[A-List] Re: Asian-American Students at Virginia Tech

[CeJ <jannuzi@xxxxxxxxx>]

Sorry, posting again the same mail with the correct thread title

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> > I'd add another factor to your speculation: racism. It can really get to you
when you are one of the few students of color in a vast sea of white
students. It can be a real betrayal if you have been "accepted" all these
years, and then suddenly you start to think there was actually a lot of
racism, subtle racism around you, that you didn't notice. What if he
realized, "this white girl is never going to marry me; her parents are
racists; she is a racist; she's been playing me."
I gotta say the first thing I thought of when they started announcing "an
Asian student" was that his mind was blown by racism.>>

It sounds like he never even developed any relationships with women
there, of any race, though a lot of this could be a continuation from
high school--since his high school puts a lot of students into VT.

All the people that knew anything about him were the men in his dorm.
I just assume racism as a factor in all this. But in terms of the
sexual relationships at an undergraduate university, there is lots of
racial mixing, most especially white women with African American men
(at VT they are still something of a novelty), and white men with
women of 'Asian' appearance. This sort of social phenomena mixed with
a background of racism might even add to the craziness of it all.

We on the left tend to try to explain things in terms of social
environment. That might well have started with this young man's family
culture, which may not have prepared him for the high stakes human
relationships game of an upper working class and middle class
university.

But I think another thing the media are not looking at is the
psychiatric treatment he was getting, which means drugs (at least I
haven't seen it, they instead are looking at the video clips where the
individual is already in the psychotic deep end and there is nothing
much else to be learned from analyzing what he says).

There might as yet be an uncovered story about treatments for
attention deficit disorder and depression, and his mind blew up on the
drugs. Drugs for attention deficit disorder have been linked to a lot
of violent behaviour in young people (including massacre shootings),
but the medico-psychiatric establishment does not want to deal with
it. They hope instead that their drugs are an anodyne for all the
psycho-social problems that they hardly acknowledge. Still yet another
example of how a capitalist society deals with problems by not dealing
with them in any way except making huge amounts of money from them,
and then using the power of money to shut down discussion, debate,
outside views. And if they can't be drugged, put 7 million of them in
the criminal justice system, where the conservatives can go on about
original sin, innate evil, blah blah.

CJ