Look, an Asian!

The Politics of Racial Interpellation in the Wake of the Virginia Tech Shootings
sylvia shin huey chong
Journal of Asian American Studies, Volume 11, Number 1, February 2008, pp. 27-60 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/jaas.2008.0007

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jaas/summary/v011/11.1chong.html

Access Provided by Saint Marys College of California at 11/08/11 7:41PM GMT

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Look, an asian!
The Politics of Racial Interpellation in the Wake of the Virginia Tech Shootings

sylvia shin huey chong

the Virginia Tech shootings unfolded, a parallel news story was being constructed. Beginning with Asian American bloggers and journalists, this story focused on Asian Americans, and particularly Korean Americans, and their fears of a racial backlash caused by the furor surrounding the shootings. In these venues, many Asian Americans expressed a mix of shame and relief after Chos identity was revealedshame for the fact that he was Asian, but relief that he was not of their own ethnic group. Vietnamese American author Andrew Lam summarized the multi-ethnic anxieties surrounding him: Well be in deep if its Chinese . . . I have a bad feeling. It might be Mit (Vietnamese slang for Vietnamese) . . . If hes a Paki and Muslim, we might all just as well pack up and go home.1 On the other hand, after Cho was identified, the Korean American community entered the spotlight, and controversy arose from within when some, like Washington State Senator Paull Shin and South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun, issued apologies for the shootings in order to deflect the expected backlash. In turn, many younger Korean Americans angrily denounced the pressure to repent for something for which they were not responsible.2 Other Asian American groups took a more proactive approach, launching a media watch to police any potential bias in the news coverage of the shootings. The Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) issued media advisories to other media organizations on best practices
t the same time the story of
jaas february 2008 2760 the johns hopkins university press

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and exhorted its members to monitor their employers coverage of the shootings.3 Although the first reports of Chos identity represented him as a resident alien and emphasized his South Korean citizenship, later details revealed that Cho had lived in the U.S. since he was eight years old, making him as much American as Asian, or more technically a 1.5generation Korean American.4 Ironically, if these proactive measures did indeed heighten public awareness and prevent hate crimes and other reprisals against Asian Americans, the lack of any visible backlash led other commentators to point to an unfounded paranoia coming out of supposedly politically correct attitudes. The majority of the emails the AAJA received in response to its media advisories were negative, accusing them of perpetuating rather than preventing racism.5 When AAJA vice president for broadcast Jam Sardar appeared on The OReilly Factor to defend his organizations stance, host Bill OReilly slammed him for representing a pressure group trying to alter the relevant facts of the story. OReilly further suggested that fears of racial backlash were unfounded, claiming that even after 9/11 there wasnt a backlash in this country against American Muslims.6 What do these various narratives and arguments about Cho and his racial identity mean? For many non-Asian American commentators, anti-Asian racism is practically invisible, limited only to a few irrational individuals who are ultimately unrepresentative of the American body politic. But even among Asian Americans, there is a contradiction between, on the one hand, the heightened racial consciousness exhibited by both the AAJA and many Korean American groups, for whom racial group identification forms the basis for action and, on the other hand, the disavowal of racial identity that ultimately lies behind the fears of an anti-Asian racial backlash. We want race to matter when we are fighting the onslaught of racial backlash and stereotyping, and yet we do not want race to matter because it is the consideration of race that produces backlash in the first place. We feel our racialization as Asian Americans most acutely when Chos identity is revealed, but we do not want race to become a part of Chos criminal profile. These tensions, of course, predate the Virginia Tech incident, forming a central paradox for racial politics in the post-civil rights era. As we struggle to confront the continued existence of structural racism, the

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topic of race has become increasingly taboo in the color-blind rhetoric of contemporary politics, such that Californias failed Racial Privacy Initiative of 2002 attempted to protect our racial identities from the prying eyes of the state by banning the collection of all racial information.7 Whereas the civil rights victories of the 1960s addressed the use of race as the basis for legalized discrimination, these inversions from the post-civil rights era have made any mention or consideration of race a suspect act, even in the context of analyzing or confronting racism. This contradiction is a symptom of the failure of the current liberal individualist view of race and racism, which informs the rhetoric of contemporary Asian American politics. This model has formed the basis of the color-blind rhetoric that transcends the usual liberal-conservative political binary and has dominated the politics of race in the U.S. in the last three decades.8 This liberal individualist investment in the subject as the possessor of race and the victim of racism has increasingly come to dominate discussions of race in the public sphere, but this investment is unable to confront the institutional and structural aspects of race and racism, nor is it able to account for these aspects collective effects on racialized groups. By framing the problems raised by the Virginia Tech shootings as a matter of racial backlash or stereotyping, liberal individualism casts the normative state and public sphere as non-racist, and thus fails to confront the larger systemic problems of anti-Asian racism as a product of racial interpellation, or of the larger, institutional investments in racism as a system of control. In this essay, I analyze the ways that the supposedly alternative voices of Asian American activists, journalists, and bloggers reproduce these contradictions of liberal individualism in their discussion of Chos race and the possibility of an anti-Asian backlash in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings.9 By showing what a politics of interpellation can provide to our response to Virginia Tech, I hope to reinvigorate a post-structuralist line of critique to serve the purposes of contemporary pan-ethnic Asian American political coalitions, which have stagnated upon issues regarding the representation of Asian Americans in the media and public sphere. As a way of pushing on this contradiction further, I examine the logic behind two Asian American critiques of the media coverage of Virginia Tech: the analogy between media stereotyping and state-sanctioned racial

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profiling, and the effects of the shootings on the pre-existing stereotype of the model minority. Although analogies are made between the current situation and racial profiling of groups such as Middle Easterners, Arabs, Muslims, South Asians, and African Americans,10 liberal individualism ultimately refuses the broader anti-racist critique raised by this comparison in favor of an Asian American exceptionalism that looks remarkably like the model minority stereotype that haunts this discourse. In turn, the condensation of anti-Asian racism into the singular image of the model minority reveals the liberal individualist investment in masculinity, whiteness, and capital as a model for post-racist Asian American success. These tensions become extremely unstable as the Asian American pan-ethnic coalition confronts how to deal with race when Asian Americans are seen not as the racialized victims but rather as the racialized perpetrators of violence.11 The righteous indignation which accompanied the murder of Vincent Chin in 1982 transformed in 2007 into an uneasy sense of shame or guilt after the Virginia Tech shootings, only to be alleviated by the denial of the significance of race to the shootings.

A Mirror Scene of rAciAl interpellAtion

I stare into his face. He is pale, solemn, drained of emotion. He is made of stone. Maybe its his heart that is made of stone. A student said that when he walked into the classroom, his face was very serious, very calm. The photo shows his eyes, dark and dull, behind his glasses. His black hair is shaved close on the sides. His ears stick out. He offers no smile. His mouth is slightly open, as if he wanted to say something as the photo was taken. His eyes are as narrow as almonds, set beneath thick brows. He is the killer. He looks like me. Thomas T. Huang, Assistant Managing Editor, Dallas Morning News12

In a national media that so seldom features Asian faces of any kind, it is a cruel irony that Cho would make Asianness so unavoidably visible in the weeks following the Virginia Tech shootings. Chos face, seen in the

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unflattering frontal shot typical of drivers licenses and mug shots, seems to stare straight at viewers, a stare made more sinister by our hindsight into his actions on April 16. But for Asian Americans of East Asian descent such as Thomas Huang, Chos face also operates as a racial mirror of sorts. In looking at his face, we clearly see his Asian features. Some may recognize those features as their own, and worry that they have more in common with Cho than just black hair and narrow eyes. But in looking at Cho, we also see him looking back at us, as if to show that this is also how we look to others, from the outside. But, the gaze inverted and reflected in Chos photograph was not simply any gaze, but a racializing one, concentrating the visual logic of racial difference into an assertion of identity. After the Virginia Tech shootings, we are told that Alex Kim, a student at the University of Washington, has never felt more Korean.13 Even those who were defiant of the racializing imperative of Chos image nonetheless seemed to acknowledge its presence before refusing it. Jen Park, president of the Asian American Student Union at the University of Maryland, College Park, remarked that although Cho was a person that looked like me; that doesnt mean I have to apologize about the tragedy.14 An impossible demand was being placed upon this gaze, to distinguish between those traits one wanted to claim and those one disavowed, when in fact the primary condition of the gaze is to disrupt that illusion of control. Being-looked-at-racially reminds us that we do not control the conditions of our social existence and meaning, least of which this concept of race which we experience simultaneously as a valuable part of our identity and as a violation of our sense of self.15 The Asian American encounter with Chos image recalls a different racial primal scene, one found in Frantz Fanons Black Skin, White Masks. Writing about the positioning of black colonial subjects in French society, he relates an encounter with a young white child, who calls him out on a train: Look, a Negro! . . . Mama, see the Negro! Im frightened!16 As Fanon points out, this example does not simply prove the Sartrean view that we all are potential objects for the gaze of others; rather, there is a particular burden for the racialized minority whose difference is glaringly obvious in the visual field. In this case, the drama of racial interpellation is not restricted to the racial subject who is called out, for there are also the necessary roles played by the white child whose race goes unmarked

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in contrast to Fanons, and by the mother off-stage, the figure of authority to whom this interpellation is ultimately addressed. These three players constitute a microcosm of the social, and reveal the necessary relational nature of racial interpellation: not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man.17 Just as this scenario forms the basis for an extended meditation on what Fanon calls the fact of blacknessthe Negro face to face with his raceChos image provides an opportunity for us to examine Asian Americans face-to-face with their own racialization.18 As Yen Le Espiritu has argued, anti-Asian violence has historically been the catalyst for the protective formation of pan-Asian ethnicity, with cases like Vincent Chin sparking cross-ethnic coalitions to obtain racial justice.19 But, the Virginia Tech shootings complicate this familiar narrative of racial victimization. The racializing gaze does not instigate an act of anti-Asian violence. It is, on the contrary, an act of Asian violence that instigates the racializing gaze, awakening Asian Americans from their slumber of seeming racial invisibility. Asian American fears of misrecognitionof being mistaken by other Americans for Choare unfortunately too easily dismissed as irrational. As University of Virginia student columnist Stephen Parsley claimed,
common sense and a reasonable evaluation of the situation show these worries to be exaggerated . . . . It is not out of the question that a few unhinged, previously racist people might harass Asian students in response to the killers identity, but it is unlikely that these murders will create an atmosphere of hostility from average Americans.20

Parsleys claims form a striking mirror to the popularized diagnosis of Chos motives, as the unhinged, previously racist perpetrators of a potential backlash become the reflection of Chos own mental illness, which in turn infects the exaggerated worries of paranoid Asian Americans. Racism is pathologized, excised from the reasonable consensus of average Americans who suddenly know that all Asians do not look alike. To fear racism in this form, then, is to revert to some primitive racial hierarchy that has supposedly been dismantled in our post-civil rights era. However, Asian American anxieties prompted by the Virginia Tech shootings are more complex than a mere case of mistaken identity. They

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are also prompted by the fear of racialization itself, for having ones racial particularity called out in the public sphere. In this case, the call, Look, an Asian! may have originally targeted Cho in the media spotlight, but in fact addresses any Asian American who recognizes him or herself by that racial label. One of the most frequent critiques of liberal individualism focuses on its conception of the individual as a universal construct, unencumbered or separated from the claims of communities (ethnic, cultural), institutions (church, state, work), or other historically contingent identities (race, gender, disability).21 If liberal individualisms endorsement of civil rights is premised on such a notion of abstract equality, race can only be conceptualized as a disruption of that utopian state, whose primary effect on the individual is in the form of racial discrimination. Under this color-blind logic, racial consciousness is itself a form of discrimination. The result is not far from Parsleys dismissal of racism, for in both cases the fear of racism and racism itself are aligned as irrational superstitions at odds with the rational liberal individualist consensus. To be called out as Asian in a white-dominated society, then, is to be separated from the liberal community of citizens whose raceless equality to one another is what guarantees their rights and liberties. In such a society, clinging to ones racial identity is, at best, an outmoded primordial attachment, and, at worst, a voluntary surrender of freedom. This compulsion towards racelessness reproduces the valorization of whiteness, reifying one particular racial identity into a template for universalism. For the Antilleans whom Fanon describes, under the sway of colonialism, the Lacanian mirror stage does not return a racialized self-image but is neutral, reflecting the racelessness of universal subjectivity: When Antilleans tell me that they have experienced [the mirror phase], I always ask the same question: What color were you? Invariably they reply: I had no color.22 For the Asian American staring into Chos face in the media, the call, Look, an Asian! seems to pierce through this illusion, forcing a confrontation with the fact of racialization. But, what if we were to upset this binary between racialization and racial subjugation by reconceptualizing the relationship between racial subjects and the racist systems that surround them? Following Michel Foucaults insight that power is productive as well as repressive,23 I propose that we think about racialization as a process with positive as well as

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negative possibilities for racialized subjects. In order to do so, we must first address some misconceptions about the way racialized subjects interact with racial ideology. Therefore, I propose to resurrect the idea of racial interpellation, with all of its Marxist, psychoanalytic, and post-structuralist baggage, to understand the complex relationship between power, ideology, and subjectivity. Racialization, then, is not simply something that a powerful social structure imposes upon powerless individuals, but a process of conscious and unconscious negotiations through which a racialized subject comes into being. As extrapolated from the work of Louis Althusser and Stuart Hall, a theory of racial interpellation redefines ideology and subjectivity as reciprocally constitutive rather than ontologically opposed entities.24 Although this theory, along with its associated post-structuralist paradigms, has been accused of effacing the very notion of agency so necessary to social change, it provides a necessary intervention into a nave racial politics that might very well reinforce those structures it thinks it is challenging. Unlike classical Marxism, ideology here is not meant in the sense of false consciousness, or of an oppressive tool solely belonging to the ruling class or the state. Instead, in defining ideology as the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence, Althusser and Hall mean to position ideology as the necessary frame through which social and political realities are understood by all subjects within a given historical situation.25 Although race is usually thought of as a material fact of reality, that does not mean that our relationship to race is unmediated. Racial ideology functions to describe and make sense of the ways in which the material conditions of bodily difference, economic exploitation, and social disparity organize our lived experience of race. However, with the rejection of an idea of racial false consciousness, we must also remember that there is no outside of ideology, no racial real to strive toward. When liberal individualism tries to go beyond race, what it really attempts is to secure a sense of racial privilege, in the form of economic success, freedom from discrimination, or social mobility. This move thus places liberal individualism squarely within the very ideology it purports to be overcoming. Conversely, the racially interpellated subject is not simply a pre-existing subject on whom race is imposed as some sort of social construc-

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tion, and who strives to be free of these ideological restraints in order to live freely and authentically. For Althusser, the subject is always already an ideological subject, not only because ideology creates the subject but because ideology requires subjects in order to function: there is no ideology except by the subject and for subjects.26 Even the notion of an authentic, individual interiority that evades the external machinations of power is itself a construct of our current liberal individualist ideology. In this respect, Althussers notion of the way ideology creates subjects dovetails with Foucaults notion of the self-disciplined body who creates the notion of a soul in order to maintain the illusion of freedom against the backdrop of increasingly efficient systems of political and economic control.27 Although it is this argument regarding subjectivity that engenders suspicion for its seeming erasure of agency, it is here, in the bind between the subject and ideology, that many theorists locate the possibility for a new style of resistance. Substituting power for ideology, Judith Butler redefines agency as not simply the classical liberal-humanist formulation [in which] agency is always and only opposed to power, but rather as the assumption of a purpose unintended by power.28 Similarly, Marianne Constable argues that these ideas, derived from Foucault in particular, prompt us to consider what we have hitherto considered to be undirected and non-power, as a possibility for thinking about future action and future power.29 In our contemporary ideological formation, one cannot be a subject without being racialized, any more than one can avoid being gendered or classed, because ideology has structured subjectivity around these forms. This applies equally to the masculine or white ideals of unmarked subjectivity, as it does to the minoritized or feminized groups we usually designate as racialized or gendered. To claim not to have a race, either as a form of racial unmarkedness or as a willed color-blindness, is not to step outside of an ideology, but simply to define oneself as exempt from the racialized exploitation that affects other subjects. This is no outside of race, just a different positionality within race. The Asian Americans who looked at Chos face and saw themselves in the picture were not dupes of an internalized racism that falsely required them to associate with members of their racial group. They were responding to the ideological injunction to exist as racialized subjects, to make sense of their lives

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through the category of race. Although these Asian Americans did not answer their interpellation identically or without hesitation, even their equivocations or refusals to be racialized in a particular way still affirmed the normative function of race, just as the color-blind refusal of race is itself part of racial ideology. Thus, we find both those Asian Americans who apologized for Chos actions and those who rejected these apologies to be responding to the shame associated with the fact of racialization itself. Edward Chang, even while trying to break the link between Chos ethnicity and his actions, admits almost sheepishly in the midst of his commentary in the Los Angeles Times, And yet, I too somehow feel responsible.30 In a speech explaining his shock upon hearing of the Virginia Tech shootings, Frank Wu recounts the following memory:
Like many other Asian Americans, this raised for me many different conflicting emotions and feelings. It caused me to remember what it was like to be a child who was ashamed of my own parents, ashamed of my parents because, of course, it was their fault that I was Chinese, that I was Asian, teased and taunted and picked on.31

In experiencing the media coverage of Cho, Wu is transported back to a childhood moment of helplessness. It is a memory not only of the shame of being Asian, but also of the shameful desire for whiteness, to be like one of those unmarked individuals doing the teasing. This desire is shameful because it longs for the very site of his trauma: the other whom one hates, and yet identifies with. These emotions reveal the difficulty of extracting the various strands of racial interpellation from one another. In a way, the racialized Asian American is doubly shamed, doubly interpellated: in the act of looking at Cho through the seemingly omnipotent (and deracialized) eyes of the media, the Asian American subject is not only surprised by the turn of the gaze onto him or herselfthe attention now paid to Asian Americansbut also by the realization that he or she shares in Chos distance from whitenessthe fact of Asianness that had been forgotten in the identification with the medias gaze. They apologize not only for Chos actions, but for being Asian American in a society that demands the erasure of racial difference for the full assumption of rights. To consume a racializing media as a racialized subject is a dizzying hall of mirrors. As Fanon comments, I cannot go to a film without see-

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ing myself. I wait for me.32 It is not as if the media were a monolithic ideological state apparatus, projecting constructed images of race onto unsuspecting individuals. The interpellated subject plays her part as well, waiting for the moment of recognition as an opportunity to enact her relationship to the image, whether resistant or compliant. Even if one were to turn away from the mirror found in Chos image, one would still be part of the ideological drama of interpellation. In looking at his photograph, Asian Americans come face-to-face with what it means to be looked at themselves. To be an object of the gaze, to be a racialized objectboth forms of objectness are fundamentally intertwined. In other words, the racial gaze interpellating Asian Americans cannot simply be pathologized as an aberrant phenomenon, isolated as a form of racism that can be excised. It is constitutive of what it means to become visible as a subject in contemporary America. We are always already racialized at the point at which we encounter that racialized image, whether it be our first or our thousandth time. As Thomas Huang confesses of his compulsion towards Chos image: I cant escape his face . . . . It makes me feel sick, but I need to look.33 Huang cannot escape Chos face because it is his own, the one he recognizes as look[ing] like me. As Asian Americans, we cannot avoid seeing ourselves in Cho if we are to understand how we ourselves are seen.

Good And BAd ASiAnS: rAciAl profilinG SeunG-Hui cHo

A racially Asian man with mental illness is automatically associated with violent mass shooting sprees because Asian craziness is a factor of ones skin color. Whereas the countless depictions of white men with mental illness are nonthreatening because white craziness has nothing to do with whiteness . . . .34 Jenn Fang, Ph.D. student, University of Arizona I dont want people to think all Asians are bad. Thanadoul Khunngam, restaurateur, Blacksburg, Virginia35

The medias treatment of Cho has been likened to an act of racial profiling, but interestingly, the usual culprits [agents?] of racial profilingthe state and the policehave not been centrally involved. On one level, the analogy between media stereotyping and racial profiling makes sense if we

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think of the repressive state apparatus and the ideological state apparatus as aligned in their interests in the maintenance of a certain social order. After all, Cho became visible to the media because of a criminal act, and the reporting of the shootings took on the air of a post facto police investigation, with the revelation of clues, motives, and means. To be more precise, the circuit of a racial backlash would require not only the medias participation, but that of its viewing public, to be complete. The Virginia Tech shootings provide a case of what historian Patrick Rael has called racial synecdoche, which fuse[s] all people of [common] descent into a single group united by an ascription of their vicious characters.36 According to Rael, racial synecdoche gains a particular intensity when situated within a politics of respectability taking place within the field of mass media, since individual acts increase in symbolic weight when reproduced in the media. As blogger Jenn Fang notes above, this is a burden that rests asymmetrically on minority groups, although the fact that whites do not generally bear this burden is not a sign of their lack of racialization but rather the sort of privilege that marks their racialization as invisible by comparison. In particular, the news media is able to take advantage of a veridical discourse not as readily accessible to fictional or entertainment genres: it can claim to be simply reporting the facts of the case.37 And in that sense, the media can utilize the same defense used by the state, that they are not racist but instead are just doing their job.38 Writing on racial violence against Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians after 9/11, legal scholar Muneer I. Ahmad suggests that in the aftermath of a traumatic national crisis the state may even sympathize with, if not exactly endorse, acts of discrimination or even hate crimes by viewing them as expressions of an acceptable emotion, such as love of nation or patriotic fervor.39 In participating in an anti-Asian backlash, private citizens would be performing the will of the state without the constraints of judicial or legislative review. Hence, we might view physical hate-violence as the end product of racial profilings flawed logic, just as racial profiling may be viewed as a form of violencewhether psychic or physicalflowing from bias.40 On college campuses, the increased scrutiny of Asian Americans in the media has created a hostile atmosphere that heightened pre-existing prejudices, calling upon not only public officials but private individuals to

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increase their policing of their racial minorities. To date, there have been at least four incidents of Asian American male students being punished by school authorities after the Virginia Tech shootings for speech acts related to violence, and one potential hate crime against a Korean student at Auburn University in Alabama.41 Also troubling is the increased pressure for racial self-policing on the part of Asian Americans. At the University of Illinois at Chicago, on the day of the shootings, a group of Asian American students staging a campus sit-in were ominously warned by campus police, Just keep that in the back of your mind. We would hate to have to take action.42 Anecdotally, it seems that the words, Seung-Hui Cho, have become a new racial epithet used to keep uppity Asian Americans in their place.43 University of Virginia student columnist Rajesh Jain explains the dangers of media stereotyping:
[W]e can see the damage of analyzing Cho as an Asian. It creates a stereotype of what an Asian is and should be. It creates the perception that an angry Asian person is somehow abnormal. Maybe the person just had a bad day, but for many people, their first instinct will be fear.44

The shootings also provided public fodder for a number of anti-immigration and white-supremacist positions. Conservative pundit Patrick Buchanan blamed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 for causing the Virginia Tech shootings by allowing the greatest invasion in history of tens of millions of strangers into our national community, including this deranged young man who secretly hated us, while former Klan leader David Duke lashed out at multicultural education, claiming that anti-white racists such as poet Nikki Giovanni, one of Chos professors at Virginia Tech, had helped to incite his violent actions.45 Yet the analogy between stereotyping and racial profiling also obscures crucial differences between overt repression and ideological coercion. When it surfaced as a term and a legal issue in the mid-1990s, racial profiling was defined as the improper use of race as a basis for taking law enforcement action.46 Most liberal critiques of racial profiling focus on its violation of individual civil rights.47 This critique leaves untouched what Foucault called the micro-physics of power, or, applied to this context, the more subtle ways in which racial ideology disciplines the subject.48 As

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seen in the colloquialism Driving While Black, racial profiling is not only about acts of law enforcement. It also introduces the repressive power of the state into everyday life, with powerful consequences not only for those who are arrested but over the very construction of deviancy. Examining the American Civil Liberties Unions campaign against racial profiling, critical race theorist Devon W. Carbado points out that the majority of cases employed in their reports focus on middle- or upper-class blacks and Latinos who are innocent targets of biased policing rather than on the working-class and underemployed minorities who are the most vulnerable victims of the racialized police state and may already be caught up in the criminal justice system. As Carbado argues, by promoting a narrative of racially bad cops . . . profiling racially good blacks and Latinas/os, this approach leaves intact our norms about race and policing. Indeed, on some level, it confirms if not entrenches our racial suspicions about crime and criminality.49 Such a politics of respectability does little to dismantle the racial gaze and even invites white racial inspection of blackness as a way of separating out good from bad blacks.50 While the media does not participate in the violation of civil rights, it does play an integral role in maintaining the norms of good from bad subjects, and the subjects under its gaze not only consent to, but even participate actively in, the policing of this boundary line. The most visible effect of this extra-legal sense of policing is in the anxiety expressed by many Asian Americans over identifying (or being identified) with Cho. If we examine some of these commentaries closely, we can see a complicated set of emotions at play behind the arguments against stereotyping. As Thomas Huang noted,
The story I tell myself about the killer is the story I know about myself. I grew up in an immigrant family. I was a loner in high school. I was quiet. I wrote odd, if not disturbing, stories. Like most kids, I grew out of that and came out of my shell. . . . Yet I imagined that I understood some of the killers story.51

Jeff Yang, a popular columnist and publisher of the now defunct A Magazine, writes a similar confession:
I know hundreds of young Asian males who experienced that kind of pressure as adolescents, who grew up silent, studious and socially

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awkward; who were perceived as different, to the point of being excluded or taunted; who had unusual hobbies and obsessionsand whove never shot off anything except their mouths. Im one myself.52

These comments evince a surprising amount of sympathy for Cho. At the same time, they express the uncanniness of being confronted with a mirror image both familiar and disquieting. While the manifest logic might be the inductive argument against racial profilingI, who am Asian and share these traits, did not become a murdererthey also reveal a latent, but pressing questionwhy did I not turn out that way? Because this question cannot ultimately be answered, it must be disavowed, made taboo as a continuation of racist prejudice. But, the remaining sentiment skirts the fact of racial interpellation, offering instead an individualist and exceptionalist response to racial profiling. When sociologist and blogger C.N. Le remarks, I believe the opposite is truedespite having to frequently deal with various incidents of prejudice, hostility, and outright racism, the vast majority of Asian Americans react with dignity, courage, and perseverance, the assertion reveals the urgency of a foundational belief necessary to position Asian Americans within the social order of liberal individualism.53 I am the good Asian. I cannot explain the bad Asian. Identification turns into a form of dis-identification. One strategy for refusing the politics of respectability and its divideand-conquer tactics would be to forge a coalition between Asian Americans and other racial groups who find themselves the victims of racial profiling. Such a strategy would emphasize the link between state and social coercion at the intersection of anti-Asian backlash and racial profiling, and would show the interdependence of various forms of racial interpellation. Throughout the responses to the Virginia Tech shootings, there are repeated analogies made to the anti-Muslim backlash after 9/11 and to the history of anti-black racial profiling, as if to situate the impending backlash within a longer history of racial violence in the United States. As Dave Sidhu, a civil rights attorney and blogger, spoke from the perspective of the Sikh community, which also suffered racial profiling after 9/11 by being mistaken for Muslims, Korean- and Asian-Americans should know they are not alone in their efforts.54 African Americans also offered their sympathies to Asian Americans, allowing this moment of shared racial threat to overcome

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a historyof class-based tensions between the two groups. Khalil Abdullah offered the following anecdote: Every time theres an incident like this, every ethnic group is on pins and needles . . . . I still recall my aunts when President Kennedy was assassinated. They were praying that it wasnt a Negro.55 Project RISE, an African American peer-counseling system at the University of Virginia, also extended help to the universitys Korean Student Association soon after the shootings, explaining their motivation: We understand that as the profile of the shooter is released across the world, there may unfortunately be a backlash toward Asian students at the University and elsewhere. While the backlash stems from anger and ignorance, as another minority on Grounds, we understand how it may feel to be the target of such things. So we want to offer our support.56 However, no signs of a significant interracial coalition forming after the Virginia Tech shootings have emerged to date, and the predominant response to the backlash may be orienting towards racial self-interest. It is not only whites but Asian Americans who are discounting the backlash, claiming that they feel no sign of recriminations in the wake of the shootings, as if reverting back to the myth that anti-Asian racism is extinct.57 There may be some similarities between the Asian American reaction to Virginia Tech and the handling of the Wen Ho Lee case, in which a Taiwanese American scientist was wrongly accused of spying for China. There, too, Asian Americans failed to link the treatment of Lee with the larger issue of racial profiling against other racial groups. As Frank Wu recounted of the case, Some actively tried to distinguish Lee, as an unassuming scientist, from drug dealers, preferring an image of middleclass conformity while avoiding association with stereotypes of people of color.58 Lees innocence was integral to his defense, further separating good Asians from bad blacksreflecting the coded racial meaning of the euphemism, drug dealerin the interest of protecting the civil rights of the good alone. In our hurry to heed the dangers of categorizing Cho as an Asian American, we have reversed the racial dynamics of the case. Thus, Cho becomes the villain not only of the shootings but of the subsequent racial profiling he causes, and added to his list of victims are the good Asian Americans who become subject to undue racial scrutiny as a result of his actions. Rather than opening up into a larger dialogue about

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the deeper sources of anti-Asian racism, the protest against backlash has revealed instead an unconscious desire for de-racialization. To be treated as the good Asian is ultimately to adopt the privileges of invisibility and individuality that mark whiteness. It is unlikely that Angry While Asian will take the place of Driving While Black or Flying While Brown as a form of systematized racial profiling, so long as Asian Americans insist that Chos case is an aberration from the usual racial interpellation of other Asian Americans.

Murder And tHe Model Minority

They will emphasize Chos ethnicity and economic background by wondering what would set off a hard-working, quiet, South Korean immigrant from a middleclass dry-cleaner-owning family . . . . They will promote Cho as the model minority who suddenly, for no reason, went crazy . . . . Indeed, we are not even seen as having legitimate reasons to have anger, let alone rage, hence the need to figure out what made this quiet student snap. Tamara K. Nopper, Ph.D. student, Temple University59 I am not a model minority; I am me, I am myself. Yixin Li , freshman, University of Maryland60

Beneath any discussion of stereotyping and Asian Americans lies the specter of the model minority, so it is little wonder that it quickly appeared in analyses of the Virginia Tech shootings. Writer Tamara Nopper predicted how the mainstream media would manipulate this stereotype, offering the narrative of the ethnic American dream as a suspenseful prelude to Chos unexpected outburst of violence. But, this accusation also highlights the way that the model minority has also become a central hermeneutic for Asian American self-analysis. Understanding the effects of the model minority stereotype was seen as crucial to Asian American perspectives on the events of the Virginia Tech shootings. For instance, the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Maryland sponsored a panel entitled, The End of the Model Minority Myth: Reflections on the Virginia Tech Tragedy from Asian American Perspectives.61 Featuring campus administrators, counselors, and professors, along with Frank Wu

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as keynote speaker, the panel offered students such as Yixin Li a chance to work through their traumatic encounter with racial interpellation in their anxiety over the shootings. Li describes his personal backlash from the [Virginia Tech] tragedy, relating that after the incident people started calling me Cho. To be racialized through the model minority is to lose the sense of self, even the uniqueness of a proper name. Wu describes the Virginia Tech shootings as presenting a crossroads for Asian America, in which the model minority has turned into a mass murderer, when those images that we are familiar with, the images that garner us so much praise . . . might be paired in some way with its deeply troubling twin. As another avatar of Chos image, the model minority becomes like a doppelganger whose presence annihilates its original. In order to avoid becoming the model minority as mass murderer, one must, in a sense, murder the model minority. As early as 1969, Asian American activists were critiquing the model minority stereotype as a form of consciousness raising, calling upon other Asian Americans to recognize how [they] are perpetuating white racism in the United States as they allow white America to hold up the successful Oriental image before other minority groups as the model to emulate.62 But, the change in Asian American demographics over the past four decades has altered the conditions in which this critique has been received. As Asian American scholars have frequently noted, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act marked the rise of a middle-class, professional Asian American population, altering both the class dynamics of the population as well as the ratio of foreign- to native-born Asian Americans.63 A large number of our current Asian American college students are the offspring of this demographic shifteither 1.5-generation, like Cho, or the American-born second generationand thus differ from the students of the 1970s movement who were likely to be third- or even fourth-generation Asian Americans. Pensri Ho has pointed out that these current students are partly shielded from racial marginalization by their class privilege, and often lack a historical memory of the explicit anti-Asian racism that earlier generations of Asian Americans faced.64 As a result, their experience of the concept of the model minority has been largely shaped by the historical conditions of the 1980s and 1990s,

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in which a shift from collective concerns to individual rights has focused attention on how the model minority stereotype affects individual Asian Americans, rather than on how it interpellates Asian Americans as a group within a larger, multiracial social formation.65 In this respect, we should recall that the idea of the stereotype, if traced back to its origins in Walter Lippmanns 1922 work, Public Opinion, is itself born of a deep suspicion both of the masses and of mass culture.66 Rather than raising an awareness of the processes of racialization, this recent critique of the model minority expresses an individualist anxiety over how the stereotype violates the notion of an authentic, unique self by imposing prior restraints upon its expression or activities. The violence with which Asian Americans react to the model minority stereotype is also a product of this contradiction between individual agency and collective racialization. On the extreme end, we can see this murderous impulse in former New York University student Kenneth Eng, who made waves twice in 2007: once for being fired by AsianWeek for writing an article entitled, Why I Hate Blacks, and the second time for claiming to admire Cho and calling the Virginia Tech shootings humorous.67 In both cases, Eng enacted a mock heroic defense of Asian American masculinity, repeatedly lamenting the lack of Asian heroes in the American media, and even claiming an explicit identification with Cho, and of Cho with him (Eng speculated that his own writings inspired the Virginia Tech shootings, and even floated a book proposal defending Cho.)68 The tone of Engs polemics recalls the heterosexist and masculinist protests associated with Frank Chin in the 1970s, insofar as they both deemed the failure of Asian Americans to resist the model minority as an inherent feminization and drew upon a syncretic, pan-Asian mythology to combat that feminization.69 In his earlier essay, Why I Hate Asians, Eng even returned to the setting of one of Fanons racialized primal scenesthe movie theaterto stage something like the revenge of the nerd:
If I saw an Asian being stereotyped in a movie theater, I would immediately stand up and shout incessantly at the screen so that none of the white audience members could enjoy the film . . . . But most other Asians, I am disappointed to say, would rather just chuckle at their own stereotypes on screen and ignore the problems of their brethren. At the risk of sounding corny, whatever happened to the days of the samurai?

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When honor meant more than life? Whatever happened to the age of Sun Tzu when we used to kick ass?70

As the conditional form of the first sentence betrays, this fantasy of disrupting the pleasure of the white gaze substitutes an encounter with the representational form of racism for a more material confrontation. This is not to assert a split between the real and the imaginary (which the Althusserian theory of ideology refuses), but to point to Engs rhetorical excess as a performative violence in the face of Asian American masculinitys perceived impotence. Were Engs rhetoric an isolated case, we could dismiss him as an unrepresentative lunatic, much as Cho is being dismissed now. Yet even a noted academic such as Frank Wu reproduces this rhetoric, albeit with a melancholic rather than swaggering tone. In his book, Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White, he begins his chapter debunking the model minority myth with the following personal confession:
I am not the model minority. Before I can talk about Asian American experiences at all, I have to kill off the model minority myth because the stereotype obscures many realities. . . . I would like to fail in school, for no reason other than to cast off my freakish alter ego of geek and nerd . . . . I yearn to be an artist, an athlete, a rebel, and, above all, an ordinary person.71

By using the verb, kill off, to refer to the model minority myth, Wu in effect animates the stereotype, attributing some kind of direct agency to this social construct. By implication, it is this freakish alter ego, and not the other exigencies of social life, which prevents Wu from assuming the other identities for which he yearns. In effect, the model minority is likened to psychic slavery, leading to a form of what Orlando Patterson has called social-death.72 Its particular form of enslavement is to block the forms of social and economic mobility that liberal individualism would have us believe is available to all motivated citizens. From Wus melancholic frustration to Engs comic rage, this spectrum of rhetorical violence reveals a desire for the diffuse ideology of racial interpellation to take embodied form, so as to make an easier target for anti-racist resistance. However, the stereotype itself is a red-herring; killing it off leaves intact the systems of racialization and exploitation that produced the racial fragmentation of labor in the first place.

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Racial interpellation, in the form of the model minority, already anticipates and even accommodates this type of resistance. Its complex and impossible imperatives towards whiteness and assimilation, which David Eng and Shinhee Han outline as forms of racial melancholia, mark the model minority as untenable as a subject position, with one symptom being the higher prevalence of suicide among Asian American students.73 What breaks down is not the process of racialization itself, but the racialized subject, and this is precisely what took place with Chos murder-suicide. Here, we see the antinomic conjunction of the model minority with what seems to be its oppositewhat Gary Okihiro names the yellow peril and Robert G. Lee terms the gook.74 For both of these historians, the antinomy of the model minority and the yellow peril/gook reflects the contradictions of capital and power as a way to manage economic crises at particular historical junctures (for Okihiro, the early 1900s; for Lee, the 1970s). Under the logic of capitalism, the cheerful story of economic success contains its own undoing, in the form of the racial enemy who personifies the systems of exploitation that make such success possible. The model minority proves that we can all make it if we try, but the yellow peril/gook reveals how Asian Americans succeed unfairly, through deception or violence. This contradiction manifests in Chos figure as the perpetual foreigner cum mass murderer, whose existence does not undo the model minority but in fact reinforces it by policing the boundary between model and murderer. Through Chos failure to fulfill the terms of the model minority, the success of all other model minorities is affirmed. Hence, both sides of this antinomy uphold the larger system of racialization which relies upon such categories to produce docile Asian American subjects. Far from killing off the model minority, the Virginia Tech shootings offer a limited case for the politics of declining the stereotype, or of confronting racialization with a refusal to play according to its terms.75 It is more than a conceptual short-circuit which makes the stereotype difficult to escape. It is also the ideological field which limits the ways one can respond to the stereotype. Even if the stereotype of the model minority designates some form of social death for Asian Americans, by relegating to them a socio-political impotence, this tragic narrative exaggerates the psychic consequences of being stereotyped and even hides the

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complicity of some Asian Americans in their own racialization. In other words, there are dangerous consequences to the way Asian Americans currently deploy their critique of the model minority myth. In reaching for authentic, unencumbered individuality as the absence of stereotype, Asian Americans play into the larger structural function of the model minority, a move to which Vijay Prashad has astutely referred as the solution to the problem of African Americans in the American black-white binary.76 While Kenneth Engs comments have shown the absurdity of claiming Cho as an Asian American hero, there remain heroic undertones in other descriptions of Asian Americans confronting their own model minority doppelganger, which play up this self-contained dualism without attending to the larger ideologies within which racialization is situated. We would do well to remember the ending to Edgar Allan Poes William WilsonA Tale, in which the dying doppelganger says to his murderer: In me didst thou existand, in my death, see by this image, which is thine, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.77

concluSion: towArdS

Realpolitik of interpellAtion

My attempt to think of interpellation rather than racialization is not simply a matter of semantic substitution. Whereas the term, racialization, implies a process that is simply done to racialized subjects, racial interpellation is as much about a subjects own role in both recognizing herself as racialized and in living a life conditioned by the possibilities that racialization offers. In the case of Virginia Tech, interpellation gives rise to both the conditions for anti-Asian backlash as well as the conditions for resistance to that backlash. It writes Asian Americans as the subject of media coverage but also offers those Asian Americans a subject position from which to respond to that media. And, it articulates the link between our perceived individualism and our collective experiences. In short, racial interpellation may be both the poison and the cure for anti-Asian racism. A critique of racism cannot be separated from a critique of our own conceptions of subjectivity and resistance, including our accepted notions of civil rights and social justice. By extension, racial ideology is not simply a dominant fiction imposed from above upon us poor racialized dupes of the system. If any particular

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idea, such as the current ascendancy of color-blindness, becomes hegemonic, it does so by virtue of consent by those who must live through this idea. But, hegemony or dominance is never an inevitable conclusion, nor is consent equal to monolithic agreement, and the constantly shifting nature of these ideologies reveals the pressures placed upon them both by active resistance and by the vicissitudes of historical change. As Althusser reminds us, despite the seemingly totalizing nature of ideology, the ruling ideology is never a fait accompli of the class struggle, and therefore immune to the influence of the class struggle itself.78 Or, in the words of Stuart Hall: The ideologies of racism remain contradictory structures, which can function both as the vehicles for the imposition of dominant ideologies, and as the elementary forms for the cultures of resistance.79 Thus, the possibility of resistance is already contained in the structure of racial ideology. If the model minority is indeed the current face of Asian American racialization, it cannot be treated as a mere effigy of power that we all attack. Rather, it should be examined as a site of struggle, as a symptom of a larger problem involving the structuring of all forms of racialization and their truth-effects in a linked system of exploitation and domination. By now, the media which so heavily promoted the story of the Asian shooter has pronounced its own mea culpa by no longer reporting on race at all in connection to the Virginia Tech shootings. Tired of waiting for the sensationalized anti-Asian backlash to occur, the media has switched instead to the story of mental illness, using the opposition between reason and madness to replace the original racialized dichotomy between citizen and foreigner to explain Chos actions. And, some Asian Americans have followed, describing the essentially Asian resistance to psychological counseling as partly responsible for the shootings.80 By separating out the racial component from the mental health issue, the media is able to deny the importance of Asian American racialization to the story of the shootings, and thus keep the core of American society intact as racially progressive. As Jon Meacham, editor of Newsweek, commented on covering the Virginia Tech shootings on NBCs Meet the Press: one of the things I found so striking was the diversity of the victims . . . its a snapshot of what the country is. And its a diverse country and its a good country.81

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The victims of the shootings are converted into testaments of diversity, and sympathy for the Hokie Nation is diverted into an affirmation of U.S. nationalism. It is also significant that the Virginia Tech shootings took place at a university, presumably a sanctuary of higher learning and a cosmopolitan refuge from the prejudices of provincialism. But the university, as much as the media, is a crucial ideological state apparatus, propagating a corporate multiculturalism that aids in the management of racial difference among the professional and managerial classes it trains. My current position, a mere two hours away from the site of the shootings, is itself an outgrowth of the co-optation of Asian American Studies within this neo-liberal agenda, allowing the university to claim an interest in diversity even as it intensifies the material and ideological disparities underlying racism. Asian Americans are of interest to the university insofar as they represent an untapped source of revenue and consent. If the Vincent Chin case has served as one of the ways Asian American studies has promoted the building of a collective memory of Asian America as an oppositional formation within the U.S. nation-state, how will the Virginia Tech shootings fit into that collective memory?82 Will we be able to think the transition of Asian Americans from victims to perpetrators of violence, and to understand that this, too, is a product of racial interpellation? The shootings are a sobering reminder that the university is not an idealized space of intellectual exchange free from the coercive power dynamics circulating through the rest of society. This leads us to a very difficult question, which is beyond the scope of this article to answer: What is Asian American Studies for? If the discipline itself was born in a different ideological era and under different historical conditions, what purpose does it serve in our present moment? One outspoken critic of Asian American Studies and other ethnic studies formations, Walter Benn Michaels, accuses the discipline of being a kind of blackface, a performance that produces the image of racialized oppression alongside the reality of economic success.83 Although I disagree fully with Michaelss premises about the nature and function of Asian American Studies, I must admit that I, too, am also troubled by the contradiction between racializationagain, as a thing done to subjectsand class privi-

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lege.84 In our contemporary tendency to think racialization as all those things (including the model minority myth) which hinder our individual freedoms, are we trying to produce Asian Americans who are free to earn as much as possible, to sleep with whomever they want, and to do whatever they want, unlike those poor, discriminated-against souls we study in the past? Is this hedonistic full subject the goal of our pedagogical endeavors? If so, then there is no way for Asian Americans to understand Seung-Hui Cho except to exclude him from our racial formation. Although I exaggerate here for the sake of polemics, I fear that such a goal actually animates the Asian American civil rights rhetoric that dominates our public activism and our response to the Virginia Tech shootings. This is not to let the mainstream media off the hook for their own unsavory investment in such racial spectacles. But, I am weary of the politics of representation, of fighting over good and bad, true and false images of Asian Americans. Even Kenneth Eng was able to recite the standard lessons of Asian American Studies in his hysterical defense of Chothe murder of Vincent Chin, the history of Asian stereotypes in Hollywood, the feminization of Asian males. These lessons alone did not prevent him from reaching for the most reactionary of responses to compete in the medias marketplace of ideas. We have responded to the Virginia Tech shootings as a battle against racism, but who is the enemy in this battle? Cho? The media? Ourselves? By reaching for the obvious tactics of media protest, including the preoccupation with stereotyping and the call to action against an anti-Asian backlash, we have avoided the difficulty of self-analysis, of confronting the meaning of Chos image for Asian America. Althusser, Hall, and others remind us that ideology is both discursive and material, and that images partake of both the real and the imaginary. Chos image presents us not with a stereotype to be refuted, or a negative model to be disavowed, but a reminder of the material stakes and real consequences of our contradictory and always already racialized selves?. A viable pan-ethnic Asian American collective must be able to speak for all its members, even those who commit extreme acts of violence that we ultimately cannot condone, for these are the most vulnerable subjects of racial interpellation, the ones who can no longer speak for themselves.

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notes
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. I would like to thank Eric Lott, Michael Puri, Guo-Juin Hong, James Kim, and Eng-Beng Lim for their extensive comments, Sarah Wilcox Elliott, Project RISE, and the Asian Student Union at UVa for giving me access to important primary sources, and Min Hyoung Song at JAAS for his incisive editing. Andrew Lam, Let It Be Some Other Asian, New American Media, 17 April 2007, http://news.newamericanmedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_ id=e3b9c4941f9d849f93. This article was widely reproduced on the Internet, and was even posted onto the web edition of The Nation. Adrian Hong, Koreans Arent To Blame, Washington Post, 20 April 2007, A31, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/19/ AR2007041902942_pf.html; Song Jie-Ae, South Korea Shocked by U.S. Shooting Link, CNN.com, 18 April 2007, http://www.cnn.com/2007/ WORLD/asiapcf/04/17/vatech.seoul/. Asian American Journalists Association, Coverage on Virginia Tech Shooting Incident, 16 April 2007, http://www.aaja.org/news/aajanews/2007_04_16_ 01/, and Continuing Coverage on Virginia Tech Shooting, 17 April 2007, http://www.aaja.org/news/aajanews/2007_04_17_01/. Bob Drogin, Faye Fiore and K. Connie Kang, Bright Daughter, Brooding Son: Enigma in the Cho Household, Los Angeles Times, 22 April 2007, http:// www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-cho22apr22,1,6085952. story?page=1; Lead Editorial: We Are All Americans, AsianWeek.com, 20 April 2007, http://news.asianweek.com/news/view_article.html?article_id= 07371cb4e8319538ba3953b29d0a4c8b&this_category_id=172. Major news organizations such as National Public Radio and Associated Press changed their representation of Chos name from Cho Seung-Hui to Seung-Hui Cho, a switch that both honored the preference of the Cho family and emphasized Chos Asian Americanness. Richard Prince, AP Switches on Chos Name; Asian Journalists Presence Felt on Va. Tech Story, Richard Princes Journal-Isms: An Online Column, 20 April 2007, http://www.maynardije. org/columns/dickprince/070420_prince. Esther Wu, Asians on Edge after Virginia Deaths, Dallas Morning News, 26 April 2007, http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/ stories/DN-wu_26met.ART0.North.Edition1.43ce3ca.html. Jam Sardar, Interview with Bill OReilly, The OReilly Factor, Fox News, 20 April 2007, transcript accessed through Lexis-Nexus. Language of the Racial Privacy Initiative, 28 September 2001, archived at Adversity.net: A Civil Rights Organization for Color Blind Justice, http://www. adversity.net/RPI/RPI_pages/2_language.htm. One of the main sponsors of this initiative was Ward Connerly, a former University of California regent who was also behind the anti-affirmative action Proposition 209, passed in California in 1996.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

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Liberal individualism has a long history in American political life, its various forms outlined and debated by numerous critics such as Michael Sandel, Michael Walzer and Charles Taylor, among others (see note 22). For a summary of these debates, see Elizabeth Frazer, The Problems of Communitarian Politics: Unity and Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). The particular manifestations of American liberalism are discussed in Carol A. Horton, Race and the Making of American Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). Horton has dated this latest manifestation of liberal individualism as it pertains to racial politics to 1975, when Nathan Glazer linked the new efforts in affirmative action with the decently deposed Jim Crow laws, both of which constituted violations of an American liberal tradition. See Horton, 20102. 9. The Internet has radically altered the shape of the public sphere available for analysis by media critics such as myself. Non-traditional sources such as blogs and emails have allowed new voices to enter this sphere, and while their writings may lack the circulation and the cultural capital that accompany established publications, they are able to respond to and comment upon new information and changing circumstances more quickly and freely than authorized reporters. But we also must bear in mind the reciprocal influences of these sources on the traditional media, whose Internet presence also differs greatly from their usual print and televised outlets. The websites of news organizations such as CNN, NBC, the Washington Post, and the New York Times supplemented their coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings by offering additional materials online (Chos plays, suicide note, and photographs, or cell phone videos from Virginia Tech students). We should also distinguish between news blogs (unofficial journalism) blogs about the news (cf. Poynter Institute) in which working journalists reflect upon and critique the practices of their colleagues. It is too soon to conclude that these changes are necessarily democratizing the nature of the news media and making the public sphere more inclusive. For more on these developments, please see Blogging, Citizenship and the Future of Media, ed. Mark Tremayne (Hoboken: Taylor & Francis, 2006). 10. The inclusion of the religions identity Muslim alongside ethnic/racial designations such as Arab or South Asian is a result of the racial profiling that has taken place in the wake of 9/11, which has had the effect of racializing the category of Muslim into its own pan-ethnic designation. See Leti Volpp, The Citizen and the Terrorist, UCLA Law Review 49 (2002): 15751600. 11. It is important to acknowledge that the victims of the Virginia Tech shootings included a number of Asians and Asian Americans (G.V. Loganathan, Partahi M. Lumbantoruan, Minal Panchal, Henry J. Lee, and Mary Karen Read). However, it is equally important to note that the media representations of the Virginia Tech 32 as a whole have tended to de-emphasize the race of the victims, especially when compared to the emphasis on the race of the shooter.

8.

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12. Thomas T. Huang, Who Does He Look Like?, Poynter Online: Journalism With a Difference, 20 April 2007, http://www.poynter.org/column. asp?id=58&aid=121748. 13. Susan Paynter, Feeling The Ripples Of Virginia Tech, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 25 April 2007, D1. 14. Margaret Kamara, Asian Panel Debunks Model Minority Myth, Diverse Issues in Higher Education, 10 May 2007, http://www.diverseeducation. com/artman/publish/article_7318.shtml. 15. Being-looked-at-racially is a specific form of what Jean-Paul Sartre has called being-looked-at, a state which implies the existence of Others around the self and situates that self in a necessarily embodied, non-transcendent form. See Sartre, The Look, in Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), 340400. The concept of the look will prove to be central to Frantz Fanons analysis of blackness within the visual field, as discussed below. 16. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 112. 17. Ibid., 110. 18. Ibid., 13. 19. Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 134160. 20. Stephen Parsley, Overstated Fears of Racist Backlash, Cavalier Daily, 26 April 2007, http://www.cavalierdaily.com/CVArticle.asp?ID=30384&pid=1589. 21. For example, see Michael Walzer, Liberalism and the Art of Separation, Political Theory 12.3 (Aug 1984): 315330; Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Michael Sandel, The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self, Political Theory 12.1 (Feb 1984): 8196. 22. Fanon, 162n251. 23. Although this thesis is most explicitly developed in Foucaults work on the history of sexuality, it can also be seen in his study of the modern prison and the dispersal of disciplinary procedures throughout civic society. See The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), and Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison,. trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977). In an interview with Quel Corps?, Foucault connected the theses of these two works along the lines of the productivity of power over the body as we know it. See Body/Power, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 19721977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 5562. 24. Louis Althusser lays out his famous definition of interpellation as his second thesis on the functioning of ideology in the Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127186. However, a clearer definition of the concept of ideology appears in an earlier essay, Marxism

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25.

26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

31.

32. 33. 34.

and Humanism, in For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1996), 219247, in which Althusser discusses bourgeois humanism as a form of ideology. Stuart Hall discusses both these Althusser essays in Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-Structuralist Debates, Critical Studies in Mass Communication 2:2 (June 1985): 91114. Hall also offers an application of this notion of ideology using the case of Thatcherism in The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism among the Theorists, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 3573. Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, 162; Hall, Signification, Representation, Ideology, 103, paraphrasing Althusser in Marxism and Humanism, 23334, defines ideology as systems of representationcomposed of concepts, ideas, myths, or imagesin which men and women . . . live their imaginary relations to the real conditions of existence. Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, 170. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 2930. Although it is commonly thought that the theories of Foucault and Althusser are irreconcilable, both Slavoj Zizek and Warren Montag argue that Foucaults concept of discourse has a materialist basis not far from Althussers concept of ideology as an unconscious representation of the conditions of existence, and Montag contends that the construction of the interiority of subjects (in opposition to their material existence) in the case of modern disciplinary systems is a crucial step in interpellating subjects who will then police their own practices. See Montag, The Soul is the Prison of the Body: Althusser and Foucault, 19701975, Yale French Studies 88 (1995): 5377; Zizek, The Spectre of Ideology, in Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Zizek (London: Verso, 1994), 133. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 17, 15. Marianne Constable, Foucault and Walzer: Sovereignty, Strategy and the State, Polity 24.2 (Winter 1991): 290291. Edward Taehan Chang, Feelings of Guilt by Association; But Does the Ethnicity of the Virginia Tech Gunman Really Matter?, Los Angeles Times, 18 April 2007, A21. Frank Wu, keynote speech, End of the Model Minority Myth: Reflections on the Virginia Tech Tragedy from Asian American Perspectives, University of Maryland, College Park, 9 May 2007. Minority Student Issues, DVD, CSPAN2, 2007. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 140. Huang, Who Does He Look Like? Jenn Fang, hbos the sopranos and the vt massacre, Reappropriate blog, 23 April 2007, http://www.reappropriate.com/?p=674. Quoted in Jeff Yang, Asian Pop: Angry Asian Men, 8 May 2007, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/ article.cgi?f=/g/a/2007/05/08/apop.DTL.

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35. Quoted in AFP (Agence France-Press), Despite Fear, Campus Asians Face No Post-Massacre Backlash, reposted by Philippine News, 2 May 2007, http://www.philippinenews.com/news/view_article.html?article_id=00684 4e174154ed1cb4ec725285f3b9a. 36. Patrick Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 179. 37. See Richard Prince, Is It OK to Call Suspect an Asian Man?, Richard Princes Journal-Isms: An Online Column, 17 April 2007, http://www.maynardije. org/columns/dickprince/070417_prince/. 38. Milton Heumann and Lance Cassak, Good Cop, Bad Cop: Racial Profiling and Competing Views of Justice (New York: Peter Lang, 2003), 111. 39. Muneer I. Ahmad, A Rage Shared By Law: Post-September 11 Racial Violence as Crimes of Passion, California Law Review 92 (October 2004): 12591330, 1306, 1277. 40. Ibid, 1277. 41. Caroline Aoyagi-Stom, Are Asian Males Unwilling Targets of Virginia Tech Fallout? Pacific Citizen, 24 May 2007, posted at New American Media, http:// news.ncmonline.com/news/view_article.html?article_id=10428a6d3230f8 4f21455d9f53cfeed0. These cases include Allen Lee, a Chicago high school student who was arrested for writing a violent-themed essay; Tharindu Meepegama, a SUNY Cobleskill student who was suspended for posting a picture of himself holding a shotgun on Facebook; an unnamed Chinese American high school student in Fort Bend County Texas, who posted maps of his school for a video game; and Rithichai (Toro) Yibcharoenporn, a doctoral student at the Illinois State University, who was expelled and subsequently deported shortly after he reportedly asked about buying a gun. The hate crime at Auburn University is still being investigated at the time of this writing. 42. Caroline Aoyagi-Stom, A Return to Classes Brings Unease for Some Virginia Tech AA Students, Pacific Citizen, 4 May 2007, http://www.pacificcitizen. org/content/2007/national/may4-stom-virginiatech.htm. 43. An Asian American student leader at the University of Virginia, who had a reputation for being confrontational or difficult, reported that other students had started to call him Cho. Personal communication to author, 10 May 2007. 44. Rajesh Jain, Avoiding Anti-Asian Backlash, The Cavalier Daily, 26 April 2007, http://www.cavalierdaily.com/CVArticle.asp?ID=30382&pid=1589, my emphasis. 45. Patrick J. Buchanan, The Dark Side of Diversity, Townhall.com, 1 May 2007, http://www.townhall.com/columnists/column.aspx?UrlTitle=the_ dark_side_of_diversity&ns=PatrickJBuchanan&dt=05/01/2007&page=1; David Duke, Where Cho Was Taught to Hate, 25 April 2007, http://www. davidduke.com/general/2077_2077.html. 46. See Chavez v. Illinois State Police, 251 F.3d 612 (2001), 620, quoted in Charu A. Chandrasekhar, Note and Comment: Flying While Brown: Federal Civil

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47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54.

55. 56. 57.

58.

Rights Remedies to Post-9/11 Airline Racial Profiling of South Asians, Asian Law Journal 10 (May 2003), 200. This is the basic definition that has been adopted by the American Civil Liberties Union. See Racial Profiling: Definition, 23 November 2005, http://www.aclu.org/racialjustice/racialprofiling/ 21741res20051123.html. The American Civil Liberties Union has taken a particularly active stance against racial profiling. See, for instance, the work of Reginald T. Shuford, a senior staff attorney with the national ACLU, and David A. Harris, a University of Toledo law professor who also authored a special report for the ACLU. Shuford, Civil Rights in the Next Millennium: Any Way You Slice It: Why Racial Profiling Is Wrong, St. Louis University Public Law Review 18 (1999): 371380. Harris, Driving While Black: Racial Profiling on Our Nations Highways, ACLU Publications, 7 June 1999, http://www.aclu.org/racialjustice/racialprofiling/15912pub19990607.html, and Profiles in Injustice: Why Racial Profiling Cannot Work (New York: The New Press, 2002). Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 28, 139. Devon W. Carbado, (E)racing the Fourth Amendment, Michigan Law Review 100 (March 2002): 9461044, 974. Ibid, 1041. The term politics of respectability is taken from Randall Kennedy, Race, Crime, and the Law (New York: Pantheon, 1997). Huang, Who Does He Look Like?, my emphasis. Jeff Yang, Killer Reflection, Salon.com, 19 April 2007, http://www.salon. com/opinion/feature/2007/04/19/cho_shooting/index.html, my emphasis. C.N. Le, Asian Identity of Virginia Tech Gunman, Asian-Nation: Asian American History, Demographics, & Issues, 17 April 2007, http://www.asiannation.org/headlines/2007/04/asian-identity-of-virginia-tech-gunman/. Dave Sidhu, Learning from the Past, Moving Forward Together, intentBlog, 6 May 2007, http://www.intentblog.com/archives/2007/05/learning_from_t.html. One alternate viewpoint expressed by an Arab American feminist blogger is that the analogy between Virginia Tech and 9/11 is facile and obscures the much larger scale of oppression being directed at Muslims, Arabs, and Middle Easterners, as a result of the war on terror. See Why the Virginia Tech Massacre is different from 9/11, No Snow Here, 18 April 2007, http://nosnowhere.wordpress.com/2007/04/18/why-the-virginia-tech-massacre-is-different-from-911/. Quoted in Lam, Let it Be Some Other Asian, Personal communication, 10 May 2007. AFP, Despite Fear, Campus Asians Face No Post-Massacre Backlash; Joanna Law, How Asian-American students feel about the Virginia Tech Tragedy, La Voz Online, 30 April 2007, http://media.www.lavozdeanza.com/media/storage/paper911/news/2007/04/30/News/How-AsianAmerican.Students.Feel. About.The.Virginia.Tech.Tragedy-2875065.shtml. Frank H. Wu, Foreword Profiling Principle: The Prosecution of Wen Ho Lee and the Defense of Asian Americans, UCLA Asian Pacific American Law Journal 7 (Spring 2001): 56.

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59. Tamara K. Nopper, What May Come: Asian Americans and the Virginia Tech Shootings, Azine: Asian American Movement Ezine, 17 April 2007, http://www.aamovement.net/viewpoints/2007/virginiatech.html. 60. Quoted in Kamara, Asian Panel Debunks Model Minority Myth. 61. End of the Model Minority Myth: Reflections on the Virginia Tech Tragedy from Asian American Perspectives, University of Maryland, College Park, 9 May 2007. Minority Student Issues, DVD, C-SPAN2, 2007. 62. Amy Uyematsu, The Emergence of Yellow Power in America, Gidra (October 1969). Reprinted in Roots: An Asian American Reader, eds. Amy Tachiki, Eddie Wong, Franklin Odo, and Buck Wong (Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1971): 11. 63. For one summary of this demographic shift, see Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1991), 145152. More recently, Mae Ngai has re-examined the effects of the 1965 Immigration Act, arguing against the perception of its liberal pluralism by linking it to increased economic nationalism and the criminalization of immigration from the Americas. See Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 227264. 64. Pensri Ho, Performing the Oriental: Professionals and the Asian Model Minority Myth, Journal of Asian American Studies 6.2 (June 2003): 170. 65. See Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994), 113136, for a historical discussion of the convergence of neoconservativism and the New Right in the 1970s and 80s, and how that has affected even the liberal discourse on race and civil rights in the 1990s. 66. For an extended critique of Lippmann and the resulting sociological research on stereotypes, see Ellen Seiter, Stereotypes and the Media: A Re-evaluation, Journal of Communication 36.2 (Spring 1986): 1426; Michael Pickering, Stereotyping: The Politics of Representation (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 1621. 67. Kenneth Eng, Why I Hate Blacks, AsianWeek, 23 Feb 2007, reposted by the Coalition of Asian Pacific Americans, 23 Feb 2007, http://www.capaweb. org/awpetition/AsianAmerican_Leaders_Condemn_Racist_AW_Article. pdf; Chlo A. Hilliard, Sharing in the Gory: Already a Pariah, Kenneth Eng Goes Even Lower, Village Voice, 1 May 2007, http://www.villagevoice. com/news/0718,hilliard,76520,2.html. 68. Mein Kampf: Kenneth Eng Full Of Murderous Rage, Savvy Marketing Strategies, Gawker Daily Manhattan Media News and Gossip,, 4 May 2007, http://www.gawker.com/news/mein-kampf/kenneth-eng-full-of-murderousrage-savvy-marketing-strategies-257856.php. 69. This was a very contentious issue for an earlier generation of Asian American literary critics, especially as Chin used his position to attack both female and queer writers for contributing to the emasculation of Asian men. See Chin et al., An Introduction to Chinese- and Japanese-American Literature, in Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers, ed. Jeffrey Paul Chan et

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70. 71. 72.

73.

74.

75. 76.

77. 78.

79.

al. (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1974), xxixlviii, and Chin, Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake, in The Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese and Japanese American Literature, ed. Jeffrey Paul Chan et al. (New York: Meridian, 1991), 193. For one feminist response to Chin, see King-Kok Cheung, The Woman Warrior versus The Chinaman Pacific: Must a Chinese American Critic Choose between Feminism and Heroism?, in Conflicts in Feminism, ed. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (New York: Routledge, 1990), 234251. For a detailed explication of the theme of masculinity in Chins own work, see Daniel Y. Kim, Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow: Ralph Ellison, Frank Chin, and the Literary Politics of Identity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 128134. Eng, Why I Hate Asians. Frank Wu, Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 3940. See Abdul R. JanMohameds explication of Pattersons Slavery and Social Death in Abdul R. JanMohamed, The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wrights Archaeology of Death (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 1618. I am not submitting the model minority as a state directly comparable to slavery, but merely pointing out one of the more melodramatic endpoints of the Asian American rhetoric responding to the model minority. David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia, in Loss: The Politics of Mourning, ed. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003): 343371. See Gary Y. Okihiro, Perils of the Body and Mind, in Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994), 118147; Robert G. Lee, The Model Minority as Gook, in Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), 180203. See Mireille Rosello, Declining the Stereotype (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Press, 1998). Prashad is responding to W.E.B. DuBois question that begins The Souls of Black Folk, How does it feel to be a problem? Addressing Asian Americans, and South Asians in particular, Prashad asks instead, How does it feel to be a solution? Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), viiviii. Edgar Allan Poe, William WilsonA Tale, in The Unabridged Edgar Allan Poe (Philadelphia: Running Press, 1983), 565. Louis Althusser, Extracts from Althussers Note on the ISAs, trans. Jeremy Leaman, in appendix to Mike Gane, On the ISAs Episode, Economy and Society 12.4 (November 1983): 431467. Originally published as Ideologie und ideologische Staatsapparate (Hamburg: VSA, 1977). Stuart Hall, Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Domination, in Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, ed. Houston A. Baker, Jr., Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996):

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81. 82. 83. 84.

57. Originally published in Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (Paris: UNESCO, 1980), 305345. Jean H. Lee, Virginia Korean Community Still Reeling, Washington Post, 22 April 2007, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/22/AR2007042200936_pf.html. Meet the Press, NBC, 22 April 2007, transcript at http://www.msnbc.msn. com/id/18230965/print/1/displaymode/1098/. Mae M. Ngai, The Legacy of Vincent Chin: A Twentieth Anniversary Commemoration, Amerasia Journal 28.3 (2002): 5. Walter Benn Michaels, Why Identity Politics Distracts Us from Economic Inequalities, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 15 December 2006, B10. This critique is taken up more extensively by Kandice Chuh in Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), and by Viet Thanh Nguyen in Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).