Anderson Reading on Chinatown - Essay Example

Two of these stereotypes are the idea that Chinatown and Chinese people are somehow immoral and dirty.
A lot of the background of these and other racial ideas has to do with a shift in the thinking of the nineteenth century "from ethnocentrism to a radical biological determinism," where people tried to come up with scientific proof that one race was somehow better than another (Anderson 585). These resulted in stereotyping of other races and also, such as in the case of Chinatown, the splitting apart from the mainstream society of other races so that their lesser qualities would not "contaminate" white society (Anderson 585).

Anderson quotes a secretary of state from 1885 in Canada who says that Chinatown is "attended with evils" and that "because of their habits of lodging crowded quarters and accumulating filth, is offensive if not likely to breed disease" (Anderson 586). This idea continues to grow in the period from then until the 1920s. Darwin's ideas and other scientific advances were used to argue that the Chinese were inferior, dirtier and that the areas they lived in were bad because of this. It was the council of Vancouver who officially labeled the area "Chinatown" in the 1890s and then actually destroyed some of the buildings because of supposed health complaints.

The other idea which grew at the same time period was the idea of Chinese immorality. Anderson says the area was seen as "non-Christian, uncivilized, and immoral" and that because of this perception, Chinatown was supposed to be a lawless opium-addicted area with "wickedness unmentionable" (589). At the same time, he disagrees that this perception came about purely because Chinese people were not white. He says that instead, the government was motivated by "economic competition" and racial myths which were thoroughly embedded in the government's employees (Anderson 590).

2) In the Aitken reading on school shootings, how is the media depicting these tragic events? And, what is the importance of place in the varying reactions to the murders?
Aitken talks about several school shootings which took place near San Diego in 2001 and compare these to the Columbine shooting that was so shocking when it happened. Several other authors have claimed that the Columbine shooting was inspired by Neo-nazi movements and that it is disturbing that the media did not report on this information (Aitken 594). Although Aitken does not think the San Diego shootings were inspired in the same way, he says there is still an element of racism in how the media represented them in news. Specifically, this has to do with where the murders took place.

Aitken argues that both the place of the school shootings and the way the media reported on them after they happened to point towards what he calls "a normalizing and mythic geography of fear" (595). What he means by this seems to be the combination of the old idea everybody has that it can never happen where a person lives because where that person lives, at least in America, is always normal, middle-class, and safe. The fear and horror take place in other parts of the world, or in non-white communities, in places other than the "mythic place of white middle-class America—suburbs, small towns, edge communities, country villages" (Aitken 597).

Aitken mentions that both of these shootings, like Columbine, took place in communities that were exactly like this. For this reason, the media shows these shootings as incredibly horrific compared to other kinds of gun violence in America, or violence in other parts of the world. The reason the high school shootings are shown so badly is exactly that it is carried out by young white males who are supposed to be, according to the American Dream, ideal. Aitken creates typical questions that might be asked by middle-class white society to represent this horror: "How can something so horrifying happen to communities that so resemble middle America? How can the perpetrator be so as my son?" (Aitken 599).