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I’m sort of breaking a promise to myself by writing this, since all the talk about the recent unpleasantness at that school in Virginia is really part of the problem.
But, predictably enough (at least for those with blackened, cynical hearts), the Asian-American community is the target of new social pressures. Which is a clinically detached way of saying that things like this are going to be more common, at least for a while: a Chinese-American student (apparently, a pretty bright one – an honors student) has been taken out of Clements High School in Fort Bend, Texas, and prevented from graduating because he drew a map of the school building and put it in a computer.
I’m not making that up. He and his buddies were logging onto their computers and playing games using the school as a setting.
I’m also not making up the fact that, once police found the public server with the map of the school on it, they searched the boy’s room and found a hammer, which they confiscated as a weapon. There were actual swords in his room, too, but it seems like those were decorative. And, as far as I can tell, not actually involved in any mapmaking or videogame-playing activities. (Read the comments at the bottom of that last link.)
These are, of course, high-pressure times – the computer mapmaker is joining terrorists webcomic makers in the hot water of suspicion. But still, you can definitely see a kind of public anxiety centering on ethnic (Asian) origins here… as well as some kindhearted public gestures on behalf of the Korean community. It’s kind of heartwarming to see this kind of fundraising, on one level, but it’s also a gesture that I can’t really imagine seeing with other ethnic communities… like, say, the one in which I grew up. The one in which my children both are and are not members.
It wouldn’t be necessary for us, says the whisper in my ear.
People are idiots. So one whacked-out loner, who happened to be Korean, is causing a backlash. In a way, it’s not much different than the thought crime overreactions that happened after the Columbine incident. Of course, it’s easier to discriminate against Asians because they’re an easily identifiable minority. It would have been harder to discriminate against all white male teenagers back then. Not that I see it as any justification for singling out Asians for any reason. I say ‘Asians’ and not ‘Koreans’, because Schmuck Average couldn’t tell the difference between one Asian or another, anyway. Reminds me of the stories I heard of idiots wigging out at Indians (as in people from India) after 9/11, thinking they were Arabic. But America doesn’t ned any improvements in its education system, no sir.