How Asian Is He Now?

Professor Kim and the Kwaku Network have been passing around this racial projection by somebody named Tamara Nopper which concludes:

Whatever happens, Cho will become whoever the white media wants him to be and for whatever political platform it and legislators want to push. In the process, Asian Americans will, like other non-whites, be picked apart, dissected, and theorized by whites. As such, this is no different than any other day for Asian Americans. Only this time an Asian face will be on every television screen, internet search engine, and newspaper.

You really do have to read the whole thing because Nopper runs the gamut of possible stereotypes that she predicts the white media, and presumably all of us brain-dead couch potatoes, and especially white ones, will ingest without the slightest bit of skepticism. So she covers all of the bases of shallow thought and casts it into a racial complaint.

But as time goes by, we are finding instead that Cho is far from being anything stereotypical, a creep worthy of horror film status, loopier than just a little bit. The more extremely close-up we look the more bizarrely individual he becomes. In fact, he put together his own press kit just to make sure that we know what kind of madman he is.

Even before his collection of videos were sent to NBC, all anyone had to do was read his writing to know that he was an extraordinarily scrambled egg. Nopper is projecting. And what makes that so clear is that she uses Cho as a placeholder for her fears, exactly the thing she is accusing others of preparing to do. All she knows is that he is 'Asian' and that certain things will happen to 'Asians' no matter what. Read what that deranged fool actually wrote and see how useful her speechifying becomes. The more you know about Cho, the less you care to generalize it to the fate of 'Asians', unless of course, those are the only kinds of debates you wish to have.

But let's have a little multicultural one shall we?

You see there's something crawling under my skin right about now, and that is the question to what end was this twisted character's education directed? VA Tech professors are now testifying to this whackjob's wackiness, and yet there was nothing they could do to get him off campus. So it seems.

What if Cho had called Virginia Tech professor Nikki Giovanni 'nappy headed ho'? How long would it have taken the University to find a way to excommunicate him from their bosom?

When Department Head Lucinda Roy mentioned on the news last night that her entire career there had only been two students who creeped her out as much, I immediately wondered who the other one was and what happened. Then I thought of David Cash who quickly became persona non grata at UC Berkeley because of his association with the murderer of seven year old Sherrice Iverson, Jeremy Strohmeyer.

At some point a University is supposed to be serving the public interest. What interest was served in keeping Cho in school? Giovanni rightly booted him from her class for taking upskirt pictures. Certainly she was perceptive enough to see that he was a menace. Obviously the English department had seen his work, what kind of grades did he get for Richard McBeef and Mr. Brownstone? You have to question the very premises of the educational mission of Virginia Tech when is at this distance from shaping or disciplining the character of its students.

You cannot lose focus of this in light of the fact that the University has worked against the law of the state with regard to the right of citizens to bear arms. They cannot claim any neutrality or suggest that there is not a particular environment they wish to sustain on campus. So it's clear that VT was an anti-gun campus, which is their right to be. It raises questions about what you can and cannot get away with at Virginia Tech.

So that directs us to the issue of why Virginia Tech wanted Cho to stay. It clearly wasn't the content of his character. Was it the color of his skin? Was it the quality of his work? He wasn't flying under the radar, he was flying in the face of students and faculty. And yet there were never three words he uttered that could have ended his college career. As far as Virginia Tech was concerned, he never crossed the line.

If I were a prospective student considering Virginia Tech I would have to ask myself what kind of people get in and what kind of people don't? Any mention in the campus brochure about ethnic diversity? Any notable percentages mentioned? Any Asian student associations?

This goes nowhere for me, but it seems to drive folks like Nopper to their ends, which I find dubious generally and moreso specifically in this case. I don't want Asians to be anything. I don't need Asians to be anything and so I am not invested in any way in the maintenance or alteration of their public images. I have no reason to second-guess them and I am skeptical of those with an agenda to insert a proper ethnic interface in the public mind. I am skeptical about both in their ability and their integrity.

In the end everyone has to make the decision of where Cho belongs and what he represents. Managing the guidelines for inclusion is a dangerous business for multicultural activists and Universities. So how Asian is he now? How Asian do you want him to be?