Letters to the Editor
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I agree with einnocents.
The only people I've heard mention Korean culture as culpable or backlash against Asians at all is from Asians themselves. For the love of God, people, please stop talking about this or you will give the radical white racists and anti-immigration people fuel for their fire!
The mainstream media has clearly not indicted Asians and neither has the amazing student body, faculty, and administration at VT. Nor have the victims' friends and families made any comments about it.
It's so sad to me that the automatic expectation from the Asian American community was that white people were going to immediately bash them for Cho's crime. We really have not made any progress if this is still the expectation. As a white person, I feel ashamed and angry that Asian Americans like Yang would stereotype me as a would-be basher.
White people live and work with Asians, African Americans, and Hispanics/Latinos every day. Heck, some of us are even married to Asians and have Hapa kids! I'm sickened that the level of discourse in this country has once again devolved to amped up charges of racism when there is so little to substantiate that.
Why can't we all just agree that Cho was a profoundly disturbed and mentally ill young man whose actions were the result of his illness and his own personal lived experiences? And that those experiences included immigrating to the US at age 8, growing up middle-class in what to him must have been a very foreign country for at least a few years, having to adapt and learn a new language, being bullied at school for his social awkwardness and speech issues, the frustrations he likely felt when his overbearing romantic affections were not returned, and a general sense that no one understood or could understand his pain. None of those reasons have anything at all to do with being Asian. They could apply to ANY person who immigrated to this country at a young age; or who was bullied a lot as a kid; or who had obsessions with women that resulted in harassment and stalking. There is a way to talk about this without addressing ethnicity. But the thing is--his cultural background will (and should) be addressed because it IS a part of his personal context, just as it would have been addressed in the "culturally-sensitive" therapy that Yang would have sent him to.
Not to take a cheap shot at Yang, but his writing stinks of the kind of Gen X identity politics-mongering that was his bread-and-butter at A Magazine. He should get with the program and realize that the generations after him, including that of Cho and his victims, are far more enlightened and nonchalant about difference (be it ethnic, religious, or sexual orientation) than he and his fellow neurotic Gen Xers ever were.