The following is taken straight from one of my friend’s blog. I was going to let this topic stew and post my thoughts on this heightened racial tension I’ve been feeling in the air and my other Asian-American friends are experiencing as well. However, Doan had more passion to colour his words and thoughts and I thought I posted his writings instead. I find it provocative in the right way.
Spit your game
Talk your shit
Grab your gat
Call your cliques
Squeeze your clip
Hit the right one
-Notorious B.I.G.
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I keep forgetting how rare yellow-skinned folk are in America. I’ve grown up in a family of them and have always gravitated towards them. At least, that is how most other Americans see us. We are them–we’re the mysterious Others, from the far side of the Island–and when a non-Asian looks at us, interacts with us, they’re constantly making assumptions about us. (After all, everyones got expectations, preconceived notions and stereotypes to inform them about the world.) Reality be damned, when someone non-Asian meets me for the first time, they assume I’m a passive, mathematical robot with a two-inch dick.
What’s the kicker–what’s awesome–is that because of how rare we are in America, I get to represent my race. That’s right, without even taking a foreign service exam or sweating through exhaustive interviews, from the day I was born, I have always and will always be an ambassador for my race and culture. My every action and decision will reflect on my family, my culture, and my people (and lemme tell you, despite the fact that I grew up in America and can speak English with greater facility than 99.99% of Americans, that does not mean that my people are American. When someone asks where I’m from, Houston, Texas is not good enough. What they mean is, what dog-eating, yellow country are you from?). So it fucking pisses me off that whenever I get mad now, people make jokes–watch out before Doan goes VTech on us!–and when Seung Cho appears on CNN, there is always someone nearby who will comment, “Hey look, Doan, your cousin’s on TV!”
“Fuck you, dipshit, I ever given you shit about your cousin shooting up Columbine!?!” After repeating myself a few times this week, I think the other soldiers have learned to back the fuck off of me. But then, just the other day, I heard that same line all the way across the chow hall, and when I turned to smite the offender, I saw that he was ribbing on the Asian guy at his table.
This whole week, some of the other guys in my platoon started ending every line they said to me with, “That’s because you’re Asian, Doan,” or “You can’t do that; you’re Asian!” You’ve gotta have a thick skin in the Army–after all, you’re working with knuckleheads who signed up to get shot at in distant lands for less than $30,000 a year. And it’s a balancing act–not drawing fire your way while keeping others from walking all over you. But I drew the line when a sergeant called me a gook. He said it in jest, of course. It wasn’t malicious. I should have been cool with it. It’s not worth picking a fight with a superior about. But I snapped, “That’s fucking inappropriate, sergeant. You think it’d be cool if I went up to a group of black guys and after making a few random jokes to get everyone laughing I could just call one of them nigger? You think they’d be cool with it? You think the Army would be cool with it? ‘Cause that’s what you just did to me, and lemme tell you, that dog don’t fucking hunt.”
He shut the fuck up because I think he sensed that the VTech was just about to kick in.
I told myself that I let them do it to me, that I need to be a mean son-of-a-bitch so that no one will fuck with me just because yellow skin = easy victim.
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Big-picture-wise, I hate how initial reporting racialized something that isn’t racial. SHC didn’t target just white kids or black kids or latino kids or whatever. He was a fucking nutjob that decided to hit every fucking human available to him. Take a look at the victims. To me, the fact that SHC was Asian was needlessly emphasized. Now, some knee-jerk conservative will say that it’s part of the guy’s description. I remember someone wrote if we would be sensitive about the guy’s age being printed, too? But that’s common in newspaper articles to specify age. I’ve never seen a newspaper with the balls to specify that so-and-so killer was black. Or even white.
I remember on the day it happened, when the first news that trickled in claimed that the shooter was on a student visa from Shanghai, my roommate remarked, “See! What did I tell you about our borders!?! We keep letting them in like that!”
“Whoa whoa whoa, dude. How many fucking foreign students do we have in America? How many of them have done something like this?”
“Some of the 9/11 hijackers were here on over-stayed visas!”
“That’s at most, what, 7 out of how many thousands of the foreign students we let in every year? It’s a statistically insignificant portion. And what about fucking Columbine or Jonesboro or that one in Mississippi? Were those psychos foreign students? From what I read, the guy’s race is only incidental to what happened. His girlfriend cheated on him and he went batshit fucking loco.”
“I’m just saying that we need to protect our borders from all the foreigners.”
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It goes without saying, but I don’t know SHC. I’ve never met him, and I’m as close to him as I am to Timothy McVeigh. Hence, I won’t apologize for SHC’s actions. I’m not responsible for his actions nor am I to blame for what he did. I didn’t hand him the guns nor did I tell him to kill whitey. White people don’t have the burden of responsibility for Columbine, so why should yellow people apologize for VTech?
My only thought is that those apologists are fucking pussies, always ready to kowtow and maintain the image of the model minority. And I bet you already know how I feel about that myth.
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Why are shootings at educational institutions so common in the US?
This depends on who you ask. For those opposed to the country’s liberal gun laws the key problem is easy access to highly powered weapons. They say the school shootings merely throw into sharp relief what is happening across a country where 30,000 people die of gun wounds every year. Others contend that these killings take place within a deep culture of violence, which they say is promoted in the US through music, film and video games.
But there are those who argue these incidents take place not because there are too many guns, but because there are not enough. “All the school shootings that have ended abruptly in the last 10 years were stopped because a law-abiding citizen – a potential victim – had a gun,” said Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America. “The latest school shooting at Virginia Tech demands an immediate end to the gun-free zone law which leaves the nation’s schools at the mercy of madmen.”
Others argue that schools and colleges are not sufficiently protected, and that the lack of security is tantamount to an open invitation.
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In Switzerland where every man of military age is required to keep a gun at home as part of the country’s civil defence policy, the number of deaths per 10,000 population was 0.05.
BBC Q&A: US campus killings
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