Racism without Recognition

Abstract

This chapter looks at Seung-Hui Cho and the violence at Virginia Tech to critically interrogate Asian American masculinity and racial formations in relation to contemporary postracial discourses in the American South since 9/11. On April 16, 2007, Seung-Hui Cho killed thirty-two people on the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, Virginia. The media soon dubbed the event the “deadliest shooting rampage in American history,” and news coverage was inundated with uncovering the “madness at Virginia Tech.” What stood out beyond the numbers of murdered individuals in a “school shooting” was the shooter himself, a Korean American whose identity and location as “alien-other” marked him as always already suspicious, dangerous, and outside. The chapter then analyzes the important ways in which Seung-Hui Cho was simultaneously racially othered as an Asian immigrant alien and whitened as disenfranchised male youth.