Was Elliot Rodger Asian American?Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Identity Development/Psychology, Law, Media Archive, United States on 2015-03-12 01:57Z by Steven |
Was Elliot Rodger Asian American?
Reappropriate.co
2015-03-10
For weeks following the Isla Vista shooting, killer Elliot Rodger was described in mainstream media as a young White man. This was a convenient narrative: Rodger was seen as yet another example of the maligned young vengeance-seeking White male outcast (like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold and Adam Lanza): so twisted by violent first-person shooters and sexual-social frustration that he resorted to unthinkable violence.
Yet, for Elliot Rodger, this narrative is complicated by Rodger’s own tangled and confusing relationship with his racial identity: one that defies simple categorization as Rodger being straightforwardly White, or otherwise.
Biologically speaking, Elliot Rodger was biracially White and Asian American. Both Rodger’s biological mother and his step-mother were Asian American, and in his lengthy manifesto, Rodger self-identified as a “beautiful Eurasian”. Upon his death, Rodger was initially identified by law enforcement as an unknown “Asian male”.
Elliot Rodger also viewed his mixed race heritage as elevating him above those he termed as “lowly” “full-blooded Asian” men. In a lengthy 68-page report released last month by the Santa Barbara sheriff’s department, it is revealed that Elliot Rodger frequently conducted Google searches on Adolf Hitler and Naziism. These search terms are consistent with Rodger’s frequent racist web postings that espouse a clear belief in a racial hierarchy which positioned men of colour as sexually and socially inferior to Whites, and which further positioned White women as the most-coveted.
In May of last year, Chauncey DeVega wrote a highly-shared piece for Alternet (“Yes, Elliot Rodger is ‘White’: What the Santa Barbara Shooter Can Teach Us About Race and Masculinity”), where DeVega argues that racial identity is predominantly a performance, and that Whiteness is the specific performance of superiority over other people of colour. Both DeVega and Philip of You Offend Me You Offend My Family reason that Rodger’s rejection of his Asianness coupled with internalization of White supremacy was evidence of his Whiteness…
Read the entire article here.