ATLANTA, GA — The trio of Georgia spa shootings that left eight people dead sets up a moment for President Joe Biden to step into a familiar role as the “comforter in chief” — one that eluded his predecessor — when he and Vice President Kamala Harris visit Atlanta on Friday.
Biden and Harris had already scheduled a visit to the city as part of a nationwide tour to sell their coronavirus relief package — before a night of violence that stunned America and made more glaring the spotlight already fixed on a pandemic-related increase in hate crimes against Asian Americans.
Most of the eight people killed were of Asian descent, but investigators have been careful to point out the shooting spree does not appear to be racially motivated.
Robert Aaron Long, the 21-year-old man arrested Tuesday night, confessed to the shootings, but told investigators he “blames the massage parlors for providing an outlet for his addiction to sex,” Cherokee County Sheriff’s Capt. Jay Baker said at a Wednesday news conference.
Still, a report by Stop AAPI Hate — showing nearly 3,800 hate crimes and incidents targeting Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the past year — looms large.Subscribe
In remarks to reporters Wednesday, Both Biden and Harris referenced the wave of attacks on Asian Americans.
“Whatever the motivation here, I know that Asian Americans are very concerned,” Biden said. “I’ve been speaking about the brutality against Asian Americans for the last couple of months.”
In a prime-time address last week, Biden condemned the “vicious hate crimes against Asian Americans who have been attacked, harassed, blamed and scapegoated” over the pandemic.
Harris, the nation’s first woman, Black and Asian America vice president, said the shootings speak to the “larger issue … of violence in our country and what we must do to never tolerate it and always speak out against it.”
“I do want to say to our Asian American community that we stand with you and understand how this has frightened and shocked and outraged all people,” the vice president said, “but knowing the increasing level of hate crime against our Asian American brothers and sisters, we also want to speak out in solidarity with them and acknowledge that none of us should ever be silent in the face of any form of hate.”
It’s unclear whether or how Biden and Harris will address the shootings during Friday’s visit to Atlanta. But it gives Biden a chance to further separate himself from former President Donald Trump, who struggled with empathetic responses to national tragedies and is said to have failed to connect in a meaningful way with the emotions and suffering of others.
Trump’s own words fanned racial tensions in America, whether with his stubborn insistence on referring to the coronavirus as the “Wuhan” or “China” virus, his statement that there were “very fine people” on both sides of a racially charged 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, or with anti-immigrant rhetoric turned against him by accused El Paso, Texas, mass shooter Patrick Crusius in a racist manifesto.
Of the 22 people who died in the Aug. 3, 2019, mass shooting, eight were Mexican nationals. The attack near the border was followed the next day by a mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio, that left nine people — four of them Black Americans — dead.
Trump, who has acknowledged his discomfort with public displays of empathy, was golfing that weekend and didn’t address the Texas and Ohio mass shootings until Monday, Aug. 5. He spoke the right words, saying the “barbaric slaughters are an assault upon our communities, an attack upon our nation and a crime against all of humanity,” but then unleashed an angry screed against Democrats and the news media, effectively erasing his earlier remarks.
Empathy comes easily to Biden and is the linchpin of his emotional intelligence.
Shaped by personal loss and suffering, Biden speaks — and often weeps — about the deaths of his first wife, Neilia, and 13-month-old daughter, Naomi, in a 1972 car accident, as well as the death of his oldest son, Beau, to brain cancer in 2015.
“When I talk to people in mourning, they know I speak from experience. They know I have a sense of the depth of their pain,” he wrote in “Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose.”
History may remember Trump as one of America’s least empathetic commanders in chief, but empathy has been a critical governing and political resource for many of the nation’s previous 44 presidents, especially in matters involving racism.
However brief the moment would later prove to be in the national reckoning over race relations, President Barack Obama’s watershed election in 2008 was heralded as a victory over Jim Crow-era racism. But Americans couldn’t savor for long what many saw at the time as the country’s move finally to post-racist America.
He was one of America’s most polarizing presidents, the schism as much a matter of race as it was of policies. Yet he pressed on, pulling off just two months after he took office a comprehensive speech on race that was at the same time a salve on the wounds of his Black supporters and an ointment to calm the fears of white voters.
In one of the most powerful moments of his presidency, President Obama sang “Amazing Grace” during the eulogy for the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, the pastor of Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, who was among nine killed in 2015 by self-avowed white supremacist Dylann Roof.
Obama paused for 13 seconds after speaking the words “Amazing Grace” to describe Pinckney’s life, leaving the words hanging in the air for mourners to contemplate before he began the beloved hymn in the style of Black churches.
President George W. Bush stirred the emotions of Americans after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, saying the terrorists “shattered steel, but … cannot dent the steel of American resolve.”
There are other examples throughout history of U.S. presidents whose tenures have been defined by their empathy in response to racial strife, but perhaps none was more skilled than President Abraham Lincoln, who de-escalated conflict and ultimately saved the union during the Civil War.
Lincoln’s emotional intelligence was poignantly illustrated by his anguish over those killed on both sides of the bloody conflict, his compassion for mothers pleading with him to spare their sons who had been sentenced to die and his understanding of Southerners’ mindset, which ran so deep that he admitted that if he had lived in the South, he might have been a slave owner.
“I have no prejudice against the Southern people,” he said during a U.S. Senate debate in 1858. “They are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist amongst them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist amongst us, we should not instantly give it up.”
He pleaded for unity in his second inaugural address on March 4, 1865, about a month before the war ended.
“Both sides read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other … let us not judge that we be not judged,” he said.
Biden’s challenge is in many respects similar to Lincoln’s — to provide the leadership, and the comfort, to heal an America some historians say is more divided now than during any point since the Civil War, even during the bloody civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
“We can join forces, stop the shouting and lower the temperature,” Biden said in his inaugural address. “For without unity there is no peace, only bitterness and fury. No progress, only exhausting outrage. No nation, only a state of chaos. This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge, and unity is the path forward.”
He acknowledged that getting there won’t be easy.
“I know speaking of unity can sound to some like a foolish fantasy these days,” he continued. “I know the forces that divide us are deep and they are real. But I also know they are not new. Our history has been a constant struggle between the American ideal that we all are created equal and the harsh, ugly reality that racism, nativism, fear and demonization have long torn us apart.”
Delivery on that promise could begin in earnest in Atlanta on Friday.
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