"Us" and "Them" - Racism in Our Culture

the topic came up the other day during a family dinner. my brother and sister were both saying how they thought the shooter was going to be a white guy when they first heard about the news. asians just somehow don't fit that stereotype. we are supposedly all nerdy, geeky, weak, and cheap.

many news articles focus on cho seung-hui's family life and racial background. apparently, he was born in south korea, moved to the states in 1992, grew up in washington, dc, and died at the age of 23. although cho wasn't technically an "american-born-korean", i thought he was quite well-assimilated. for example, his college major was english, and he seemed to have quite a bit of knowledge in the western religion, as shown in his video, which he sent to the nbc network during his shooting. however, i have noticed that many journalists repeated emphasized that cho was a "native" korean. the word "native" came up multiple times. word choice is never a coincidence in news culture. the way a mainstream north american journalist frames an idea or a story is usually ideological. in this case, perhaps these journalists are trying to link the violence with cho's ethnicity. nevertheless, the journalist chang who composed this particular news article that i posted up is quite an exception. chang specifically pointed out that cho's south korean heritage should not matter and south koreans don't deserve the blame. what is really interesting is that chang is a south korean journalist. that may be a factor.

put the journalists' writing routines aside - does anyone notice something disturbing? in the past, there were some white american school shooters. now surprisingly we have an asian one. when a white shooter do such things, people focus on gun control. when a racialized, coloured individual does the same thing, people focus on potential racial retaliation, on top of the usual gun ownerships talk, of course. the act of school shooting is an individual issue. it has nothing to do with race. it seems that the social norm is that when an ethnic person commits a crime, it is automatically a lot worse than it is when a non-ethnic person does it. the society implies a very distinctive boundary between "us" and "them". the idea of "otherness", be it racial otherness, cultural otherness, or anything, is colonizing and oppressive as it indirectly sets up some of a hierarchical relation. i find these things are very problematic.

Virginia Tech University Massacre

how do i describe how fortunate i am to have been a canadian? school shootings are extremely rare in canada. for us canadians, it is nearly impossible to even see a gun in a store, not to mention to be able to purchase one. however, it is a totally different story in the united states. recently, a senior student from virginia tech was able to get his hands on guns and shot thirty two innocent human beings like he was a pro with previous training. if this is not the time to really fix the gun ownership policy, when would it ever be?

i was watching a video clip of a news interviewed conducted by ctv and the criminologists discussed how they could prevent such tragic stories from happening in the future. based on their arguments, i believe that there are many constructive policies that could and should be implemented to stop such crimes from taking places again. however, everything comes with a price, and in this case, the price is personal privacy.

apparently, many people saw warning signs in the shooter cho seung-hui long ago. for example, one of his teachers read some of his writings where he wrote about disturbing stories and scenes about murders, violence, revenge, and so on. the teacher reported to the school, but not the place or the authority, about how this boy needed counselling. he never saw a counsellor, however, and no one kept pressing the button. it was too bad. also, other students pointed out that cho had an imaginary girlfriend and often stalked people. these were all very obvious signs, and yet nothing was done to fix the problems.

what if the teacher had reported to the police? of course, that would have been against the law. cho couldn't have been arrested without committing any crime. it looked like the cops would have to wait until he really committed one and shot thirty two innocent people, eh? we should change this system. whenever a citizen has any suspicious behaviour or disturbing thoughts, the authority should be given the right to monitor him/her. no arrests should be necessary, but at least some sort of surveillance would be helpful, in my opinion. in this case, for example, the police could have kept track of cho's behaviours and would have been able to detect immediately after cho purchased the guns. cho also wrote threatening letters before the shooting. the police would have been able to pick that up if cho's teacher and classmates had been allowed to file reports.

i understand that this deals with privacy issues, but is it really worth it to sacrifice thirty two innocent lives over one criminal? think about that. don't let those young students and the brave professors pass away for nothing. their deaths should serve us as a warning sign. these stories aren't just "stories". they are straight-up real in our faces. the victim could have been you and me if we had been in a different place and a different time!

德國女市長拍攝性感照片招致黨內不滿

Occasionally I like to get in touch with my Chinese side. I consider it a gift to be so fluent in both languages. It would be a waste to abandon any one of them. The title of my post, in English, means 'Germany’s Female Mayor's Posing for Sexy Photo Shoot Raises Complaints within the Party.' from news coverage like this, I've noticed the gender ideology embedded in the media, particularly mainstream news (Gabriele Pauli).

A female mayor in Germany, named Gabriele Pauli, recently showed her face in a German fashion magazine. Politicians of her party have made a huge deal out of such exposure and been massively filing complaints. The Chinese journalist specifically relates the female mayor to the word "trouble" in the very first sentence of the news piece. Apparently, the politicians, whom I would assume to be mostly male, think likewise, believing that Pauli should have never accepted such invitation from the fashion magazine. While many Germany politicians deem Pauli's behaviour inappropriate, Pauli was in fact very pleased when she was given the opportunity to pose as a model. Other politicians criticize that Pauli appeared to be "too sexy" in the magazine with those leather black gloves and stylish hairstyle with heavy, short bangs in front. However, Pauli disagrees and claims the photo-shoot to be purely a piece of art work.

I have always been highly critical of how women are portrayed in news media discourses. This news piece about Pauli is not the first news story that reveals and reinforces sexist judgments about women and their subordinate status within a male-dominated society. If the mayor who posed for Park Avenue fashion magazine had been male, the story would have been framed in a completely different way. There would have been fewer sexual implications drawn to his exposure in a mass consumer, or "low-art", magazine. References to inappropriateness would not have been made. Instead, there would have been positive remarks on the male mayor. He would have still been labelled as sexy except without the negative connotations. Nevertheless, today we have a 49-year-old female mayor, who is still able to hold on to the tail of her youth; yet somehow the news manages to find a means of expression to attack her, construct her as sexually available, and frame the story as if she were eager to expose her sexuality, when in fact, she shows very little of skin or flesh in the magazine.

Stuart Allan writes in his book "News Culture" that many journalists deploy such gender stereotypes just for a bit of fun, but they are often unaware that they are contributing to the ideological reproduction of patriarchal social relations. Many feminist critics have been making an effort to initiate and promote a conceptual shift of how women are being portrayed in news discourse. News framing like this piece about Pauli raises issues of representation in terms of the hegemonic gendering of news as a masculinized form of discourse.

Bush Calls Dems "Irresponsible" on Iraq

i love how house majority whip james clyburn calls bush a cow boy in the article "bush calls dems 'irresponsible' on iraq'". there is no particular reason why i am amused by this statement other than that i find it very true....

the american government is running out of money to support the war, eh? their financial difficulty reminds me of what professor martin laba said in lecture the other day. he said that bush made a pubic statement encouraging all american citizens to go out of their houses to shop. his reason was that if americans did not participate in consumerism, then the terrorists would have won. i suppose i see a correlation between america's economy and how active these supposedly-citizens-but-now-consumers are, but still, he seems to attempt to conceal the seriousness and level of damage of the iraq war on not just america but the entire world by relating the war to shopping. the act of shopping is often taken light-heartedly as it is a form of casual leisure and entertainment. once bush puts "shopping" in the picture, the war does not seem so awful anymore, at least on the surface. while trying to mask his so-called "cow-body style showdown", he reinforces the capitalist socio-economic system and reproduces relations of social inequalities. how convenient! when there are innocent people dying every day in the middle east, the capitalists in america are getting more affluent and purchasing more louise vuitton, as encouraged by their president!

i don't want to say consumption is the root of such evilness because it is not. bush employs consumption as a means to legitimate his idea. however, perhaps if everyone cuts down shopping, it could be an act of taking a political stand - anti war? it's an interesting perspective, isn't it?