Possible Racist Backlash of Virginia Tech Shootings

[Voronwë the Faithful]

The question that needs to be asked (certainly at least in the context of this thread) is whether he would have been arrested if he had been of European descent rather then Asian-American? I can't help feeling that he would not have been.

[Athrabeth]

I'm not so sure about that, Voronwë. I can definitely see the same over-reactive consequence being dealt out regardless of the student's race. I think things are really that sensitive "out there" right now.

It might be just as interesting to consider if Lee, as a Chinese-American student, would have more than the usual teenage desire to shock and awe a teacher he didn't like by writing what he did after the VT shootings. Just as interesting, but just as elusive.

[axordil]

There's really no way of knowing if in that particular case race played an issue...unless it turns out a white kid wrote something just as disturbing and skated.

Personally, I'm more troubled by the notion of an honors student who WANTS to join the Marines. Now.

[MithLuin]

The problem is that "warning signs" like that so often don't lead to trouble. Looking at it from the other end, after a tragedy, it may seem so obvious—but adolescent boys often have and express violent fantasies without necessarily even being abnormal.

Completely. There are a few details in this article that are (to my mind) very telling.

First - the teacher was in her first year. If you are a first-year teacher and you read an essay like this, you flip out. You don't have any context to know if the kid was just joking. I remember asking students to write about a difficult time in their lives (or something) and getting essays about the day their moms died. I did not expect that, because I didn't even know they'd lost their moms. Now I know that certain topics will bring up things, so I am not as surprised. Considering her shock, and the timing....I would imagine this is connected to the VT incident. Not because of race, though - because the killer wrote violent plays. That puts the idea out there, "We should pay attention to what our students write." I know a teacher who had a student write (unprompted) a disturbingly detailed account of how he was going to rape her. I think he even illustrated it. He passed it around the class on a day when she had a sub. The next day, her other students told her about it, because they were freaked out. What happened? She photocopied it and went to the principal, saying "I don't want this student in my class anymore." He said, "Tough - I see no problem." She moved to another state. That is a lot different than this.

Second - the violent acts were described as happening in a dream, not for real (and then the dream wasn't even a real dream). I know for a fact that my little brother has had violent dreams in which he takes guns and kills people on a regular basis since he was about 4 years old. He could talk about them in great detail when he woke up - and they sounded like a movie or video game. They were just thrillers, shoot-em-ups. Sometimes he got shot, too - he was usually being chased by people with guns. The point of the dream was not the violence, but the plot. He also had dreams about his strategy for Axis and Allies, but I didn't think he was going to start a war! My brother is not violent - he does not get in fights. He plays rugby and paintball, and sometimes tussles with his brother. But - he is very much normal. He understands the distinction between watching a movie where everyone gets his brains blown out and killing someone. My brother would never hit me, even though I hit him plenty when he was little.

Third - Writing gives you a window into a person's thoughts, but it is not a clear one. If someone describes something in great detail or with great emotion, then you can suspect it is important to them. But I've written something a lot more violent then what this boy wrote, and that doesn't mean I have a secret desire to tie someone up and thrash them until they bleed to death, or cut out their heart, or anything like that. It just means that Death Eaters are nasty people, and I wrote a story that had them as main characters . Similarly, a girl in my high school committed suicide the year after she graduated. When it happened, people went back and read her submissions to the school poetry booklet - they were despressed-sounding. But you know what? So was everyone else's. Teenage girls will write about how their lives are horrible and no one understands them and they are so alone. It doesn't make them suicidal. How can you tell the difference between normal teen angst and suicidal depression in a poem? Most people can't...because they use the same words, and the only difference is that the suicidal person means them. My other brother (the one at VT) said his reaction after coming out of the movie theater when he saw 300 was that he "wanted to kill someone." He meant he was pumped up. Talking about guns, even often and in great detail, does not make someone a criminal. It might be a reason to have a conversation, of course - much more minor incidents than this essay would concern a parent or a teacher.

But kids do the darnedest things. A student just came in my room with a paper bag containing a cockroach. She wanted me to keep it as a pet. I explained to her that if she left it in my room, I would kill it. Why would anyone want to save the life of a cockroach? Even a poor, defenseless cockroach? I do not know. She left it on someone's desk with a note.

[axordil]

How can you tell the difference between normal teen angst and suicidal depression in a poem? Most people can't...because they use the same words, and the only difference is that the suicidal person means them.

Well put. Although I might say the suicidally depressed poet means them in a different way, as a plan of action instead of simply, as the games say, QQing. The vast majority of literary angst does NOT lead to violence.

[axordil]

On this note, from the NYT today:

On Education
Deciding When Student Writing Crosses the Line
By JOSEPH BERGER

AMHERST, Mass.

In the wake of the Virginia Tech killings, creative writing teachers across the country have been wondering what they would have done if the gunman, Seung-Hui Cho, had been writing troubling stories in their classrooms.

Perhaps no other teaching position offers as intimate a perch into the hearts and minds of students — and poses as many difficulties. These teachers ask students to write stories that reflect the wider culture or their own interior life, and the picture is not always pretty.

Teachers at colleges as different as Amherst, Marquette and the University of California at San Diego say students often depict scenes of violence or concoct narratives in which people hurt themselves. The students may be paying homage to favorite movies or mimicking the world around them. After all, these are children who grew up with Columbine, and many echo what Elizabeth Minkel, a senior in Alexander Chee’s writing class at Amherst, said: “I spent all of high school feeling someone could come into my class with a gun at any time.”

The teachers are called upon to prowl that fine line between what is discerning and what is disturbing, what are the creations of a fevered imagination and what are the cries of a troubled heart.

A writing teacher is sometimes like the Michael Douglas detective in “Basic Instinct,” trying to decide whether Sharon Stone’s sultry novelist is toying with him in her potboilers or telegraphing plans for murder. Teachers also know that literature — “Hamlet,” “Oedipus Rex,” “Anna Karenina” — is pocked with mayhem or self-destruction in which violence is essential. As C. J. Hribal, a professor of English at Marquette, said, Oedipus’s rapping his knuckles would not have packed the same tragic wallop as Oedipus’s tearing out his eyes.

But when do violent passages need watching, even attending to? And how does a teacher prepare a response that is therapeutic rather than invasive?

There is a case for delving deeper, teachers say, when the darkness of the prose matches the student’s mood or behavior. A Sylvia Plath-like exploration of depression may be more alarming when it is matched by a Sylvia Plath-like withdrawal and deep unhappiness.

At Virginia Tech, Mr. Cho’s teachers stepped in when he wrote his play “Richard McBeef,” in which a teenager threatens to kill his stepfather to prevent his own rape, because Mr. Cho was also frightening students with erratic behavior, like asking to be called Question Mark. One teacher tutored Mr. Cho, another banished him, others alerted deans. Still, the authorities never put all their concerns together to make a case for his removal.

Mr. Chee, Amherst’s visiting writer, recalled that when he was teaching graduate students in New York, one wrote a memoir in which she told of having been a closeted lesbian preparing to become a nun and trying to kill herself.

“I didn’t go on red alert precisely, even though I was deeply alarmed,” Mr. Chee said. “I wrote back to her, ‘Where’s the chapter where the character talks to a therapist about trying to kill herself?’ ”

He learned that the student had been treated at a hospital for a suicide attempt but had never discussed it with her therapist. He urged her to do so.

Another student of Mr. Chee’s, whom he taught at Wesleyan, wrote a story about a girl who cuts her flesh. In conference, she confided that writing about cutting was not quieting her own impulses. She was not in therapy, so Mr. Chee told her how therapy had helped him.

But writing teachers face a quandary: What some observers consider warning signs could be misleading, and intervening could squelch a young writer’s voice.

“A creative writing class should be a place where you can write things that are disturbing without people thinking you’re disturbed,” said Sam Maurey, a junior in Mr. Chee’s class. Moreover, as Mr. Chee explained, there is a “typical male student” who “writes things that try to shock,” and these violence-filled works need to be seen in perspective.

“They break certain cultural taboos, but in those cases, the students are usually quite socialized and not the kind of shut-down loner we saw at Virginia Tech,” Mr. Chee said.

Probing deeply into a student’s life would not only brand such a student as unstable but also constrain an honest voice. Students fret enough about exposing stories about failed romances or family illnesses, fearing these will be seen by classmates as autobiographical.

To get students to lay bare feelings, teachers like Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, who teaches in San Diego, create an atmosphere where, as Ms. Bynum said, “no topic is off limits, where they are given the freedom to write about those places in their imagination that are very dark and embarrassing and disturbing because often very powerful writing comes precisely from those places.”

STUDENTS sometimes censor their writing because they do not want to be seen as politically incorrect. “During the height of identity politics,” said Constance Congdon, Amherst’s playwright in residence, “one of the biggest hurdles I had to get over is making sure students knew they were allowed to create characters who may be anti-Semitic, misogynistic, violent, that it’s O.K. to do that. If they start censoring themselves, than the muse just shuts up.”

Writing teachers are not therapists, and writing, as therapeutic as it may be, is not therapy by other means. So teachers try to focus on the craft. “Students are asking me to see what they write as a piece of fiction, and they’re not saying ‘I want to talk about my life,’ ” Mr. Chee said.

One student, Priyanka Jacob, a senior, bolstered Mr. Chee’s literary point just before his workshop last Thursday in which a story with Harry Potter overtones was dissected. She observed that a gratuitous sexual assault in a story might be worrisome, but not one that filled in a character or elicited a political response.

Horrors like the Virginia Tech killings complicate teachers’ jobs because the events and the accompanying media overload — like the repeatedly shown video of Mr. Cho’s menacing rant — become fodder for writing workshops. Teachers would not be surprised if they soon got more than a few works about a seething college loner who wants his classmates to call him Question Mark.

[solicitr]

Speaking as a Virginian (although I attended The University, not the pretender), I can pretty confidently predict that such racial backlash as there is will be fairly subdued, and pretty much confined to the established hardcore bigot community. The reason? Racist stereotyping. Here (as with much of the country) the prejudice-profile runs "hardworking, quiet, studious, good at math, bad at sports, lousy drivers." "Violent" and "criminal" aren't on the label, and so there's very little "I told you so" kind of reaction. No more than after very WASP Tim McVeigh blew up the Murraw Building.

It also doesn't hurt that Cho can be conveniently labeled a "crazy."

If OTOH the shooter were Arab or Pakistani (God forbid)- OMFG! You'd see lynch mobs in the streets.