I'm sensitive to Dana's criticism of Wesley Yang's essay on the dark and lonesome world inhabited by the Virginia Tech Killer, but I think she's analyzing it too much as an exploration of what drove Seung-Hui Cho to murder, rather than an attempt to use Cho's murders to explore a particular strain of marginalization and alienation that affects American life. In particular, I think she overplays the role racism and sexism assume in Yang's article. Cho's race has relatively little to do with the issues explored. When Yang says that Cho had "a face that has nothing to do with the desires of women in this country," he's not blaming women, or racial preferences. There could be -- and are -- plenty of white faces that are greeted with the same soft sense of revulsion. Cho's ethnicity and gender were inextricable parts of his particular experience, and so they must be mentioned, but they are not particularly important to the larger yearning for companionship and acceptance that Yang explores. Nor is the essay a suggestion that someone should have, or could have, looked past their own biases to love Cho and avert his massacre. What's so brutal about Yang's essay, what makes it more affecting than a simple lamentation of loneliness, is his claim that some people are unloved not because society has slipped up, but because they are not, on some level, worthy of other people's love; because they are as ugly within as they are without, and so there is nothing to save them from the chasm, and no one who should be expected to try. Love, Yang argues, is not offered as charity. It must be earned. You must have qualities that make others want to love you. His question is what happens if those qualities are entirely absent?
