Letters to the Editor
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Hysteria
Conflation of Lo, Lu, and Cho?
The other cases happened almost 20 years ago. Perhaps it is understandable that some Asian-Americans whose memory reaches that far back search for similarities and "memes," but I haven't read or seen a single item in the mainstream press making such comparisons or even mentioning the other cases. Personally, I vaguely remember one (Lo) and don't even recall the other.
If you wade deep enough into the blogsphere, you can find any ugliness you want, and cite it as evidence of a racial backlash, along with "unconfirmed reports" of flag burning or threats; but that doesn't make any of this true. And suggesting that the Cho episode somehow illustrates a bizarre "whiz kid/yellow peril" dialectic in the way white Americans perceive Asian-Americans is pushing the bounds of credulity past the beaking point. Yellow Peril??!!
There seems to be an absolute hysteria developing on SALON and some other lefty sites about a phenomenon that just doesn't exist. Inexplicably desperate to find "racism" somewhere in this tragedy, every reference to the simple fact that this mentally ill young man was Asian or born abroad is parsed as evidence of cultural fear of the "other"; and when that doesn't suffice, specious "reports" or outright hypotheticals are posited as proof of some ugly cultural bias.
This is really becoming a theater of the absurd. No one is going to think reflexively of a quiet Asian-American male as a "potential spree killer!" No one is blaming Koreans, Korean-Americans, or anything to do with Asia for this tragedy. No one is using this incident to warn American society about the unassimilated yellow peril!
This entire dynamic simply does not exist anywhere but on these very pages. The Emperor has no clothes.