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Last week was the two year anniversary of the Virginia Tech shootings, where Seung-Hui Cho murdered 32 people and injured 23 others, and ended the horrific incident by killing himself. The week before this somber anniversary, Jiverly Wong, an immigrant from Vietnam killed 13 people at an immigration center in upstate NY before committing suicide. In the last few weeks, there has been a lot of violence in the Asian American community, which has got me reflecting about how we think about Asian Americans and violence - not just terrible incidents where Asian Americans have perpetrated acts of violence, but also incidents where we are targeted with violent acts.
In the last few weeks, there have been more incidents of violence among Asian Americans than I like to think about. In addition to the Binghamton shootings, there's been:
I could go on with this list, but I'm already feeling overwhelmed by this list as it is. You might wonder why I listed anti-Asian bias incidents in with violence perpetrated by Asian Americans. Quite simply, I've been thinking about how easy it is to just write off all of these incidents to "crazy" people, and say they're all random acts of psychos. It lets us off the hook from asking and confronting tough questions. One I've been wondering about is: How are anti-Asian incidents/hate crimes indicative of a broader underlying anti-Asian sentiment in society? These incidents, I believe, are not just isolated incidents. They're indicators of a more pervasive problem in society, where whiteness is still King.
Is it a coincidence that some of these perpetrators of violence, most notably Jiverly Wong and Seung-Hui Cho, mention in their last messages that they were treated badly by dominant society? Wong mentioned policy brutality. Cho was repeatedly taunted for being Asian. Is it a coincidence that all of the Asian American shooters were immigrants? Anti-immigrant sentiments aren't only directed at Latinos, and immigrant and linguistic status make Asian immigrants easy targets for bias and hate.
What role does a pervasive, xenophobic and racist, anti-Asian sentiment in U.S. play in all of these violent incidents? I don't think it's right to just say, "Jiverly Wong/Seung-Hui Cho, etc. were just crazy. They were wacko exceptions." In the same way, it's too easy to say that people who perpetrate anti-Asian acts are just crazy exceptions. They were all products of AMERICAN society. I'm not saying that they were sane people who made justified decisions. I'm saying that their psychoses may have been a product of a larger problem in White dominated U.S. society.
Research has shown a significant correlation between the daily experiences of racism experienced by Asian Americans and public health risks, including mental health (see: Gee, et al, 2007). Unfortunately, I don't think that these incidents will just come to a stop. We live in a violent society. Just ask the students at Lafayette High School, where the bullying of Asian American students reached such a level that the federal government placed a consent decree over the school to ensure the civil rights of the students. To just chalk off all of these incidents as isolated acts by crazy people doesn't get to the roots of the problem, and really just lets all of us in U.S. society off the hook too easily.
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| User | Points |
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| curtis | 1953 |
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| chriswong | 190 |
Great post Oiyan. I certainly think the ant-Asian experiences endured by Cho and others are certainly a "root" cause in explaining why these individuals engaged in homicidal and ultimately suicidal acts. This then reinforces host other social factors typically found these cases such as a lack of moral and social integration, mental illness, alienation from mainstream institutions, and a presentist attitude. Not to mention the institutional failure from school officials to law enforcement which allowed Cho to obtain a gun despite a history of mental illness. Katherine Newman, an anthropologist from Harvard, recent wrote a book on understanding why school shootings happen. I haven't read it but I've read her work on poverty and she's extremely good. The book is called Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings if you want to check it out.
I've been tracking that Lafayette High School story for a while. It seems that many of the Asian kids were being bullied by black students. I think the story itself is changing but it's a bit more complicated than the usual white-on-person-of-color violence. Also, the high school was already pretty violent and until 2006 had been considered of the most violent schools in the NY school system.
People here in Brooklyn will probably just say, hey, it's Bensonhurst. It's a rough high school with graduation rates in the low 30s. It's hard for me to think of Lafayette High School in the larger context of anti-Asian violence when there are more obvious issues of poverty that occur with both blacks and Asians in the high school. However, many of the Asians are new arrivals to New York and probably merit protected status due to ESL and immigrant status.
Allan,
I believe that acts motivated by an ideology of white dominance need not be perpetrated by white bodies. An ideology of white dominance enforces the pitting of people of color against each other, all the while reinforcing whiteness at the top (see: Clare Jean Kim's book: Bitter Fruit).
But yes... as cityscapes become more multiracial, we need to do more work around racial tensions, to understand source and develop pedagogy.
I think we have to look at mental health and how it is being addressed or not addressed in our community.
Thanks Curtis. I think that my point is that it shouldn't just be a mental health for Asian Americans response, because I don't think that fully gets at the root causes. We have to question and push general society to address how pervasive white privilege and racism is.
I think you need to draw a distinction between mass shootings and the ones that are individually targeted because the motivations are completely different. Cho and Tran follow the classic pattern of workplace/school mass shootings like Columbine and Santee High Schools. Mass shootings are misunderstood because we have no narrative to explain them beyond the "lone crazed gunman".
I think you have the right idea about bullying being behind many of these incidents. If you get a chance, check out Going Postal, by Mark Ames. I don't necessarily agree with him 100%, but he does give an interesting perspective. Workplace shootings were unheard of before the early 80's which was the time of Reaganomics, union busting, and the middle class squeeze. He draws some interesting parallels between workplace shootings and the few slave revolts in the US South, including news reports attributing these incidents to lone, crazed people.
http://www.amazon.com/Going-Postal-Rebellion-Workplaces-Columbine/dp/1932360824/
He detailed the bullying behind these school shootings. I'd also suggest reading the Hellmouth series on Slashdot, a tech blog that had its heyday the in late-90's dotcom era.
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/04/25/1438249.shtml
http://slashdot.org/features/99/04/27/0310247.shtml
http://slashdot.org/features/99/05/03/0518209.shtml
http://features.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/10/25/181257
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