AAS 345 OL - Contemporary Asian American Issues

A disturbing news item from the LA Times, Violent Threats on Wilson High's Wikipedia Page Went Unchecked [free reg. required]. I'm not sure what's worse, the fact that death threats targeting Asian students at the school were made or that the school and authorities did nothing about it until very recently, when more threats were posted on the anniversary of last year's Virgina Tech shooting.

According to the article, 

The writer, who said he was a student, hid behind an anonymous e-mail address to threaten by name Asian students at the San Gabriel Valley school, hurl racial slurs at the school's primarily Asian badminton team and allude to possible attacks.

School district officials and sheriff's detectives did not start investigating the messages until two weeks ago, after Wikipedia staff alerted them to a violent threat posted April 16, the one-year anniversary of the Virginia Tech shooting and a few days before the anniversary of the shooting at Columbine High School.

"On Friday, April 18, 2008, there will be a shooting at this school," the threat said, promising to target "a good majority of the badminton team and almost every single fob" -- a reference to recent Asian immigrants "fresh off the boat."

This story reminds me of some other cases. For example, in 1996, Richard Machado, a student at UC Irvine sent death threats to 59 students "Asian-sounding" last names. He was eventually convicted and served a year in prison. More recently, in 2005, harassment of Asian students in Brooklyn schools was so bad that the Department of Justice stepped in.

At his school, Lafayette High in Brooklyn, Chinese immigrant students like him are harassed and bullied so routinely that school officials in June agreed to a Department of Justice consent decree to curb alleged "severe and pervasive harassment directed at Asian-American students by their classmates." Since then, the Justice Department credits Lafayette officials with addressing the problem _ but the case is far from isolated.

If anyone decided to look at the topic of hate crimes targeting Asian Americans , the Vincent Chin case, for example, you might want to take a look at some of these more recent cases as well.

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