Violence has always been the American way. But for many minority communities in the U.S., enduring and participating in that violence has also been a pathway to becoming American — albeit always as second-class citizens.
People of color in the United States have endured genocide, slavery, massacres, wartime incarceration, police brutality and more, simply for not being white. They have also joined the military, police, FBI and CIA, and participated in state-sanctioned violence, often gaining the trappings of belonging as reward without ever fully being accepted.
With mass shootings, however, Asian Americans seem to be entering a new phase — mimicking the majority white population and becoming both victims and perpetrators in a peculiar national insanity.
When mass shootings became a feature of daily American life, Asian Americans were largely out of the picture except as occasional victims. In a few shootings — such as Stockton in 1989, Oak Creek, Wisc., in 2012 and Atlanta 2021 — they were the target.
In three high-profile shootings, they were the shooters: In 2007, a South Korean national male college student, who was a U.S. permanent resident after moving to the U.S. at the age of 8, killed 32 people, mostly white students, at Virginia Tech University before taking his own life. And last month, two older Asian American men are the suspects in separate mass shootings in California.
On Jan. 21, police say a 72-year-old Asian American man killed 11 Asian Americans in their 50s, 60s and 70s at the Star Ballroom Dance Studio in the Los Angeles suburb of Monterey Park. Two days later, a 66-year-old Asian American man is suspected of killing seven Asian American and Latino co-workers at two mushroom farms in Half Moon Bay.
But the reaction of Asian Americans to the 2007 and 2023 tragedies have been markedly different.
In 2007, there were reports from across the…
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