Combating the Slow Economic Violence of Rescue

Abstract

Abstract: This paper contributes to the growing consensus of voices who articulate how the newfound North American consciousness around “anti-Asian hate” must connect individual acts of violence to structural forms of state and white supremacist violence. Focusing on the policing of Asian massage work, the essay argues that this unique human-itarian commitment reflects the slow economic violence of rescue. It contextualizes the 2021 Atlanta massage murders alongside the work of Red Canary Song (RCS), a grassroots coalition of migrant massage workers, sex workers, and allies organizing against the policing of massage work in New York. The essay echoes an abolitionist call to not only dismantle policing and punishment mechanisms—as these forms of policing have penetrated most aspects of civilian life—but demands the urgency to build a vast network of community resources coupled with imaginative ways of organizing. Abolitionist feminist frameworks must necessarily encompass economic justice, migrant justice, housing justice, and language justice to name a few. One strategy espoused by RCS builds worker power and the capacity for organizing towards the decriminalization of poverty, migration, and low-wage informal and sex work alike. For Asian migrant workers, the fight for justice is not only about the resources needed to live, sleep, and work safely, it is also about changing the deep-seated mix of paternalism and resentment that refuses to acknowledge Asian working-class communities to ability to make choices within constraints.