In the wake of the March 16 Atlanta shootings in which eight people, including six Asian women, four of whom were of Korean descent, were killed, and following a marked rise in attacks on Asian Americans over the past year, Trevor Noah says the country should have seen this coming.
“We see these things happening,” says Noah in the Daily Show monologue above. “People have been warning, people in the Asian community have been tweeting, saying please help us.”
Noah goes on to say that it’s so frustrating to see violence like this happening in America over and over. “Why are people so invested in solving the symptoms instead of the cause? America does this time and time again. A country that wants to fight the symptoms and not the underlying conditions that cause those symptoms to take effect,” he argues.
“But whatever you do, please don’t tell me that this thing had nothing to do with race. Even if the shooter says that — he thinks it had to do with his ‘sex addiction’ — you can’t disconnect this violence from the racial stereotypes people attach to Asian women. This guy blamed a specific race of people for his problems, and then murdered them of it.
“If that’s not racism, then the word has no meaning.”
