backlash
Virginia Tech Koreans— and let’s face it, members of Virginia Tech’s entire Asian community— are being served a double helping of tragedy now that the racist backlash to the shootings has begun.
Young-je Ko told Salon’s Joe Eaton that “Korean students have been e-mailing and calling each other since the release of [the shooter's] name this morning. Ko said he wanted to attend today’s convocation at 2 pm, where President Bush was scheduled to speak, but friends warned him against it. ‘People said don’t attend because it could be a bad situation.’”
Ko took that advice and went home with his sister, Kim, also a V-tech student, to Annandale, Va., near Washington, where their parents live. “My parents were so worried,” Kim said. “When I left my dorm, I felt like the white kids were staring at me.”
If there’s an Arab safehouse on campus, erected post 9/11, maybe campus Asians could settle in there for a while…
Related note: It’s been confirmed: Wayne Chiang didn’t do it.
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have there been any incidents demonstrating racist backlash to the shootings? all this post discusses is how asians on campus fear a backlash, so the phrase “now that the racist backlash to the shootings has begun” is a little misleading. of course there are the unfortunate and ignorant comments on right-wing blogs about how korean men have a certain propensity to rage and violence, but that isn’t what’s motivating asians to leave campus (presumably)
It’s the right-wing blogs that I take as the “beginning” of a backlash as well as the widely reported but un-addressed anxiety among the Korean community at V-Tech. The hate language, the anxiety in the air, that’s how it begins. How will it play out: as individual violence, cultural stereotyping, social discrimination, physical intimidation, destruction of property, racial profiling? Likely not extra-legal renditions to torture centers or internment at camps in the Sierras, but who can deny at this point the American history of race paranoia in the aftermath of violence? I thought that, among the Korean people interviewed this week who had decided to leave campus, it was pretty clear they were leaving for fear not of another random alienated shooter but of racist reprisal.