Week 5-Tao Zheng-A03

One of this week's readings is chapter 12 of Darrelly Y. Hamamoto's book, "Masters of War: Empire of Death and the Plague of Civic Violence." This chapter talks about death and killing happening mainly in North America and categorizes murders according to sociocultural milieu, number of killings, perpetrator, and kinds of victims. The first type of murder discussed is serial murder. The definition of serial murder has to do with the mass number of victims killed by the perpetrator. In the article, "Masters of War: Empire of Death and the Plague of Civic Violence," Hamamoto argues that, "there is a strong causal connection between an increasingly militarized society and the attendant rise of serial and mass murder over the past few decades." She demonstrates and verifies this statement by the example increased homicide in the U.S. during the Vietnam war. An interesting type of murder discussed by Homamoto is race murder. Race murder is determined by the race of victims killed by the perpetrator. While discussing race murder, Homamoto points out white people's "supremacist systematic violence against people in color" (Hamamoto, 2003). Euro-centric society has made white people to believe that they are superior to people of other races, and victimized people of color. I like how Homamoto connects those killing and murdering to sociocultural and historical factors, and it made me wondering how the society could evolve so that there is no longer white supremacist and racism, and what can Asian Americans do to make that society come true?

Works Cited

Hamamoto, D. Y. Masters of War: Empire of Death and the Plague of Civic Violence. New York, New York, Routledge, 2003.
NA. Chinese and Korean “comfort women. Retrieved from: http://www.oldpicsarchive.com/chinese-comfort-women/