Modern Orientalism

(originally posted on April 18, 2007)
For the most part, I don't spend my time ranting about Asian American issues. People who know me well will come across it occasionally, but I don't go around preaching. However, after spending a good part of last night and today following the Virginia Tech shooting case I feel the need to step forward for a second and make a few comments.

In times like this I always hope that the news media will prove me wrong and do their best to be sensitive about the kind of damage the way they handle race can do. I'm a firm believer that the methods in which they report can make a huge difference.

When I first saw in reports late last night that the gun man was Asian, I got a sinking feeling. In the back of my mind I knew that this would some how devolve into a case that involved race.
I was outraged to see in one news article, that before even getting confirmation, they reported that one of the students who survived the shooting mentioned that he looked "Chinese." Historically, anyone Asian is generally assumed to be "Chinese." They should never have ran that comment. This fact was clarified today when they determined that 23 year old Seung Cho was, infact, not Chinese but, South Korean. And though he had resided in the US for the majority of his short life he was still a green card holder and therefore still "foreign." Every report today was prefaced by this fact, except for the one given by Suchin Pak on MTV news.

When journalists start off their reports by emphasizing that he was South Korean, they lead the public to focus on this trait which is really not very important at all. A more important fact to focus on is that he was a known "loner" and identified as mentally disturbed student who was on medication before the attack. These traits say far more about his state of mind and causality than the fact that he was Asian.

By repeatedly focusing on his ethnicity, the media is doing a great injustice to the Asian American community and putting our security at risk. A couple of the news articles I read even mentioned that Asian Americans on campus and in the surrounding community are bracing themselves in anticipation of a possible backlash against the AA community. As a precaution they have removed his family from their home.

I think a larger problem is that these sorts of things continue to happen because as Asian Americans, we don't speak out against these subtle acts of racism. Imus makes one off comment about the African American Ladies on the Rutgers basketball team and gets fired, but Rosie O'Donnell makes fun of Chinese Americans on the View and barely even gets a slap on the back of the hand. Small as they may seem, acts that demoralize or subjugate any ethnic group do build up in the collective conciousness. By ignoring them we are allowing them to continue and by allowing them to continue we are saying it's ok for the American public at large to percieve us as second class citizens, as perpetually foreign.

I think that says quite a bit about where we are in the fight for equality.