but I guess there's a first time for everything. I've been here (and at the school up the street) since 9am and it's almost 8 now... only another half hour to go (these are the joys of not teaching in a "regular" school - crazy mad hours sometimes) but my brain is mush, so this won't be the crisp, articulate prose it would have been. Nonetheless, I think the idea is worth sharing.

It all started with this fantastic class I was subing in this morning. Just the greatest bunch of students you can imagine, and so appriciative of my being there to work with them. Dreamy. And smart as all hell too. The students were talking about the whole heart-breaking tragedy at Virginia Tech during thier break, and they roped me in. Specifically, one student roped me in.

She asked how long I thought a person had to live in a place to be considered OF that place. I knew right off from the way she spoke that her issue was about the way the race card has come into play with regard to the gunman. Since the brake was just ending, I opened the question to the class, who all chimed in their two bits about the importance of where you spend your childhood, adolesence, go to school, and so forth. Next, I asked them if they thought that race had anything to do with what went on.

When I saw the newsies start playing up the race element, you know I was pissed. I can't believe that any one race or group could have a monoploy on violence, and from all I'd read and heard about what happened in Virginia Tech, I was convinced that this crime could have been committed by anyone, race irrelevant. School shootings (shiver) have been planned and carried out by members of a whole lot of different ethnic and cultural groups.

Of course, as is so often the case, the students were smarter than me. Back track - this whole class is ESL students (though it's not technically an ESL class, oh the joy of the institution), from all over the place - China, Malasia, Japan, Iran, Romania, Argentina, just to name a few. That's only relevant because it suggests why some of the students had such clarity about this issue. What they told me was, essentially, this: one of the immigrant groups who currently face the most discrimination (aside from those from the middle east, a whole nother tangent waiting to happen) are Koreans. This is mostly due to the substantial recent increases in immigration from Korea to North America. They've become the latest groups who is "taykin' awr jawbs" and other such nonsense.

The shooter in this case had been in America for by far the majority of his life (making him American, by any measure I can justify) but it is entirely possible, as these students helped me see, that he continued to experience marginalization and discrimination for the crime of wearing his background in his skin. And it's entirely possible that that kind of treatment contributed to the young man's mental health problems and ultimately to his actions.

The bottom line: I'm not saying feel sorry for the guy, by any wild stretch of the imagination. What I am saying though, is that if race is a relevant consideration in this whole mess, it's not in the usual "people who aren't like us are scary and want to hurt us sense," but rather in terms of the message for the rest of us. Racist, bigoted, and discrimanatory behaviour, over the course of a lifetime, are enough to make anyone sick in the head. If we want to keep living in a safe society, we have to stop pushing people to the margins - it's a dangerous practice.