The Ethnic Slant
I was astonished to read an editorial on MSNBC regarding the Virgina Tech massacre with the header: “Loving the US and Hating It Too.” The deck reads: “For South Koreans, the story of Cho Seung-Hui underscores a nation’s ambivalent relationship with America.”
Oh, really? And exactly how does a mass shooting in America underscore how “ambivalent” South Koreans feel about Americans?
But behind the Korean public’s fascination with the tale of a native son who made good before making spectacularly bad, was the ambivalence of the country toward the United States. Koreans have long had a love-hate relationship with America. Young people there routinely take part in protests against the American presence in their country and what they consider its unilateralism, but at the same time see the country as a true land of opportunity.
So, South Koreans look to America for opportunity, but also harbor anti-American sentiment and this has exactly what to do with a mass murderer? You mean that it’s just a short step or even a short leap between protesting American policy and . . . killing innocent students?
I suppose the visceral reaction I had is akin to the one felt by those who believe in the right to bear arms in the US, or even those who were annoyed once again to learn that video games were being blamed for Cho’s actions. One report even blamed the movies. And I, the occasional gamer and movie goer, was similarly vexed to watch what are generally harmless forms of entertainment once again considered the cause for a psychopath’s actions. But the above MSNBC editorial struck a raw nerve in me.
Is it really right to look at the deranged actions of one person and place it and him in the context of his community? Do we really need to learn that 1) Cho killed a bunch of people and 2) Koreans like to protest America? Are these things naturally linked in some sort of logical manner? Perhaps so, if we read the journalism that details how Koreans don’t “talk much” to their children, pushing them, instead, to succeed. (Oh, those cold Asian parents).
Cho’s isolation as a youth may have been exacerbated by the strains of the Korean immigrant life, sociologists said. Parents, working one or two jobs to provide for their families, often have little time to spend with their children, let alone have meaningful talks with them. Cultural stigmas make it difficult to deal with the mental illness or emotional stress of a child.
And then I got to thinking, when, in reading the analysis of other spectacular crimes in a magazine article have I been encouraged to view a person’s motives in the context of their culture? Obviously 9/11 comes to mind. I, along with hundreds of thousands of other people, read books, listened to NPR, read the papers in some sort of desperate attempt to “understand.” And along the way, there were more than a few glib references to the Middle East as some sort of understandable generator of violence. As though there weren’t more to the country than that.
In the case of Timothy McVeigh, I don’t remember anyone writing about his “community” and how it had primed him to take the actions he did. Instead, I remember reading how he was deranged, and which philosophies influenced him. In other words, he acted “alone” and out of personal resentments. No one tried to examine his religious beliefs, the socio-economic group in which he grew up, or his race.
A long time ago in college, I remember reading an excellent book by Rian Malan titled “My Traitor’s Heart” in which a South African journalist tried to uncover the motives behind black on white violence in his country. One observation stuck with me from that reading; Malan recounts how, when visiting the family of a murderer, the family itself claimed to have always found the murderer to be an odd person. In other words, he didn’t fit in their community.
This is a point of view which you can also find in the many articles appearing after the Virginia Tech tragedy.
“From the beginning, he wouldn’t answer me,” Kim Yang-soon, Cho’s great aunt, told AP Television News on Thursday in South Korea. Cho “didn’t talk. Normally sons and mothers talk. There was none of that for them. He was very cold.”
After hearing Mr. Cho read one of his sinister poems in a creative-writing class, dozens of his classmates did not show up the next time the class met, so as to avoid the young man, according to the teacher. This is what most human social groups do, when they collectively register a threat: they move away, socially and often literally.
To me, this kind of insight is far more helpful. Since I know what it’s like to belong to a culture with very strong community ties (Japan), I know that feeling of wanting to take responsibility when a member of the tribe, so to speak, goes astray. But to turn around and examine the community as having caused the person to act violently, strikes me as ignorant and somewhat elitist. Is individuality only afforded to wealthy nations and their criminals, but not to everyone else who, in their poverty and ignorance, act in a Borg-like collective fashion?
I’m definitely a far less helpful person when I’ve had to ride the subway in the summer at rush hour for weeks on end. It affects me as a person, and I’ve no doubt that if you take this kind of pressure to an extreme degree, some people will be pressed to do things they wouldn’t otherwise. But that’s some people. In the case of Cho, it seems he was or became such a person. Others have suffered the pains of immigration and haven’t gone on to commit mass murder.
And yet, I am also left with this dark observation. I spent the first Christmas after 9/11 in the UK. This was long before the Iraq war started, mind you. And I was stunned to hear just how much anti-American sentiment was voiced that winter. There I was, token American, all ears for anyone who wanted to air grievances. It struck me as a very dark thing to learn–while many decried the attacks, they also sort of “understood.” It’s not like I hadn’t know that anti-American sentiment existed. I was very unsettled to hear, however, how much more vocal it had become after the attack. Perhaps this is the kind of viewpoint the author of the MSNBC article was taking. But without a little more context, it’s hard to tell.
Until I hear something that persuades me otherwise, I’m sticking to the view that
this shooting isn’t some kind of reflection of South Korean attitudes toward America; it’s a mental health issue, made more complex by Cho’s immigrant status.
As for the Korean collective grief and shame over Cho’s actions–that’s the kind of responsibility a community minded culture takes when one of their own has done something that they themselves find apalling. It is not, in other words, an act which “underscores” the deep seeded, private wish fulfillment of any sane person.
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that in ancient china if you were REALLY fat that meant you were...
omg i feel so bad for a that monkey help it some one plzzzz
It’s disappointing but not too surprising. As you mention, Arabs & Muslims have to put up with this stuff every single day.
April 27th, 2007 at 12:45 pmFortunately for Koreans and other asians, I’m pretty confident that some Korean newspapers’ fears of an ethnic backlash are ill-founded. I’m sure some people have been the target of some snide “joking” remarks, but asians are still just too far down on the American fear-o-meter.
Hmm…SK is not dissimilar to Japan in its stalker-like love/hate obsession with Big Daddy. Must be a teenage rebellion kind of thing. On the one hand, Big Daddy saved both countries from the Soviet-imposed dirt-eating fate of N. Korea. One the other hand, both Japan and SK have this Volkisch, racial superiority thing going on, and when a person deemed to be a member of the Volk, be it Cho or Sagawa-the-Cannibal, freaks out, it embarrasses folks whose national identities are bound up in sophistic notions of racial homogeneity.
April 27th, 2007 at 12:48 pmI wonder if we’ll ever know? It is frustrating that we drop two A-bombs on Japan and they love us, but we *totally* save a country from communism, spending our own lives and money to prop up their nation*, and they hate us. I agree though, this probably has nothing to with Cho, and if he were white or Mexican or whatever, writing dangerous and scary crap, he would have been in the same boat, avoided.
Still, it’s fun to be able to bring up issues like “apology” with Koreans, like they’re always doing to Japan. I plan to keep harping for 75 years or more.
*Hmm, I guess they’ve paid us back for saving them by animating the Simpsons for us.
April 27th, 2007 at 1:07 pmMarie, I don’t see eye to eye with you on the motives of the media in their handling of this.
I don’t think they’re focus on his ethnicity is meant to brand Koreans or be racist.
I think their focus on his ethnicity is a.) to find an “complex” angle to write about that will sell more papers, and most likely, b.) they are trying to be “culturally sensitive”. Awww, the poor little guy, he was an immigrant and under a lot of pressure. That kind of thing.
Sounds like the opposite of what their end result is but trust me, American media is almost too liberal for it’s own good. Instead of saying, “This kid was a deranged retarded lunatic”, they want to “engage in heartfelt debate”. I’m sure you get my drift.
Regarding the rest of the world’s hatred of America: Who cares. I don’t. Nor should I.
April 27th, 2007 at 1:17 pm“I think their focus on his ethnicity is a.) to find an “complex” angle to write about that will sell more papers, and most likely, b.) they are trying to be “culturally sensitive”. Awww, the poor little guy, he was an immigrant and under a lot of pressure. That kind of thing.”
Possible. And if so, still terribly, terribly clumsily done. And that’s why I was surprised MSNBC ran the article.
To quote Han Solo: “I care!” I just do.
Thank you for replying and bringing up another angle. I’m actually always happy to hear another point of view even if it differs from mine (when politely executed). It makes me think!
April 27th, 2007 at 1:20 pmGenerally speaking, this was a very good post, with one minor exception. Without wishing to go into it very much, I believe that we cannot quite ignore the culture from which the 9.11 perpetrators came in trying to understand their motives. One cannot ignore the role that Islamism played then and continues to play now in fanning the flames of terrorism. They differ from Cho and McVeigh in that they were a group of like-minded men committed to an ideology of hate.
April 27th, 2007 at 2:25 pmIt’s strange. In the first days after the shootings, I did not hear *one* mention of Cho’s ethnicity as a focus point of discussion in the media. Not one. And none of the students and faculty ever mentioned it (beyond the obvious). Because, I believe, people knew it didn’t have much to do with the fact that he was monumentally nuts.
The first focus was on mental health issues, followed lamely behind by gun control issues. Now that the story’s getting old, some hacks now have to resort to the more fringe-y aspects of this event like the MSNBC thing.
Although when the Dawson CEGEP (my alma mater) shooting occured last year in Montreal, nobody made much of the fact the shooter was Sikh until later, when a writer for a major newspaper seemed to want to wrap up the three terrible educational shootings in the city (14 female engineering students at the Université de Montréal killed in ‘89 by a guy who hated women, an angry disgruntled soon-to-be-fired engineering professor at Concordia who killed four faculty members in ‘92 and Dawson) by saying the killers were terribly burdened by being ethic or linguistic minorities in a very French province… . I seem to recall a lot of letters to the editor pointing out that the UdM shooter *was* a Francophone, the engineering professor (should he have been sane) could have gotten a job easily enough out of the province if he chose and the Dawson shooter was just another very angry-at-everything young man who lived in his parent’s basement (which happens all over the world). But they were all crazy.
So this MSNBC stuff just reads like news backwash… .
April 27th, 2007 at 2:34 pmI am of Betty Woo’s opinion. Feelings of anger, envy or grudge are everywhere in human society.
And if a very crazy person had a big weapon in his hand… Very simple.
April 28th, 2007 at 2:16 amI recall a riot by African American in LA or 9.11 or a riot in France raised by ethno minorities whose family background were mostly post colonial immigrants. People who were breeding group violence are Africans or Muslims so far. (Personally I have nothing against them.) Well, Korean or Asian people are not supposed to commit group violence in the west.
As of the case of Cho, the cause of his act seemed not much of his ethnicity but of his personal mental disorder or personality collapse. Therefore I couldn’t help thinking about gun control.
I understand some of you don’t want to be mentioned on this issue. But as long as gun control is undergoing lots of obstacles in America, it’s hard to give up obtaining guns to defend yourself and you will never bring it to the end. American have to live with fears, since there is always an exceptional mad shooter whom your society cannot completely eliminate. I think things are not that bad outside (North) America. It’s really sorry for the situation in America.
April 28th, 2007 at 9:38 pmVin. Do you really feel the “rest of the world hates America”?. Because of course you are completely wrong, the rest of the world can’t agree on simple things like coffee/tea, wine/beer, how could it agree on something complex, like how to feel about such a big country as the US?.
And in fact many many countries love and admire and respect America, or facets of it anyway. Disliking a fault your friend endulges himself in, doesn’t mean you hate him, far from it.
When an American says what you just did, what is really being said is ” Any criticism of us is invalid, I will ignore it all by claiming, outragously, that it equates with the rest of the world simply hating us”.
And I hate hearing it from my friends, it ought to be beneath your diginity to claim.
(Now you can indugle yourself some more, if you like, and say America doesn’t need friends.)
April 29th, 2007 at 12:23 pm(Now you can indugle yourself some more, if you like, and say America doesn’t need friends.)
Of course America needs friends. That’s why it upsets people like me to see it (her?) doing things that are so counterproductive. It’s deeply upsetting. And, again, like Han Solo said, “I care.”
April 29th, 2007 at 12:28 pmRYO
Plenty of Islamic people in the world, that don’t commit terrorism. So maybe it is something else, specific to the cultural or governmental structures of countries like Saudi or Somalia. And the islamic part of the terrorism is simply the fact that everyone there IS islamic. Pretty hard to come up with any other kind of terrorist there, ain’t no-one else there.
I think the fact that they are dictatorships, is far more to the point. obl is first and foremost obsessed with gaining control of SA, so he can kick out the US troops there. And he can not do it by voting out the people controling SA, can he.
Countries shouldn’t support dictatorships, should they. Especially countries born supposedly resisting dictatorial tyranny. “No taxation without representation” ( for US. )
April 29th, 2007 at 12:49 pmWell much as people here might think otherwise, I am Americas true friend Marie Mockett. Many many of my countrymen are also.
In my country, we are pretty pacifistic and really mostly despise rightwing sentiments and solutions, we want all our soldiers wearing blue hats only.
But when the USA was attacked, our SOCIALIST government supported by its GREEN/Communist minor party announced in our Commons, that we would stand by America to the absolute limit of our strength. ONE member of parliament (Violently green anti-big buisiness bloke called Macdonald) gave a very brief, very soft speech along the lines of “Bloody hell, what do they expect, supressing peoples left and right, anything for their business connections, grumble grump” and because it is our tradition , they heard him out in silence. Then the entire House voted “aye”.
And not because we fear you, because we don’t. Not because we wanted to curry favour, because if we did, why’d we spend 25 years saying “no nuke ships, mate” with its massively damaging punishments by our friend, the USA?. And certainly not because we think you will always be there for us, because actually we are aware you won’t ever do anything really dangerous, even for a mate, look how begruding you were with your number one pal Thatcher, during the Falklands.
We helped you because we are YOUR mates, and saw our duty. EXACTLY why we refused to help in Iraq, why help you friend shoot himself in the foot? he can handle it much better alone, less damage all round.
I am the mate of a better America than the present one, and am simply waiting for it to come back to itself. My mate does NOT justify torture. Doesn’t fire artillary into cities because a few criminals fire rifles OUT of them. Doesn’t take a handful of weak lies to the UN, to justify a war it has already decided on.
When you hear no critcism from your friends, you’ll know you have none left.
April 29th, 2007 at 1:08 pmThere are limits to the degree to which we are allowed to discuss politics on Japundit. So, Tigger, I’ll just say that I’m glad the US has friends . . . and mates appealing to the best of our natures.
April 29th, 2007 at 2:03 pmMarie, as a person who spent an inordinate amount of time obsessed with Star Wars (in the pre-prequel days, of course), I must correct you on one thing: it was Luke Skywalker who said “I care”, not Han Solo.
Princess Leia Organa: Your friend is quite a mercenary. I wonder if he really cares about anything. Or anybody.
Luke Skywalker (lamely): I care.
I’m tempted to continue quoting this scene, because it’s awesome, but I’m going to restrain myself :>
As far as the article goes, I’ve been thinking about MSNBC’s slant ever since I originally read your post on your personal blog. It struck me then that they were speaking to the general lack of awareness of other cultures in America. Perhaps they were trying to frame it that way because they assumed people would automatically think it anyway.
Did you know that before I randomly took a Japanese culture course in college, I had only a vague idea of where Japan was, and I didn’t know what kind of government it had? For that matter, I was only marginally aware of the atomic bombings–in fact, I didn’t realize there was more than one! When I went to Hiroshima in 2001, I was afraid that the city would be a barren landscape and that I would get radiation poisoning.
I also didn’t know there were two Koreas, or anything about the Hong Kong/China situation. And it’s only been in recent years that I’ve figured out where places like Malaysia are.
I was a good student and got mostly As and some Bs throughout my secondary education. And yet I was completely ignorant until I started making an effort to learn things beyond what I had been taught in school.
I’m afraid there are many Americans in my situation.
So when you look at it that way, of course the writer of an article about a person from another country is going to want to say something about that country’s culture.
Of course, I heartily agree with you that it was done sloppily and without regard to the danger of stereotyping.
April 30th, 2007 at 4:00 amOMG. I’m soooo embarassed.
And me, a Star Wars fan. Owner of a “Revenge of the Jedi” T-shirt no less. Devoted player of KOTOR.
Of course it was Luke and not Han.
I was always so devastated when Leia went off with that nerfherder instead of the cute boy with the Force!
Anyway, thanks for the really carefully thought out comment. And you and Vin may be right–this may well have been an article that attempted to give some cultural reference for folks who had no reference point in the first place.
April 30th, 2007 at 4:23 amKOTOR !.
What really upset me about that game, was all the lectures I got about how easy it would be for me to go Darkside. I was a tower of strength for the Light, and still had to listen *yack yack yack* to her telling me to watch out. VERY tempting to give her a mouthful of knuckles . . . . .
Such fun the force Presence skill, see the baddies, fly to the attack 
April 30th, 2007 at 3:16 pmHey, at least you got to kiss her!
I couldn’t go Dark. No way. Couldn’t stand the thought of killing off Mission and Zalbar. I did see the deleted DarkSide ending done by Team Gizka, though, and thought it would have been the best dramatically. But I wouldn’t have been able to do what was necessary to get to that point, had they saved that third ending.
April 30th, 2007 at 11:24 pmWe have something in common then. My nephews (my excuse for buying the xbox in the first place, not because I am a game addict, oh no . .. . . ) think there is something wrong with me, that I can’t do dark.
I play a war game, Yanks verses Nazis, in a sort of league. On the occasions I can’t insist I am the American commander, many many cases of friendly fire happen amoungst the german troops and artillary gets called in on the germans command posts TWICE a game, instead of once.
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August 3rd, 2008 at 2:41 pm