a brighter tomorrow?

A bright and happy Asian-American family is looking into the sunshine of a brighter tomorrow through organic consumerism… wow! Brought to you by Chank Diesel.

yellow person's burden

the minority person who explodes onto the national media scene is always a metonymic stand-in for all other members of her race/ethnicity. This works for the scholarship student as well as the hardened criminal. We never get to be ordinary, and we never get to be singular. This is bad, but is it as bad as some fates? No.

Those of you familiar with this blog know that I am no fan of identity politics demands for "better representation" or for an end to stereotypes. I have always tried to keep my focus on economic justice and to argue that culturalist arguments are distractions from more fundamental relationships of exploitation, but with the Virginia Tech shootings, I am once again reminded of how Asian Americans in the media do affect the everyday lives of Asian Americans.

Ethnicity of Virginia Tech

shooter makes us all deal with "diversity" in a new way...as you can read in the LA Times . Korean-American leaders in LA felt the need to denounce the shootings in Virginia and speak of reconciliation, which just goes to show that Asian-Americans, including Korean-Americans still feel as if we live on the knife's edge of backlash. No white people or more specifically, no white suburbanites apologized for the Columbine shootings. Crazy white people ido not make news like crazy minorities do because there are always so many beautiful, tawdry, heroic white people to distract us. But with so few of my racial confreres in the media spotlight (admittedly there are more today than when I grew up) one psychotic kid can come to stand in for all of us. I myself fell into this kind of thinking when I began speculating about Asian-Americans and mental health...Then I realized, this is ridiculous, think of Oklahoma City -- was there a lot of hand-wringing on the part of rural Americans about undermedicated conspiracy theory addled paranoiacs and their fantasies of destroying the US government?

The bigger question is why some one who had been declared mentally ill was able to buy guns legally. Thirty-two people would still be alive today if Cho had not had access to firearms. That is what is crazy about this whole thing -- American gun laws....