Was I Wrong To Have Accused White Men?

It was a usual morning. I got out of bed, stretched, made coffee, and sat in the lounge chair to stroll through Apple News and The New York Times apps. There it was, and it was no longer a usual morning. The night before, a gunman entered a dance studio and killed eleven (first reported nine, then ten) people in Monterey Park. The mass shooting at a dance studio largely patronized by Asian-Americans in a well-known Chinese-American community on the eve of the Lunar New Year sank my heart. 

Should I stay in or head out to the ceramic studio and Whole Foods afterward as I had planned? A White man did it. There is a racist White man loose in the greater Los Angeles area with a gun. Panic! As a Korean-American woman, I feared for my life... Monterey Park isn't that far from K-town and Downtown LA. And, we know one violent act can trigger others to commit violent acts of hate.

When I began reading a news article about five Memphis police officers beating and killing Tyre Nichols, I thought of five White men. Here we are. We know that the Monterey Park gunman was a Chinese-American and those five Memphis police officers are Black men. When I learned that the Monterey Park gunman was not a White man, I was pinged with guilt. When I realized in the third paragraph of the news article that the police officers who beat Tyre Nichols were not White men, I questioned... Was I wrong to have accused White men in my mind?

Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash

This is going to upset some of you, but we are all racists to a certain degree. There isn't a single person in this world without a preconceived assumption of a person based on a culture, race, or nationality that differs from our own. If you say you don't have a single perception of a person based on their culture, race, or nationality, you are not only a liar but also a dangerous racist. Heck, we have perceptions about our own culture, race, and nationality.

The danger comes from that most of these folks claim to be an ally and push on the responsibility of change onto everyone else. They will say something exclusionary based on race or nationality, and say that they didn't mean it that way. They will excuse their family and friends when they make racist comments. They are dangerous because they mindlessly incubate stereotyping, exclusionary, and racist comments and act to avoid discomfort within their personal space. 

Racism doesn't have two categories, zero and one hundred percent. Racism is a gauge that starts at one-tenth of a percent and ends at one hundred percent. Where we land on the gauge isn't solely based on who is shouting racial slurs at a public parking lot. It is a lot more complex than that. 

While I didn't say it, I thought of White men. I didn't suspect White men. In my mind, they were White men. Was I wrong to have accused White men even in silence?

This nation's history is filled with violence that White men have inflicted on minorities. Racially motivated violence by White men goes back as far as slavery. White men have demonstrated cruelty throughout history, which made no exception even on young children. Emmett Till was only fourteen years old when he was abducted, tortured and killed in 1955 for allegedly offending a White woman.

If you think racial violence to Asian-American communities is fairly new with COVID, you are very wrong. The Los Angeles Chinese Massacre of 1871 killed nineteen Chinese immigrants. The San Francisco Riot of 1877, which was waged against Chinese immigrants for over three days, killed four. White men of this nation have over one hundred years of history of racially motivated violence and killings. Wouldn't it have been obtuse of me not to have thought of White men? 

It may have been obtuse of me, but does that make it okay? Genocides and religious persecutions are woven into the history of mankind. The cruelty to eliminate differences among us isn't solely owned by White men. Anyone, not just White men, can hate, be brutal, and kill on one sole fact that we are different. History tells us that.

I can't escape that the fear installed in me through history and my own experience blinded me to see how I saw White men when minorities of this nation are killed. And, that was wrong.