Homeland Security Incident at UCSB

This may be in the news in the future, but apparently Homeland Security raided the apartment of a UCSB instructor at 5am on the 23rd, and arrested her Korean roommate because she couldn't find her green card immediately.

Info from http://community.livejournal.com/ucsb/1269217.html

Racist DJs FIRED

Looks like justice has been served. The Organization of Chinese Americans deserves a lot of credit:

http://entertainment.msn.com/news/article.aspx?news=261930>1=9951

Racist DJs suspended

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6589019.stm
Two CBS DJs were suspended for a racist and sexist prank call to a Chinese restaurant. This story has been rather slow to develop, so we need to make it clear to CBS these two need to be fired just like Imus.

More Coverage on Asian organization response to VA Tech

http://www.8asians.com/

The media is speaking out!

VIRGINIA TECH MASSACRE SHOOTER DEBATE: Speculation mars discussion online
Vanessa Hua, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Initial media reports described Cho Seung-Hui -- whose shooting rampage Monday at Virginia Tech left 33 dead, including himself -- as a resident alien, an Asian and a South Korean.

On Tuesday, racially tinged speculation, based on the 23-year-old Cho's heritage and immigrant status, flew around the Internet, even though he spent two-thirds of his life in the United States.
"Yet another reason for the U.S. to further restrict immigration to this country," a user going by the name of Christabella posted on a blog at SFGate.com, The Chronicle's Web site. "Had they not allowed Cho to waltz into the nation on a student visa, those 33 people would still be alive."
Cho, the underlying argument went, was a foreigner.

That kind of thinking has alarmed Asian American leaders. Overemphasis in news coverage of his immigrant status, and stereotyping in general, could influence perceptions of all Asian Americans -- not only Koreans -- especially in areas with little connection to Asians and Asian Americans, said Eric Mar, a San Francisco school board member who is Chinese American.

The Asian American Journalists Association, headquartered in San Francisco, questioned stories and online comments posted Tuesday morning that highlighted Cho's race and immigration status because that emphasis suggested those factors played a role in the shootings.

In fact, Cho was like many school shooters -- about three-quarters of whom have been white boys and young men, according to a 2000 report from the U.S. Secret Service. Cho appeared to feel marginalized and angry, according to criminologists and psychologists such as Louis B. Schlesinger, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

Born in South Korea, Cho, 23, immigrated as a child to the United States in 1992. He was raised in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, the son of a couple who worked at a dry-cleaning business. He was sullen and depressed, an English major whose twisted fiction concerned faculty and a fan of bloody shooting games, according to media reports.

"A useful way to think about this is, 'How connected might an individual feel to a community and a society?' " said Daniel Webster, co-director of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at Johns Hopkins University. "Sometimes the barriers might be racial, sometimes it might be language. Sometimes it might be their own mental health that prevents them from forming bonds."

The public is attempting to make sense of the tragedy by categorizing Cho and his motivations, said James Garbarino, a professor at Loyola University in Chicago, and author of "Lost Boys: Why Our Boys Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them."

People have "an impulse to distance themselves" from the campus killer, Garbarino said. "The more someone is like one of us, the harder it is to sleep."

Some of the people posting to blogs and chat rooms online Tuesday blamed Cho's actions on his "foreign" status. Others dismissed such arguments as preposterous and asserted that the massacre resulted from easy access to guns, violence in the media or the popularity of violent video games. Still others theorized he was a member of al Qaeda, carrying out a terrorist attack. He was an English-as-a-second-language student depressed about finals, according to another theory.

Indeed, commentators' theories may say more about them than about the gunman.

"It's a psychological protective technique," said Franklin Zimring, a criminologist at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law. "This is about gun control, or immigration, or not allowing guns on campus. People are painting the picture."

E-mail Vanessa Hua at vahua@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/04/18/MNG7EPAN4P1.DTL

Chung: Asian-Americans dread backlash in wake of Va. Tech carnage

By L.A. Chung Mercury News Columnist San Jose Mercury News
Article Launched:04/18/2007 10:03:01 AM PDT

All day Monday, reeling from the unfolding carnage on the pastoral campus of Virginia Tech, I wondered the same thing everyone else did: Who was this shooter? Why did he do it?

When I awoke the next morning, the name of the perpetrator of the nation's worst mass murder was all over the news, and I had another reaction: Oh, no. He's Asian.

Actually, there was a collective flinch out there among Asian-Americans.
Twenty-three-year-old Seung Cho, a troubled student raised in the well-to-do suburbs ringing Washington, D.C., reportedly left a note railing against "rich kids" and "deceitful charlatans." School officials identified him as Cho Seung-Hui in the order his name would appear in South Korea, where he was born.

Now, Cho may be just the name of a guy described as "a loner" who barely spoke in class, but for a number of us, he has a face that looks like our brothers, cousins and friends. That association alone is unsettling.

Mai Hoang, a former Oakland resident, remembered vividly - and with the same flinch - the 1991 hostage-taking and siege of the Good Guys store in Sacramento that involved three Vietnamese brothers and another Vietnamese youth. Six people died, including three of the gunmen, and 11 were wounded. With the large Vietnamese population in Virginia and the shootings taking place in the engineering building, she was afraid this bloodbath was at the hands of a Vietnamese-American student.

"I felt terrible for being relieved on behalf of my community he wasn't," she said.
How does one explain this jumble of revulsion, shame, sadness - and empathy for his parents - that arises among Asian-Americans? It's hard to articulate, but it does.

Elaine Kim, professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California-Berkeley, said she has received all kinds of e-mail from concerned Korean-Americans.

"Everyone is sensitive to it, worried about it," Kim said. "I said, `Don't take responsibility for it. You have nothing to do with it!'"

Among minorities, we're not alone.

A black colleague once shared his unvoiced reaction when the Washington, D.C., area snipers John Muhammad and Lee Malvo were arrested four years ago: "Oh, damn it, they're black!"
Local Muslims report having similar feelings when violence breaks out, hoping silently that no Muslim is involved.

Kim said one of her e-mails Tuesday came from a young Jewish man who first stated, "I remember being disappointed that Dylan Klebold was Jewish," referring to one of the teen shooters of the infamous Columbine High School massacre. "And he asked what I thought about Cho being Korean," Kim said.

I can't say I know a single white male who read about Jeffrey Dahmer's serial killing and thought, "Oh, no, another white guy" - FBI criminal personality profiles notwithstanding.

As minorities, we all feel that we have to "represent," to use the modern phrase. That we have to show that our people are normal - shocked like everyone else, saddened like everyone else - and that we stand for sanity, for decency and, yes, as obvious as it is, that we have utmost sympathy for the victims' families.

We feel the need to represent - and also to distance ourselves. First up was the government of South Korea, which expressed its shock and condolences. The Korean American Coalition in Washington, D.C., extended its sympathies "on behalf of the Korean community" and announced a memorial fund for the bereaved Virginia Tech families.

It comes out of genuine concern. And out of fear of a backlash.

We're afraid others are only going to see the Asian part of the shooter's identity. Or his immigration status. We're afraid that the violence will somehow be ascribed to his Korean-ness, or that his legal permanent residency - as repeatedly mentioned in news reports - is relevant to his mad actions.

"They keep saying he's a `Korean national,' but he's been here since he was 8," said Hoang, the news editor who contributed to the blog, "Trip Master Monkey," a posting about the backlash. "He's Americanized."

Now and in coming days, this tragedy will spark discussions about campus security, gun control, mental health care. Hopefully, we can all recognize the red flags his professors and others saw.
Lucinda Roy, director of the creative writing department, described in a New York Times opinion piece the coming together of races, black and white, on the campus over the tragedy.

Playwriting classmate Ian McFarlane posted on AOL News his wish that by releasing Cho's plays, "... this might help people start caring about others no matter how weird they might seem because if this was some kind of cry for attention, then he should have gotten it a long time ago."
Perhaps all will see themselves as a community devastated by madness, not color.

Contact L.A. Chung at lchung@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5280.

What is this all about? Photo of the Asian Media

http://www.denverpost.com/portlet/article/html/imageDisplay.jsp?contentItemRelationshipId=1496964

The Denver Post recently published an article on the recent Virginia Tech shooting. The majority of the article simply repeated the same information found on other news wires. What is interesting is that the Denver Post included a photograph of what it calls the "Asian Media" photographing Cho's family home. How the Denver Post knows that these photographers constitute the Asian Media is unclear aside from conclusions based on the photographers' physical appearance. More importantly, what does that have to do with the tragedy anyway?

Anyone know details on the group of students that was threatened in Denver?

http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_5695424

A Call to Record VA Tech Aftermath

I believe that the anti-Asian sentiment that the VA Tech shootings were predicted to create has begun. Today, my sister, an undergrad on the UC Berkeley campus, came home and told me that she had had a terrible day. Walking past the SQUELCH undergraduate student political organization, one of the members remarked, "Vote for me and I'll prostitute myself out like an Asian woman" as my sister walked by. On the bus, some guy stuck his foot out in the aisle to trip her as she tried to exit the bus. When she looked at him, he simply remarked "What?"

Admittedly, incidents like these are hard to define because they're neither clearly defined racially motivated hate crimes nor are they purely circumstantial events devoid of any racial implications. Thinking back, my sister can't recall hearing such comments on her previous excursions across campus, and she definitely doesn't remember the last time she experienced subtle harassments more than once in a day. Of course, when something like the VA Tech shootings occur, we all are a little more on guard, and perhaps one could argue that the sensitivity level may be a bit higher. In other words, is it that anti-Asian incidents have increased since the shooting or do people happen to notice them more?

Regardless of the basis for anti-Asian hate incidents, it's important that we document them, not only to have a record proving or disproving theories about anti-Asian sentiment, but also to watch out for each other and the community (Asians and non-Asians alike). We must create a record and put it out in the open to force acknowledgment of what's really going on in our multicultural society. I encourage people to note incidents of racial discrimination against all races as well.

Please pass this on to people you know and ask them to record incidents that they experienced or observed. Note the date, time, place, who the participants were and what was said.

Tamara K. Nopper
April 17, 2007

Like many, I was glued to the television news yesterday, keeping updated about the horrific shootings at Virginia Tech University. I was trying to deal with my own disgust and sadness, especially since my professional life as a graduate student and college instructor is tied to universities. And then the other shoe dropped. I found out from a friend that the news channel she was watching had reported the shooter as Asian. It has now been reported, after much confusion, that the shooter is Cho Seung-Hui, a South Korean immigrant and Virginia Tech student.

As an Asian American woman, I am keenly aware that Asians are about to become a popular media topic if not the victims of physical backlash. Rarely have we gotten as much attention in the past ten years, except, perhaps, during the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. Since then Asians are seldom seen in the media except when one of us wins a golfing match, Woody Allen has sex, or Angelina Jolie adopts a kid.

I am not looking forward to the onslaught of media attention. If history truly does have clues about what will come, there may be several different ways we as Asian Americans will be talked about.

One, we will watch white media pundits and perhaps even sociologists explain what they understand as an "Asian" way of being. They will talk about how Asian males presumably have fragile "egos" and therefore are culturally prone to engage in kamikaze style violence. These statements will be embedded with racist tropes about Japanese military fighters during WWII or the Viet Cong—the crazy, calculating, and hidden Asian man who will fight to the death over presumably nothing.

In the process, the white media might actually ask Asian Americans our perspectives for a change. We will probably be expected to apologize in some way for the behavior of another Asian—something whites never have to collectively do when one of theirs engages in (mass) violence, which is often. And then some of us might succumb to the Orientalist logic of the media by eagerly promoting Asian Americans as real Americans and therefore unlike Asians overseas who presumably engage in culturally reprehensible behavior. In other words, if we get to talk at all, Asian Americans will be expected to interpret, explain, and distance themselves from other Asians just to get airtime.

Or perhaps the media will take the color-blind approach instead of a strictly eugenic one. The media might try to whitewash the situation and treat Cho as just another alienated middle-class suburban kid. In some ways this is already happening—hence the constant referrals to the proximity of the shootings to the 8th anniversary of the Columbine killings. The media will repeat over and over words from a letter that Cho left behind speaking of "rich kids," and "deceitful charlatans." They will ask what's going on in middle-class communities that encourage this type of violence. In the process they may never talk about the dirty little secret about middle-class assimilation: for non-whites, it does not always prevent racial alienation, rage, or depression. This may be surprising given that we are bombarded with constant images suggesting that racial harmony will exist once we are all middle-class. But for many of us who have achieved middle-class life, even if we may not openly admit it, alienation does not stop if you are not white.

But the white media, being as tricky as it is, may probably talk about Cho in ways that reflect a combination of both traditional eugenic and colorblind approaches. They will emphasize Cho's ethnicity and economic background by wondering what would set off a hard-working, quiet, South Korean immigrant from a middle-class dry-cleaner-owning family. They will wonder why Cho would commit such acts of violence, which we expect from Middle Easterners and Muslims and those crazy Asians from overseas, but not from hard-working South Korean immigrants. They will promote Cho as "the model minority" who suddenly, for no reason, went crazy. Whereas eugenic approaches depicting Asians as crazy kamikazes or Viet Cong mercenaries emphasize Asian violence, the eugenic aspect of the model minority myth suggests that there is something about Asian Americans that makes them less prone to expressions of anger, rage, violence, or criminality. Indeed, we are not even seen as having legitimate reasons to have anger, let alone rage, hence the need to figure out what made this "quiet" student "snap."

Given that the model minority myth is a white racist invention that elevates Asians over minority groups, Cho will be dissected as an anomaly among South Koreans who "are not prone" to violence—unlike Blacks who are racistly viewed as inherently violent or South Asians, Middle Easterners and Muslims who are viewed as potential terrorists. He will be talked about as acting "out of character" from the other "good South Koreans" who come here and quietly and dutifully work towards the American dream. Operating behind the scenes of course is a diplomatic relationship between the US and South Korea forged through bombs and military zones during the Korean War and expressed through the new free trade agreement negotiations between the countries. Indeed, even as South Korean diplomats express concern about racial backlash against Asians, they are quick to disown Cho in order to maintain the image of the respectable South Korean.

Whatever happens, Cho will become whoever the white media wants him to be and for whatever political platform it and legislators want to push. In the process, Asian Americans will, like other non-whites, be picked apart, dissected, and theorized by whites. As such, this is no different than any other day for Asian Americans. Only this time an Asian face will be on every television screen, internet search engine, and newspaper.

Tamara K. Nopper is an educator, writer, and activist living in Philadelphia. She can be reached at tnopper@yahoo.com

Responding to the VA Tech Shootings

Yes, the shooter is Asian American--which means that the tragic loss that our nation suffered yesterday will inevitably be followed by losses for the Asian American community. One can only imagine the responses that an act of such unimaginable violence will provoke. Acquaintances of mine, both Asian American and otherwise, have already predicted a host of responses ranging from media-driven stereotyping to actual physical violence against Asian Americans. This blog is being started to address two questions:

1. In your opinion, what effect will the VA Tech Shootings have on the Asian American community?

2. How do you think the Asian American community should respond to any negative fallout--including that which you predicted in your response to question 1?

Welcome & First Post

Welcome! Let's start a discussion about what seems to be a pressing issue for the Asian American community lately. Also, what about inviting guest bloggers such as Victor Hwang, Dale Minami and others to contribute to the site?