Eldo Kim

FROM The Harvard Crimson:

In 2009, then-high school sophomore Eldo Kim ’16 earned first place in the state of Washington in the U.S. Institute of Peace essay contest for his composition, “Cultural Genocide: A Look into the Unknown.” On Tuesday, he was charged with threatening to set off explosives in Harvard buildings.

Kim, the Quincy House sophomore who will appear in federal court Wednesday morning in connection with Monday’s bomb scare,was described by his peers as involved on campus and engaged in his schoolwork. They were stunned, they said, to hear that he had confessed to sending an emailed bomb threat to avoid a final exam.

— Comments —

Steve writes:

I am okay with conversations about race as a general matter.  However, using one example by itself to prove a racial point seems pretty unfair to me.  For instance, if the perpetrator was a Caucasian male, you wouldn’t have called the post “white people.”  When there is a white criminal, the PC media tries to emphasize this, even if it’s not representative of the number of crimes actually committed.  If this is bad journalism, then why is it OK if we do it?  If you had presented some sort of statistics and additional examples to prove a point that would be different from just posting a blurb about an Asian perp and implying that he represents the model minority.

Next point, I believe Asians are probably around 25 percent of the Harvard undergrad student body.  For male students (more likely to commit this kind of crime) maybe you have another 30 percent Jewish (there tend to be more Jewish males than females at Harvard for whatever reason) and maybe another 15 percent other minority.  This leaves less than a third of the male student body who would be non-Jewish white (despite making up a much larger percentage of the general U.S. population).  I could be wrong about some of these numbers, but probably not by much.  This is just by way of saying that, even if criminality rates were the same across ethnic groups, it would be unlikely that the guilty Harvard student would be a non-Jewish white.

All of that said, it would at least be possible to argue this was an Asian type crime.  You won’t find much in the way of Asian-American assault or robbery.  This was a reflection of someone caring way too much about his grades, but also someone who thought, “Hey, I won’t hurt anyone and other people might actually be psyched to get another day to study.”  Anyway, you can bet Koreans will pay special attention to this.  They take national responsibility for one of their own.  There was a lot of introspection after the Virginia Tech Massacre.  Though this is not on the same scale, you can bet this guy will be shamed by Koreans for the rest of his life.  I would actually argue that this is positive cultural shaming.  For the most part, American society has lost its sense of shame.

 Laura writes:

This is merely one blog posting in a continuing discussion about the rise of Asians in America. I was not trying to prove any point other than that this phenomenon is more complicated than it appears.

This particular case was a reflection of the Asian obsession with educational achievement, but it also indicates something else significant, i.e., when Asians do decide to lie and manipulate others, they bring the intelligence that makes them successful by other standards to those activities too.

The discussion continues here.

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