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April 25, 2007
U.S., Denial and the Culture of Violence
As I sat in the student center at my university yesterday, I got a chilling reminder of the shootings at Virginia Tech earlier this week. I looked around at the faces of people I didn't know and thought about their families and my own family and how awful it would be if something like that were to happen here. How would we recover?
What some are calling the worst shooting in United States history, the death of 32 Virginia Tech students was indeed deplorable. The media circus that followed was also deplorable. Shouldn't the families and victims be given some privacy to deal with the tragedy?
But also what is it about these isolated incidents that capture the national imagination? As other bloggers have noted, last weekend 65 Iraqis died and just yesterday another 183 in Baghdad alone. Why the hypocrisy? So far in 2007 there have been 27 deaths in Oakland County alone. Why have none of those deaths made headline news? Why does America only care about certain people's death? Do some people just deserve to die?
The strategic manipulation of stories by the mass media is to remind us that we had nothing to do with the problem. The solution this time has been simple, young Asian man, "loner," "mentally ill," certainly not one of our brightest and best, a character that rarely enters public discourse, and usually in the periphery. It gives us a scapegoat to not turn the attention back to ourselves, the possibility that the US produces a culture of violence and this isn't one isolated incident, but a continuum of death and bloodshed that has made this country what it is today. If we are not honest about this reality, I don' think it is possible for us to prevent this type of atrocity in the future.
As conservatives immediately talk about how this would not have happened if everyone had guns, neocons try and trace this students motivation to Islamo-fascist doctrine, and politicians underhandedly spin the tragedy to fit with their campaign, it is clear the point has been missed. And is gun proliferation plus increased security going to make us safer? I mean I know dumping out the liquid in your contact case makes you feel *much* safer on the airplane, but I mean really.
The United States is guilty by setting a precedent of violence, historically and today. There is a connection between our unjust invasion of Iraq with these examples of violence. If we don't accept that, we won't be able to prevent these things from happening in the future.
Finally, the media frenzy around this has been unbelievable. From the immediate release that he is an Asian man (they never say the White man, do they?) to making a spectacle of the grieving families (I certainly couldn't watch the news) I thought I would round up some of the best articles I came across about different ways that we can learn from the events of earlier this week.
One of the first and most powerful journals I read was a student at Virginia Tech writing in his livejournal in real time about the event. Also, Earl Ofari Hutchinson takes on the shootings being a wake-up call for the increase in violence on college campuses. Salon's Joe Eaton talks about how this can be compared to 9/11 since Asians started fleeing the campus immediately with fear of backlash and along the same lines Andrew Lam takes on the "please let it be another Asian," mentality that hits the people when our obsession with finding the perpetrator takes over and the hate crimes it motivates.
But alas, this story isn't even in the top headlines anymore. How fast things are deleted from the forefront of national attention.
Samhita Mukhop- adhyay is training and technology organizer at the Center for Media Justice and an editor of Feministing.com. She serves on the editorial board of WireTap.
thoughts on mental health and racism
Posted by: withoutexperience on Apr 20, 2007 6:47 AM
Thanks for this. I want to preface my response by writing that I feel very sad for the victims of this tragedy. But, I am very upset about the media's coverage and the backlash against both Asians and mentally ill students.I have been dismayed by the media circus around VT as well. In particular the SF Chronicle's characterization of the Cho as a "twisted mind" made me want to vomit. I have deep sympathy for the Asian-american communities that this may affect, and I am also very concerned about the backlash against mentally ill, shy, or other wise "different" students on campuses across the country (especially around the disproportionate support that students of color recieve around these issues).
I have to wonder if Cho was white and/or a native english speaker would the professors who tried to reach out to him have been so fearful of his writing and getting close to him? Would the mental health community at VT have been more compassionate in their treatment instead of pathologizing him as dangerous and twisted? If his creative writing teachers had encouraged him to express his rage through his writings, would he have felt so alone and silenced? Would this rage have snowballed into him feeling like murder and suicide were his only options?
Reading this morning that Cho was ridiculed in high school, and told to "just go back to China" by his peers, I think that the intersection between racism and social rejection is clear. My partner is a student of color, who suffers from and takes medication for depression and anxiety and is deeply shy. He is also an amazing person, who is worth getting to know; he is sensitive, kind and extremely intellegent. He, like Cho, is also a creative writer and an English major. I have seen the ways his peers recoil from him. I have seen how they judge him for not fitting into a stereotypical college persona. I think that what merits reflection, after this week's tragedy, is the climate of alienation and ridicule that shy and mentally ill people of color face on campus. This alienation also testifies to the "whose life counts" idea in your post: not only do the ongoing deaths of people of color in Iraq and Oakland not garner the same media attention that this has, but also students of color who are shy and/or mentally ill are not treated as equals on campus to, say, the more outgoing jocks. What needs to be cultivated is a culture of "niceness" where friendships are fostered around intellectual connections instead of beer drinking and womanizing (ahem duke ahem).
Also, the stigma around mental illness needs to be addressed. I see this whole case as a giant step backward for the counseling community on college campus. Now, instead of commpasionate care, I can just imagine counselors being compelled by administration to "pick out" the "bad seeds."
Again, I feel great sadness for the victims, but I also have an unbearable sadness for Cho and his family. Obviously, his family is afraid for their own saftey (I read they had not returned home in two days) and Cho, himself, was the victim of all kinds of social abuse. He was deeply troubled, but to use this, as the media has done, as yet another platform from which to ridicule him so that our society can begin to process the magnitude of these deaths, is just wrong.