Five years after the murder of George Floyd, the ripple effects of that summer are still being felt to this day.

Pai and others have been busy working with community members as Asian Americans reel from Tuesdays Atlanta-area shootings by a gunman who killed eight people, six of whom were Asian women. They say they’ve often had to tolerate racist and misogynistic men who cling to a narrative that Asian women are exotic and submissive. She said this scenario echoes a long-running stereotype that Asian women are immoral and hypersexual. That helps us understand violence toward Asian women like we saw this week.”U.S. military deployments in Asia also played a role, according to Kim. The bodies and perceived submissiveness of Asian women were eroticized and hypersexualized, Kim said, and eventually these racist stereotypes were brought back to the United States.