003 - to come?

32 students are dead. 32 students, probably my age, are dead.

It's really horrible, but as soon as rumors started circulating about who the shooter was in this whole Virginia Tech massacre the one thing I've been looking for in all the news reports was the shooter's ethnicity. This attack did scare me, but on a few different levels. It scared me to know that any person could do it, it scared me to know that it happened on a university campus, and it scared me to know that if the shooter was in fact of Asian descent it would set us back to the atmosphere after the Chai Vang incident.

Now that he has been identified as being of C(K)orean descent, I'm scared that there will be a backlash against the APA community and that we as a community will not be ready to combat it properly. So much of our tactic against discrimination is to yell "Stupid White People" amongst ourselves and call it a day. We need to learn how to use our own rhetoric to respond to possible attacks, even on the conversational level. We also need to be able to separate ourselves from the attack and not find ourselves inadvertedly supporting a murderer.

I'm scared that this will further the xenophobia we already have to deal with, the "go home" or "immigrants not wanted". I'm scared that this one event will become a reason to toughen up on immigration and to put us back to a small scale post-Pearl Harbor. We will become the face of evil of the week...how are we supposed to deal with that if we can barely combat idiot DJs and t-shirt companies?

I especially worry about the C(K)orean-American population back home. It's the East Coast so it hits even harder...his face, the face of an Asian person and therefore the face of all Asian people, will be forever associated with 32 dead.