The Racial Backlash Begins

I know this issue has already been mentioned in the other thread but I think this issue will start to balloon and deserves its own thread.

From Newsweek.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18178194/site/newsweek/

Braced for Backlash
Korean-Americans fear that hatred toward the Virginia Tech killer will spill over into their community—and fuel negative typecasting.

Web Exclusive
By Jessica Bennett and Noelle Chun
Newsweek
Updated: 2 hours, 23 minutes ago
April 18, 2007 - The bodies had barely been removed when the racial epithets started pouring in. Cho Seung-Hui, the 23-year-old identified as the killer of 32 on the Virginia Tech campus, may have lived in the state since his elementary school days, but to the bigots in the blogosphere it was his origins in Korea that mattered most. "Koreans are the most hotheaded and macho of East Asians," wrote one unnamed commentator on the Sepia Mutiny blog. "They are also sick and tired of losing their Korean girlfriends to white men with an Asian fetish."

The vitriol of comments like these has shocked America's Korean community, leaving it braced for a backlash and scrambling to control the damage caused by distorted stereotypes. In South Korea—where government officials feared that the incident could further sour relations with Washington—the foreign ministry issued a statement saying that it hoped the tragedy would not provoke "racial prejudice or confrontation." Inside the United States, social-network users set up online forums with names like "Don't Hate Koreans Because of Cho Seung-Hui" and "Cho Seung-Hui Does NOT Represent Asians." Some spoke of launching a fund-raising drive for the families of those who died in the most deadly school shooting in U.S. history. But many fear these measures won't be enough to blunt the hatred. "In the wake of 9/11, we saw so many racially charged incidents that I don't think it's out of the question to suspect this [prejudice] will happen," says Aimee Baldillo, a spokeswoman for the Asian American Justice Center, a Washington-based civil-rights group. "The lesson we learned then was that individuals are going to get targeted on the basis of a perceived race or ethnicity with connection to a suspect."

An estimated 1.4 million people of Korean descent live in the United States. Badillo says her organization has already received reports—still unconfirmed—of several crimes of retribution against the community. Online, chat rooms throbbed with hate. "Take that s--t back to your own nation," declared one participant on the social networking site Facebook. Not all the comments were negative: 23-year-old student and tech consultant Eugene Kim told NEWSWEEK that about half of the online commentators on Faceook "are saying how an individual shouldn't be generalized to the entire Asian community." Others, however, were making remarks like "This guy [Cho] comes to our country on a visa; he's not even a citizen." Kim, himself an ethnic Korean, says he has already been the butt of several jokes: "One guy at work said, 'You guys better be real nice to Kim. Make sure he doesn't get stressed out so he doesn't come in and shoot everyone.'"

Other Asians in the United States also experienced mixed emotions when it was confirmed that Cho was indeed Korean. Vietnamese-American writer Andrew Lam says he had held his breath waiting to learn the killer's identity, hoping his community wouldn't shoulder collective blame for the acts of an individual. "Let it be some other Asian!" was the prayer among many Asian-American communities, Lam says. Other Asians meanwhile, said they fear a spillover effect would extend beyond Koreans. "The things that some of you are saying scare the s—t out of me," wrote one Facebook contributor. "I know you all remember the stories of [turbaned] Sikhs getting beaten up after 9/11. Can we show some sense for once?"

Korean-related Web sites, meanwhile, came under intense scrutiny. The site for the national Korean American Student Association, which carried forum postings from alumni expressing support for Virginia Tech, on Tuesday morning went offline with no explanation by the afternoon. At Virginia Tech itself, the Korean Student Association site was shut down; a message in Korean said it had been closed temporarily because of too much server activity. Seung-Woo Lee, the head of the Virginia Tech association, told NEWSWEEK he had received calls from many of the several hundred ethnic Korean students on campus telling him they felt "horrified and scared." Several parents had already come to their campus to take their children home, he said

Cho was clearly a troubled young man, whose motives for the rampage may never be known. But scholars like Hugo Schwyzer, a history and gender studies professor at Pasadena City College in Los Angeles-where 35 percent of the college population is of Asian descent—says he expects to see some "classically damaging" typecasts of Asian males as socially awkward and introverted, as more information about Cho emerges. Fears are running particularly high in Los Angeles, home to one of the nation's largest Korean-American communities. Many residents there remember the violence during the Rodney King race riots that ravaged the city 15 years ago, and fear the possibility of becoming targets again. "We were once the hatred target of black Americans," says L.A. businessman Kim Yong Gi. "I hope we don't become the target of all Americans this time."

"The Korean community as a whole is in shock," says John Cho, the Los Angeles-based assistant editor of the Korean Times (and no relation to the gunman). "Something like this has never happened to us." Cho is especially sensitive to concerns about stereotyping—and the pressures facing young men like Cho. "When you first move here, it is a challenge to learn English, to make friends. In Korea, we are all taught to act as part of a group, to be part of bigger group. But here, people are taught to be individuals and to shine on an individual basis. That's culturally hard for us." One of the additional pressures facing Koreans, Cho notes, is the belief that members of the group achieve disproportionately high success rates. "The Korean community is known for overachieving," says Cho. Maybe [the killer] had pressures on him that he couldn't settle because he wasn't in [his home] community." Cho's newspaper is among the institutions trying to counter negative perceptions of the community. But even as Cho tries to explain the typecasting, he is aware of the irony. "What's worrying is that if a white person had done this," he muses, "no one would call up the white community and ask if they were going to be stereotyped."

With BJ Lee in Seoul, Tara Weingarten in Los Angeles and Lynn Waddell in Blacksburg, Va.

 

In the article it said that there have been several comments:

 

I don't feel relieved that he wasn't Chinese and don't seen any reason to distance myself from Koreans. I don't think any of us Asians should feel responsible for this.

 

Not exactly true. Canadian cities are about as ethnically diverse as ours and some like Vancouver more so. Singapore is ethnically and religiously diverse with large Tamil, and Malaysian minorities, in fact the country has 4 official languanges. Ethnic diversity doesn't lead to crime.