Whenever anything really bad happens around Korean people, that is when I would like to hide, go to Hawaii and eat spam sushi until it blows over. I don’t want to comment on it because I don’t want to escalate the situation and I don’t want to implicate myself in it. I don’t want to ‘come out’ as Asian because therein lies a tremendous responsibility that I never volunteered for, that I don’t have any real control over, and that is as mysterious to me as it is to someone who isn’t Asian.

So here is the whole terrible mess of the shootings at Virginia Tech. I look at the shooter’s expressionless face on the news and he looks so familiar, like he could be in my family. Just another one of us. But how can he be us when what he has done is so terrible? Here is where I can really envy white people because when white people do something that is inexplicably awful, so brutally and horribly wrong, nobody says – “do you think it is because he is white?” There are no headlines calling him the “White shooter.” There is no mention of race because there is no thought in anyone’s mind that his race had anything to do with his crime.

So much attention is focused on the Asian-ness of the shooter, how the Korean community is reacting to it, South Korea’s careful condolences and cautiously expressed fear that it will somehow impact the South Korean population at large.

What is lost here is the grief. What is lost is the great, looming sadness that we should all feel over this. We lose our humanity to racism, time and time again.

I extend my deepest sympathies to all those who lost their loved ones, their children, their friends and family, in this unimaginable tragedy. I send them all the love I have in me, and I encourage everyone to do the same.

I don’t know about you but I am still recovering from Michael Richards’ racist implosion the other night at the Laugh Factory. I wasn’t there, but since the invention of YouTube, we can all be everywhere all the time. Richards’ subsequent apology on Letterman was removed from YouTube, pointing viewers instead to the CBS site, but I didn’t have the proper plug-ins, so it took some time and lots of downloading to finally be apologized to. Jerry Seinfeld graciously served as character witness on Letterman, but cool as he is (and I really love Seinfeld), I don’t think he helped Richards’ case that much. At this point, the only way Richards could redeem himself is if he showed up hand in hand with Bishop Desmond Tutu in Kofi Annan’s car.

I think that people are really shocked and upset by Richards because the character he played on Seinfeld was so beloved, a fuzzy-wuzzy, grizzly pisser of a go-to guy in a vintage Hawaiian shirt. They felt they knew him, and so now feel betrayed over what they didn’t know. I had my suspicions though. I have only seen him out on two occasions, and on both he was yelling at someone. Once, during the Aspen Comedy Festival, he was hosting the show, and backstage I saw him point his finger, angrily and repeatedly into a producer’s face screaming unintelligibly about something. I don’t know what it was about. He seemed to be fine. The audience loved him, the show was going well, nothing seemed off, except he was furious about it. I thought it was weird. Another time was for the premiere of “Frankenstein,” and Prince Charles was invited to the screening, and whenever British royalty are anywhere, they are supposed to be the last to arrive and the first to leave, so even if you are ready to go, you have to wait until the Prince is finished. Michael Richards was screaming at the valet guy, who would not release his car because the Prince was still lingering over dessert. I remember Richards had a date, a tall blonde, like the kind that hold the awards on awards shows, waiting to hand them to the presenters, and he was holding his date’s hand, but also using the same hand to point his finger angrily and repeatedly into the valet guy’s face, and she just kind of stood there and let him use her hand in this nonconsensual way which may have been safe but certainly not sane. I’m sure that he was under a lot of pressure, being him and all, and I don’t want to judge him because I don’t know him.

Still, all the shit that he said at the Laugh Factory haunts me like a recurring nightmare. It is terrifying to me how certain things lie just underneath the surface of polite society, and how when they are unleashed people are actually surprised. But how can anyone be surprised that Los Angeles is a racist place?

In just a few weeks, we’ve had the LAPD in two different racially motivated incidents and the fire department feeding a black fireman dog food. Then of course there’s Mel Gibson. And then one of the greatest problems of all that nobody cares to address – the overall invisibility of people of color in the vast entertainment industry. I think that the racial tension here is worse than anywhere in the world, because the city is so segregated, and the class differences are often color coded, and when there is that much money and that much poverty and that much traffic, it is bound to go terribly wrong sometimes.

I kind of feel bad for Michael Richards, because maybe he isn’t a racist, and he just has some insane form of racial Tourette’s Syndrome. That would be so shitty. Racism from the comedy club stage is as common as dick jokes, and I’ve heard it and heard it and I don’t even really hear it anymore because I have heard so much of it. Still, I am disgusted by his remarks, and the fact that he is sorry makes me furious, because I am sick of forgiving racists, sick of being above it, sick of being the better person, sick of turning the other cheek so that one gets hit too. Everyone is saying that his career is over, but maybe it isn’t. This could open him up to a whole lot of new fans. Has the White Power movement ever had a celebrity spokesperson?