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On April 10, a 28 year old man entered the campus of Henry Ford College in Dearborn, MI, and shot 20 year old Asia McGowan to death before turning the gun on himself. The Detroit News reported that the killer, Anthony Powell, posted videos on YouTube, including on titled "Black Women Don't Deserve Respect." He denounced all black women as sexually promiscuous. He also talked about a girl he liked named Asia.
There are so many things that are devastating about Asia's death.
A YouTube video that Asia made to address hateful comments she received online, as well as more information and analysis about the situation, is available at What About Our Daughters. To me, just as heartbreaking as the loss of this talented young woman is the reaction of her killer's parents:
Powell’s grief-stricken parents — a retired Detroit Police officer and a registered nurse — said Sunday their 28-year-old son had a history of mental illness. Sam and Doris Powell said they tried for years to get help for their son’s clinical depression and other problems but never suspected he would hurt another person.
“If my child was going to kill himself, I would prefer he do himself, and not anybody else who was innocent,” Doris Powell said.
(Via Pinky at Black Girls Rock It)
The tragedy is not only then a tale of threats of violence against women not being taken seriously, and in many cases, women of color specifically, but also of a society in which mental illness is not taken seriously and prioritized. Incidentally, it also seems to me that people of color who have a mental illness receive even fewer appropriate services than white people. (This is certainly the case with other types of health care, anyway.) How many more times will we see women (and men) get hurt by individuals suffering from mental illness whose families struggle to get them the care they require to keep everyone safe?
Back to the point about violence against women of color, Cecily, who sat on a panel about fighting online misogyny at SXSW not long before Asia was killed, wrote:
As someone recently said on Twitter, I don’t want this to turn into a story about how the internet is a scary and dangerous place. Rather, I want the focus of this post to be on the absolutely asinine response of the police. When a fellow YouTube user tried to alert the police to the murderer’s videos and threats, he received a message from the police that said, “I was unable to view the video. According to the site, I have to have a sign in.”
...I’m sitting here feeling like the lives of black women are quite cheap indeed, so cheap that the cost of registering for a YouTube account was too great to potentially prevent a murder from happening.
At Whose Shoes are These Anyway, Vérité Parlant address the need for mental health care, the lack of police reaction to the warning, and also mentions the lack of national coverage received by the case:
And the question that comes up repeatedly is still, are black women less important than other women given the lack of national media coverage on Asia's death? Other than her being black, the story has all the pieces media sharks love--racial hatred, misogyny, suicide by Net, murder by Net, gun violence, unrequited love, a pretty girl, and blood.
At RH:Reality Check, Anna Clark linked the murder to the need for feminist support at community colleges:
Henry Ford is a community of an astonishing diversity of age, race, ethnicity, religion, and orientation. Most students are what most progressives would call "under-resourced." Many are training for new careers outside the auto-industry. Some of my composition students are studying writing in their third or fourth language. There are musicians and rappers in my classroom; there are health professionals and firefighters, immigrants and lawyers. They are many things at once.
At Henry Ford Community College, there is no center for survivors of assault and violence, no feminist rallies and activism, no awareness campaigns that I'm aware of, nothing of the support systems that are taken for granted at the University of Michigan (which is less than an hour away from Henry Ford). The community college's Focus on Women services are tailored to the academic and financial needs of female students. While Henry Ford does offer day care for students (a project that Michigan would do well to learn from), it lacks in any kind of support
