It began as an ordinary morning. Coffee. Stretching. The familiar ritual of scrolling through Apple News and The New York Times. Then it wasn’t ordinary.
A gunman had entered a dance studio in Monterey Park and killed eleven people. First nine, then ten, then eleven. The numbers shifted. The dread did not. The studio was largely patronized by Asian Americans, located in a Chinese American community, on the eve of Lunar New Year. The specificity made it intimate. It felt close.
I paused. Should I go to the ceramic studio as planned? Should I stop at Whole Foods afterward? A White man did it. That was the sentence that formed, fully constructed, in my mind. There is a racist White man loose in the greater Los Angeles area with a gun.
A gunman had entered a dance studio in Monterey Park and killed eleven people. First nine, then ten, then eleven. The numbers shifted. The dread did not. The studio was largely patronized by Asian Americans, located in a Chinese American community, on the eve of Lunar New Year. The specificity made it intimate. It felt close.
I paused. Should I go to the ceramic studio as planned? Should I stop at Whole Foods afterward? A White man did it. That was the sentence that formed, fully constructed, in my mind. There is a racist White man loose in the greater Los Angeles area with a gun.
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| Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash |
As a Korean American woman, I felt fear move quickly and without permission. Monterey Park is not far from Koreatown. Not far from Downtown. We know how one violent act can loosen something dormant in others.
Later that morning, another story surfaced: five Memphis police officers beating Tyre Nichols. I pictured five White men.
We know now that the Monterey Park gunman was Chinese American. The Memphis officers were Black. When I learned this, guilt arrived just as quickly as fear had. I had accused White men in silence.
Was I wrong?
This is going to upset some of you, but we are all racists to a certain degree. That includes me.
There isn’t a single person alive who does not carry preconceived assumptions about someone else’s race, culture, or nationality. These assumptions are not always loud. They are not always violent. But they exist. They form in history. They form in repetition. They form in fear.
If you insist you do not hold a single racial assumption, you are not enlightened. You are unexamined.
Racism is not binary. Racism does not exist only at one hundred percent. It also exists at one percent. It does not begin only when someone shouts a slur in a parking lot. It accumulates quietly — in assumptions, in pattern recognition, in the face we imagine before facts arrive.
There is a difference between analyzing history and assigning guilt.
The historical record tells us that racial violence in this nation has often been carried out by White men. That is documentation. That is data. That is structure.
But structure does not justify presumption.
To study patterns is sociology.
To project them onto an unnamed individual before evidence exists is bias.
Pattern recognition becomes racism the moment it hardens into an assumption about a specific person simply because they belong to a group.
My reflex did not appear in a vacuum. It was shaped by history. It was shaped by fear. But explanation is not absolution.
This nation’s history is saturated with racial violence carried out by White men — from slavery to lynching, from the murder of Emmett Till to the massacres and riots that targeted Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth century. That history is not abstract. It is documented. It is generational. It informs the subconscious calculus of threat.
Would it have been naïve not to think of White men?
Perhaps.
But history explains reflex. It does not excuse presumption.
Genocide, persecution, ethnic cleansing — these are not the inventions of one race alone. Cruelty is not proprietary. Anyone can hate. Anyone can brutalize. Anyone can kill.
My fear was understandable. My conclusion was not careful.
What unsettled me most was not that I felt afraid. It was how quickly I assigned a face to that fear. History and experience shaped it, yes. But they also narrowed it.
And that narrowing — even in silence — was wrong.
Later that morning, another story surfaced: five Memphis police officers beating Tyre Nichols. I pictured five White men.
We know now that the Monterey Park gunman was Chinese American. The Memphis officers were Black. When I learned this, guilt arrived just as quickly as fear had. I had accused White men in silence.
Was I wrong?
This is going to upset some of you, but we are all racists to a certain degree. That includes me.
There isn’t a single person alive who does not carry preconceived assumptions about someone else’s race, culture, or nationality. These assumptions are not always loud. They are not always violent. But they exist. They form in history. They form in repetition. They form in fear.
If you insist you do not hold a single racial assumption, you are not enlightened. You are unexamined.
Racism is not binary. Racism does not exist only at one hundred percent. It also exists at one percent. It does not begin only when someone shouts a slur in a parking lot. It accumulates quietly — in assumptions, in pattern recognition, in the face we imagine before facts arrive.
There is a difference between analyzing history and assigning guilt.
The historical record tells us that racial violence in this nation has often been carried out by White men. That is documentation. That is data. That is structure.
But structure does not justify presumption.
To study patterns is sociology.
To project them onto an unnamed individual before evidence exists is bias.
Pattern recognition becomes racism the moment it hardens into an assumption about a specific person simply because they belong to a group.
My reflex did not appear in a vacuum. It was shaped by history. It was shaped by fear. But explanation is not absolution.
This nation’s history is saturated with racial violence carried out by White men — from slavery to lynching, from the murder of Emmett Till to the massacres and riots that targeted Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth century. That history is not abstract. It is documented. It is generational. It informs the subconscious calculus of threat.
Would it have been naïve not to think of White men?
Perhaps.
But history explains reflex. It does not excuse presumption.
Genocide, persecution, ethnic cleansing — these are not the inventions of one race alone. Cruelty is not proprietary. Anyone can hate. Anyone can brutalize. Anyone can kill.
My fear was understandable. My conclusion was not careful.
What unsettled me most was not that I felt afraid. It was how quickly I assigned a face to that fear. History and experience shaped it, yes. But they also narrowed it.
And that narrowing — even in silence — was wrong.
_____
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