April 20 marks the 10th anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting, and almost a decade later, violence in the United States has not changed much, as evidenced by the shooting that occurred inside Binghamton’s immigrant services center a few weeks ago. Amidst all the ongoing controversy, many people have noticed a small pattern. The two major shootings in the past 10 years were both perpetrated by Asians. The gunman at Virginia Tech was Korean, and Jiverly Wong, the man who took the American Civic Association building hostage and killed 13 people, was Vietnamese. This is not even to mention the Chinese man in Canada who decapitated a fellow Greyhound passenger last summer.
“What is it with Asians and their killing sprees?” is a common question that I’ve heard many times in the past few weeks, and even Asians are guilty of self-racial profiling in this way. Recently, this anti-Asian sentiment has been echoing all over Internet blogs, mirroring what happened after Virginia Tech when there was a huge backlash against Asian Americans. After Virginia Tech’s massacre, many people, both seriously and jokingly, blamed video games for increased violence among young students, even creating new stereotypes out of old ones: “Asian students are violent because they are addicted to shooting games such as ‘Counter-Strike.’”
The Asian population as a whole is the least violent racial group in the United States, trailing very far behind black and white people when it comes to murder and crime, which makes the assumed correlation between Asians and violence unfounded. However, the public reaction to violent outbursts by Asians seems to reveal a lot about racial politics in the United States. When a white person kills someone, race is a non-issue. When a minority commits murder, race is the defining issue. Obviously, Asians do not have it as bad as other minorities, such as blacks and Hispanics, whose violent outbreaks and marginalization are largely ignored. (At least when an Asian goes on a shooting spree, it is front-page news.)
It may seem silly to be talking about race on a campus as diverse as Binghamton’s; however, just because a college has large and thriving minority groups does not mean that ethnicity is a non-issue. If anything, it’s more of an issue. Also, the University itself may be diverse, but the city of Binghamton is certainly not. It is this discrepancy between the campus and its immediate surroundings that the University really has to be actively aware of. Whites make up 83 percent of locals living in the city of Binghamton, while minority students actually outnumber white students in SUNY Binghamton. White students make up only 45 percent of the student body. Asians make up 13 percent of SUNY Binghamton’s student body, but only a little less than 3.5 percent of the local populace.
Wong lived in a city that had a very small Asian community, and finding fellow Vietnamese people to connect with would have been that much harder for him. This is in no way justification for what he did, however, it does help explain where he is coming from. The Los Angeles Times had an interesting article about Binghamton’s Vietnamese community reacting to the shooting, describing how some immigrants empathize with Wong’s struggles to overcome a language barrier and to find a niche in a country that too easily marginalizes its minorities.
We can use race to help us understand what happened in Virginia Tech and the American Civic Association, and in many ways, we have to acknowledge that race is certainly an important factor in each of these events. We should not, however, use these instances to make false assumptions and to spread hatred and fear.