Winter was heaving its last gasps that day. The air in Chicago hovered just above freezing as my family and I finished dinner. We had just put my daughter to bed when I saw a text from a friend with a news headline and a question: “Have you seen this?”

I read as far as eight shooting victims before my eyes darted to the photo underneath: Sullen police officers and bright yellow tape surrounding the neon lights of Gold Spa. Immediately, I knew: An evening of quiet had turned into a day of infamy.

A shooter in Atlanta had gone on a rampage at three massage parlors. One year ago this week, he murdered eight people – six of them Asian American women from China and Korea.

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As the head of a national organization for Asian American and Pacific Islander women and girls, I knew my colleagues and I had to act. Immediately, I went back and forth with our staff, especially those in Atlanta, to understand what our members needed. At the same time, we had to speak up for our community, so we released a statement. Before I knew it, I was caught in a whirlwind of media requests and coverage, giving more than 50 interviews in just four days.

All the while, I dealt with the same conflux of emotions as millions of Asian American women. Rage and guilt. Grief and revulsion. Devastation for our community.

American culture has hypersexualized and objectified Asian women as long as we’ve lived here.

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Afong Moy, the first recorded Chinese woman brought to the United States, was placed on exotic display. Our nation's first immigration law, the Page Act of 1875, stereotyped East Asian women as prostitutes to bar them from the country. The U.S. military involvement in World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War exacerbated this prejudice, forcing many Asian women into sex work and perpetuating the racist, sexist mythos that Asian women are temptresses or sexual servants in the American consciousness.

This sordid history has imposed upon Asian American women a dangerous present.

Our organization just finished a first-of-its-kind survey of Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s safety. The results were damning: 74% of AAPI women say they experienced racism or discrimination in the previous 12 months. More than half identify a stranger as the perpetrator, and 47% report experiencing racism and discrimination in a public space.

The data underscores the reality that AAPI women are unsafe in spaces we all should be able to trust.

Asian American women are not just reviled for our race or for our gender. We are vilified for both – for the ways our race and gender intertwine and strengthen us.

Yet in almost every interview I did after the Atlanta spa shootings, pundits and journalists were shocked when I highlighted the intersection of racism and misogyny. With the exception of Asian American women and some other female journalists, most reporters elided the fact that the intended targets weren’t just Asian people who happened to be women, or women who happened to be Asian: They were both.

As journalist Lisa Hagen told Slate, the shooter – who blamed “sex addiction” for his crimes – drove past diverse strip clubs to find predominantly Asian-run spas. He sought out Asian American women as his victims. He saw Asian American women as sexual objects, fit for his violence and self-satisfaction, and nothing more.

The shooter’s determination exemplifies why we cannot describe this violence as solely racist or misogynistic. These shootings, and the surge of hate crimes targeting Asian American women, are inseparable from the centuries of anti-Asian and anti-women violence that put the shooter’s finger on the trigger.

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Yet our country insists on ignorance. From labeling hate crimes as unintentional killings to reporting that the Atlanta shooter was not racially motivated, politicians, law enforcement and even some journalists have long failed to accurately name or prosecute abuse against Asian American women.

As a result, these attacks tend to fall into a kind of purgatory – sometimes reported as sexism, other times as just racism, but rarely as what they truly are: Hate crimes that weaponize the most repulsive elements of racism, misogyny and colonialism in our society.

I grew up near a U.S. military base in South Korea, so these experiences formed the backdrop of my adolescence. In most Korean towns occupied by U.S. military bases, the poorest members of our communities depend on American servicemen: their wallets, and their interest in Asian women.

My neighbors who worked in the red-light district usually had no other way to survive. As a child, I experienced this hypersexualization of Korean women firsthand. I still remember how tightly I gripped my grandmother's hand whenever we walked past an American soldier.

When I came to the United States at 18 for college, I quickly discovered that attitudes about Asian women overseas had followed me here. Eighty-year-old men made lewd comments about my body as they bragged about how they had saved my country. Their younger counterparts accosted me with racist accents, snickering at me in public with phrases like, “Me so horny, I love you long time.” When I snapped back, many were shocked that I spoke enough English to challenge them.

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Some people dismiss such frightening advances as flattery. But the hypersexualization of Asian women makes us more vulnerable to sexual assault – and bleeds into stereotypes of docility that make us more vulnerable to all manners of attack.

Just look at some of the crimes Asian women in the United States have suffered:

►In 2000, the year I started college, a group of locals in Spokane, Washington, kidnapped three Japanese exchange students and raped two of them. The assailants said they targeted Japanese women because they believed the victims would be too ashamed to report it. 

►Last year, six men were arrested for more than 170 attacks and robberies in the San Francisco Bay Area, all targeting Asian American women.

►And in the past three months, two Asian American women in New York City –  Michelle Alyssa Go and Christina Yuna Lee – were murdered in scenes that only make sense when we understand the full scope of the bigotry Asian American women face.

Stereotypes that depict us as willing sexual objects also label us as meek and submissive: In other words, any criminal’s ideal target.

So we shouldn’t be surprised that in Atlanta, a white man’s desire to eliminate sexual “temptation” caused a massacre. One need only to look at our nation’s history – at a culture that both degrades and fetishizes Asian women – to understand this violence, and the twinned racism and misogyny that provoked it.

But our silence cannot be the status quo – and the legacy of the women killed cannot be inaction. To move forward, we must manifest real change.

That starts with transforming the ways we discuss racism against Asian American women. Instead of characterizing racism as individual aberrations from the norm, we must reckon with it as a historical and systemic consequence, so killers cannot control the narratives of their own crimes. The media play a big part, but it will take all of us – in education, policy and activism – to make this shift.

At the same time, state and federal governments can direct more resources to preventing hate crimes, not just addressing them after they occur. While outbursts of anti-Asian hatred often generate calls for police action, we cannot police our way out of hatred – particularly when some believe that increased police presence may cause more danger to communities of color. Instead, leaders should invest in the organizations supporting the AAPI community by conducting much-needed research, sharing accurate Asian American history and providing anti-harassment resources.

For too long, Asian American women have been all too visible in ways that dehumanize us but invisible in ways that make us human. Changing this will take slow, steady work. Yet these efforts – unlearning biases like the model minority myth, and sharing Asian American women’s stories – will have effects that last far beyond one news cycle or administration.

This future begins with understanding the bigotry that spurred the murders of Daoyou Feng, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Soon Chung Park, Xiaojie Tan, Yong Ae Yue, Delaina Ashley Yaun and Paul Andre Michels. In their memory, we can make our country safer for families like theirs, and mine.

Sung Yeon Choimorrow is the executive director of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, the nation’s only organization dedicated to building power with Asian American Pacific Islander women and girls.