Allen mall shooting was a racist terror attack. Why won’t leaders say so? | Opinion

Racist hatred is showing in Texas again, in a region and state that don’t want to talk about it.

The Cho family from South Korea and construction project engineer Aishwarya Thatikonda from India are forever Collin County’s martyrs, along with the Mendoza children from Sachse and Elio Cumana-Rivas of Dallas.

Security guard Christian LaCour of Farmersville joins them in Allen’s memory for eternity.

He was the security guard at an outlet mall, the only white person of eight killed Saturday when, police say, racist sociopath Mauricio Garcia drove 30 miles to commit mass murder.

The ranking Texas Department of Public Safety officer, regional director Hank Sibley, told reporters again Tuesday what state officials had previously said: that Garcia simply targeted the mall and “it didn’t matter the age, same race or sex.”

As usual, Gov. Greg Abbott already said the “root cause” is mental health. U.S. Rep Keith Self said the attack was like street crime in Chicago and “the big cities.”

But the director of Asian Texans for Justice, Lily Trieu of Austin, has a different idea.

“Obviously we are aware that at this time, except for the security guard, all the victims are people of color,” she said Monday.

Witnesses at the scene said that Saturday.

But for some reason, state and county officials haven’t said that in their terse announcements or in the hollow political speeches following.

“I don’t want to speculate” why, Trieu said cautiously. “I will say that Collin County and the officials in Allen have been really slow to give out any information. ... It made it hard for groups like ours to respond.”

Trieu said her group has “some frustration” about the trickle of information from Collin County, both about the killings and the shooter.

“We are hearing today that more South Asians may be impacted” as injured victims, she said.

Asian Texans for Justice would like to know whether Garcia, a longtime Dallas resident with a violent and misogynistic bent, drove around the mall parking lot and picked out specific people to target.

Don’t get distracted by his Latino heritage. There are whole movies about American Latinos who identify with whites and resent people who they think are new immigrants.

A Black man, Irvin Walker II of Lafayette, La., was injured. Others listed so far are the Mendozas’ mother, orphaned William Cho and a man with Thatikonda who was shot. Officials have said they will not list the injured.

Community members are working to have Thatikonda’s body brought back home to Saroonagar in Hyderabad, Trieu said.

California-based Stop AAPI Hate, which named Texas early in the 2020 COVID pandemic as the No. 3 state for hate incidents against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, also took note.

“Four of the Texas shooting victims were Asian. Most were people of color. And three were children,” the group published on its Twitter account at twitter.com/StopAAPIHate.

“There are no words to describe the devastating impacts of hate in this moment,” Stop AAPI Hate wrote. “This tragedy is yet another reminder of the dangerous consequences of hate and bigotry. The ongoing normalization and amplification of white supremacy and far-right extremism poses a growing threat to communities of all stripes across the nation.”

Local groups like the punk vandals from Grapevine-based Patriot Front and a few extremist political activists try to blend bigotry into everyday conversation.

The Legislature itself has gone out of its way to prohibit training and textbooks that teach against racism and prejudice.

WFAA/Channel 8 reporter Tiffany Liou was at the scene Saturday in Allen.

It was her first assignment at a mass shooting since she lost an aunt four months ago in a racist club attack in California.

“One of the most beautiful things about this mall [Allen] is how diverse it always is,” she wrote in a message. “The shooter took that joy away.”

She knew what came next. Some families would wait 24 hours or more for names.

Then, “these families will be collecting the items of the deceased, planning funerals, and far more on top of grieving,” she wrote.

“It’s so much. It’s so heavy. It’s so awful.”

Trieu said anti-Asian hatred grew with the COVID pandemic.

“I don’t know if Asian-Americans have felt safe in Texas for some time,” Trieu said.

“It can be name-calling, it can be comments on the street,” she said. “Then we saw these bills in the Legislature that targeted people of Asian descent.”

A few weeks ago, the Texas Senate actually debated a bill to bar any citizen of China, Iran, North Korea or Russia from buying property.

That bill would have prohibited legal immigrants or Americans with dual citizenship from owning a home or land. It was meant to prevent foreign ranch deals. It passed the Senate with an amendment allowing land sales to legal American residents and naturalized citizens.

“Once you start that rhetoric,” Trieu said, “you can’t put that cat back in the bag. And now here we are.”

Not quite.

Eight of us are no longer here.