-loathing, it notes, may help to explain why Garcia, a Latino with multiple neo-Nazi tattoos, was attracted to white supremacism. (At the same time, it emphasizes that further examination is necessary to understand the “complexities of internalized racism, its relevancy to people of color who join white supremacist groups/advocate for white supremacism, and the relation to power dynamics shaped by systemic racism as a whole.”)
There has been a
in recent years, describing as a “misnomer” the idea that only whites can hold white supremacist beliefs.
What Internalized Racism does to a MF:
Although he says in several entries that he “snapped out of it [phases of internalised racism]” and had moments where he wanted to “explore” his roots, there is a consistent undercurrent of an inferiority complex fuelled by a tumultuous mix of internalised racism along with more general personal insecurities. These sentiments are also reflected in an imagined geopolitical hierarchy where he lauds Western Europe’s “superiority” and states that the “Western man towers over everybody.” On the following page, he fantasises about how easy it would be for “Aryans” to take over the United States and “white America” to dominate Mexico. It is important to note that his entry about geopolitical hierarchies came after his reflections about feeling more positively toward other Hispanics because it reveals how entrenched these feelings of inferiority really were even though he tried to navigate through self-resentment.
There is also another dynamic to consider. He noticeably projects his internalised racism onto East Asians and claims that they (especially men) want to be White, “They’re [East Asian men] self-loathing is even worst then my case…we know the sort of losers [are]…[sic]”. By relegating East Asians to a lower rung on the ladder of self-hatred, he incorporates highly gendered forms (i.e. animosity towards men) of anti-Asian racism narratives to comfort himself about his own internalised racism.
Police continue to say "they have not yet determined a motive for the attack".
Four of those killed by Garcia on May 6 at the Allen Premium Outlets were of Asian descent: Kyu Song Cho, 37; Cindy Cho, 35; their 3-year-old son James; and Aishwarya Thatikonda, 26.
The community GoFundMe for individuals and families of the Allen, Texas shooting can be
.
