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If you value our coverage and want to support more of it, consider becoming a member today. Our lives, liberties, and happiness are contingent on yours. Asians are arguably the most diverse group in America , ethnically and socioeconomically. This is the secret power of anti-Asian bias in the United States.
The one thing we have in common is our shared status as its targets. But as an Indian-American professor of classics , writing a book about diversity in imperial Rome , I see the Atlanta shootings within an even longer history of desiring, dehumanizing, and discarding foreign women. These ancient habits of mind remain armed and dangerous today.
Before Christ was born, Rome had forcibly incorporated people across Europe, Asia, and Africa into its multiethnic empire. It fed on the exploitation of women, poor and enslaved people, and non-citizens, with Asian women overrepresented among service workers.
Misogyny and xenophobia were endemic. People of any color, from pale Britons to Black Africans, might wind up enslaved — or find paths to citizenship. But in classical antiquity, as today, the continent became a generic conceptual home for people who were exotic enough to excite, yet safe enough to exploit.
