Jonathan Zimmerman: Reaction to Violence Muted by Stereotypes

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history at New York University and lives in Narberth. He is the author, most recently, of "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory" (Yale University Press). He can be reached at jlzimm@aol.com.]

If you live in the Delaware Valley, you've surely heard about the brutal December attacks on Asian students at South Philadelphia High School. Seven kids were hospitalized with injuries sustained mostly at the hands of African American students, who beat Asians in classrooms, hallways, the cafeteria, and the streets outside the school.

But the incident has barely registered outside the area. To understand why, try a small thought experiment: Imagine if the victims were black and the attackers were white.

The whole nation - indeed, the whole world - would know. The president would denounce the episode on television and demand a speedy remedy. Members of Congress would eagerly join in, competing with each other to condemn the racism in our midst. And hordes of reporters would descend on the school.

But, hey, they're only Asian kids getting beaten. And the attackers are black; we don't expect a whole lot from them anyway.

There's plenty of racism to go around here, and it's not just at South Philadelphia High. It's all around us, in the bigoted double standards we use to judge events like this....

In the West especially, Asian immigrants encountered rabid prejudice and brutality. White mobs in Los Angeles hanged, shot, and burned 21 Chinese residents in 1871. Nine years later, another mob destroyed most of Denver's Chinatown. In Wyoming, whites killed 28 Chinese railroad workers; in Oregon, they murdered and mutilated the bodies of 31 Chinese miners....

After the 1970s, as Asians developed businesses in America's inner cities, African Americans became the latest entry on a long list of tormentors. Across urban America, blacks accosted Asians with taunts of "ching chong," "chow mein," and other slurs. Rapper Ice Cube denounced "Oriental one-penny-counting" Korean shopkeepers in a 1991 song, warning Koreans to "pay respect to the black fist" or "we'll burn your store right down to a crisp."...

It's high time we held African Americans to the same moral standards as everyone else, lest we confirm the worst stereotypes of recent history. And it's also time we acknowledged that Asian Americans have a history, full of anguish and - yes - discrimination. Anything less will yield more of the same.