News

May 4, 2007, Danbury News-Times

By Steven Choi

A few weeks have passed since Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people at Virginia Tech, and many of us are still dealing with the shock, horror and grief. As a Korean American, I see in this controversy signs for continuing concern—but also reasons for hope.

I share with many other Korean and Asian Americans a strong sense of unease about the media’s coverage of the killer. Immediately following the incident, Cho was cast as an “Asian male.” When his identity was finally known, he was then labeled a “resident alien” and a “South Korean national”—leading to a torrent of anti-immigrant, anti-foreigner and anti-Asian sentiments in the blogosphere.

It was only when we saw Cho’s videos that we realized that, culturally, this man was more American than Korean, more a product of Centerville than of Seoul.

But questions remain—and should be asked—as to why the news media wanted to put this killer so quickly into the “perpetual foreigner” box that Asian Americans have been forced into for so much of our history in this country.

One explanation is that Koreans, more than a hundred years after we first set foot on American soil, continue to be virtually invisible in the public eye. The rare media coverage or pop culture depictions of Korean Americans tend to focus on tired old stereotypes of hard-working immigrant shopkeepers or over-achieving, socially maladjusted students. When groups are so invisible and so ignored, it becomes easy to take a single individual’s actions and paint an entire group with that coarse brush.

I am also concerned about the fact that Koreans all over the world have apologized for Cho’s actions out of some sense of shame or guilt. But for what exactly do Korean Americans need to apologize? In doing so, we send exactly the wrong signal by reinforcing the idea that ethnicity had a causal relationship with Cho’s decision.

Korean Americans bear no more blame, no more responsibility than anyone else in this country. As a community, we should share others’ grief and sorrow but we should not share blame with Cho, in any shape or fashion.

If we have seen any positive in the aftermath of the Cho killings, it has been the lack of a backlash that so many of us feared. As a staff attorney at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, I was prepared for incidents of hate violence by those who would scapegoat our community for Cho’s acts.

Many Korean Americans remembered the 1992 Los Angeles civil unrest when many of us felt scapegoated for wider social and racial problems, and the staff here remembered the innocent Muslim and South Asian American victims of hate crimes in the wake of 9/11.

But to our relief, there has been a lack of any serious backlash against Korean Americans.

This is not insignificant. It is a tentative sign of progress in this country, and one I hope we can build on.

Despite the absence of retaliation, we still see signs that hate continues to flow beneath the surface of race relations in this country.

We must remember that more work needs to be done—by the media, by all of our communities—before we can be assured that no such backlash will hit any community should another tragedy strike.

Steven Choi is staff attorney at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (www.aaldef.org), a national civil rights organization, and director of the Korean Community Law Project. He can be reached at pmproj@progressive.org.

© Steven Choi