When news broke on Monday that a former student had shot and killed seven people at a religious college in Oakland, Calif., the popular blog Angry Asian Man was quick to note with dismay that the gunman was identified as an Asian man.
“This. Again,” stated the blog, which is authored by a Korean-American man, Phil Yu, and offers incisive, often humorous criticism of the portrayal of Asian-Americans in the mainstream media.
Indeed, for some Asian-Americans, the deaths at Oikos University after a gunman identified by the police as One L. Goh, a 43-year-old Korean immigrant, opened fire inside the tiny college’s lone building rekindled uncomfortable memories of another campus shooting perpetrated by a student of Korean descent: Five years ago this month, Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed 32 people at Virginia Tech before turning the gun on himself. In the weeks following the crime, Mr. Cho’s ethnic identity figured prominently in news reports as details emerged that he had felt ostracized on the Blacksburg, Va., campus.
The day after the shootings at Oikos, an unaccredited institution in an east Oakland office park that enrolls fewer than 100 students, a scholar of Asian-American studies who advocates for multicultural education urged colleges to view the incident through a different lens. Instead of asking “What’s up with Koreans?” suggested Kevin K. Kumashiro, why not ask, “What’s up with the way we view Koreans?”
Whenever a student lashes out with violent behavior, says Mr. Kumashiro, who is a professor of Asian-American studies and education at the University of Illinois at Chicago and president-elect of the National Association for Multicultural Education, the “richer conversation” focuses not on quick observations about race, gender, or sexual orientation, but on other factors that may also have contributed to the outburst.
“How do we try to have a conversation that gets at the bigger picture?” he said. “For me, the challenge is to try to encourage conversation that gets us to leap from how we are quick to blame individuals to [looking at] much more structural problems.”
But sparking a candid, productive conversation on campuses about the genesis of stereotypes can be a delicate undertaking. Mr. Kumashiro suggested that colleges frame the discussion on several levels—from informal hallway chatter to campuswide policies—and carry it out across race, ethnicity, gender, and other demographic traits so that it doesn’t become a discussion solely about one group.
The Oikos shootings also offer an opportunity to talk about broader tensions in how students relate to one another, Mr. Kumashiro says. As the police investigation continues, for instance, more information about the gunman’s background has emerged that may explain his motive: A former nursing student, Mr. Goh is reported to have been angry at Oikos administrators over having been teased in class for his poor English-speaking skills.
As these facts came into view late Monday and early Tuesday, Mr. Kumashiro said his conversations with colleagues in the fields of Asian-American studies and multicultural education have focused less on the fact that the shooter was Asian. Instead, their concerns were about bullying—and its potential repercussions.
“Here’s another example of someone who’s experienced a pattern of harassment and then goes through this very traumatic act,” he said. “I know so many students at this university who hint, or who will discreetly share stories of being the targets of teasing—even light teasing—for all kinds of reasons. So you wonder, what’s under the surface that I can’t see? What kinds of problems are brewing that could lead to something like this?”
