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.
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What does it mean to be "smart" and "quiet"?
Yang raises some interesting points, but I think that the notion of being "smart" and "quiet" is a lot less opressive as compared to that which is faced by other minority groups, especially African Amercians. I cannot help but wonder that if a black male at VA Tech was stalking white females and making people uncomfortable, if accomodations, like the ones made for Cho, would be made -- the brotha [as they say] would be expelled and in JAIL, not a mental institution. This is not to minimize the fact that it appears that Cho was very mentally ill. I worry about this issue of hatred in the Asian community against people who are different, just look at the rantings of people like Kenneth Eng. What will the (Asian) community do to help people learn to cope more effectively with difficulties so that they deal with/face their anger and not blame others? Why can't people align across difference? Assertiveness is an effective way to deal with people; killing is not. I was bullied relentlessly as a black female who wanted to achieve and have experienced Asian's shaking their heads when they see how much I study. Who is perpetuating the "stereotype" about the smart, quiet Asian community? And to what end? Nobody wants to be linked with the negative stereotypes that even new immigrants associate with black people...Tiger Woods even distanced himself from his "blackness."
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Thanks on the Clarification
Emily, appreciate your post clarifying your prev post in response to mine. I better understand where you were coming from with what I first thought was a semi-incoherent comeback.
I now know it wasn't semi-incoherent at all. I do still disagree with your conjecture about all these poor downtrodden white boys. Whereas there are those who are bullied & picked on excessively (usually in their childhood years), I think in general those young men still have it easier in many ways than a minority youth, who might also be being picked on, but also lives in abject poverty or has to deal with language problems or having to work long hours in addition to attending school, etc.
In this huge country of ours I know there are many people who fit the profile you outlined. I have seen though, young white males try to take on the mantle of victimization for (IMO) inconsequential reasons and I guess it irks me.
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Response to Vaguebond
Appreciate your well thought post. No problems with you disagreeing with my assertions. I made mistakes in wording them in absolutes. There are, of course, exceptions to my 'rules'. I'm sure there are young white males who are in serious trouble, not just those in the horrible circumstances that I excepted in my first post.
Most of those in that catagory are young & in school right now & I wish I could make them understand that school is only a small part of your life (hopefully) & that the bad experiences you might be living thru right now are transitory & the assholes makin you miserable wil soon be long gone.
I also hear from time to time adult white males complaining about how easy it is for the blacks, etc. & that the poor white male is the one who really has it hard (this from people who are living the American dream, IMO), and it really pisses me off. I thought I detected some echos of those comments in Emily's post & I responded. After reading another response of hers, I probably mentally mischaracterized her initial post.
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Its our problem
Several factors explain this horror. The "smart and quiet" and "fundamentally foreign" is a shared personality trait of past shooters and characteristic of psychopaths in general.
The deadly combination that explains this was mainly Chos mental illness, school pressures, and alienation from himself and others. But tragically, and mostly, it reflects the utter lack of substantive mental health prevention/intervention strategy at major schools and institutions across the U.S. The practice of neglecting mental health policy, and even shunning it in some cases like the Armed Forces, invites tragedies like this.
Rather than an "Asian thing", "smart but quiet" should be seen as a sign for at-risk students. Not to be treated differently, since their sense of being different is what drives their alienation, but to focus on helping them to not feel shunned, humiliated or forgotten which then turns their alienation into numbness and makes them more likely to kill (to get back at them and kill the pain).