Racial discrimination

With the happening of the recent Virginia tech shootings, many of us have heard about how the killer Seung-Hui-Cho was bullied during his time in Stone Middle School in Centreville and Westfield High School in Chantilly. He was teased and picked on for his shyness and unusual speech patterns. This made him refuse to speak until a point when a teacher threatened to give him poor grades before he spoke. However, he spoke as though there was something in his mouth, prompting his fellow classmates to laugh and some even told him to go back to china even though he was not chinese.

This abuse that he bore with everyday in high school and middle school eventually made him hate his 'fairer' classmates, that hatred grew so much until the extent that Cho planned a hit list of who to kill before buying 2 semi-automatics guns and killing them with the guns.

Hence, i can actually say that the virginia tech shootings was actually caused by racial discrimination as the fellow students picked on Cho for his accent when he spoke and his shyness when he was embarrassed to speak.I believe to judge someone based on their accent or their skin colour or race is wrong, everyone is equal. If the students then had not picked on Cho for being 'different' in terms of accent , then the tragedy could have been avoided.

Racial discrimination actually does exist in singapore but not on such a big scale. The occasional racist jokes about other races are evidence that racial discrimination continues to exist in singapore. The racial harmony we do enjoy now is actually very fragile. We have to treat everyone equally to ensure racial harmony continues and also to ensure that a tragedy similar to the virginia tech shootings do not happen again.

We determine the Future

source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seung-Hui_Cho