"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.