American Peril

Shortly after midnight on May 27, 1991, witnesses made 911 distress calls reporting a young Asian boy stumbling through the streets of North Milwaukee naked, bloodied, and confused. He could not speak and was incoherent. They later learned his name was Konerak Sinthasomphone. He was a fourteen-year-old refugee who came the U.S. with his family from Laos. Some thought he looked as young as ten.

To their shock, the police delivered the boy to a much older white man who falsely claimed that Konerak was both an adult and his boyfriend. Over the protests of the intervening bystanders, the police, who were also white men, found this story credible. They joked in the squad car as they washed their hands of any responsibility. 

The story would resurface weeks later when the police finally arrested serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. On that night, Dahmer kidnapped, drugged, and sodomized Konerak. Amazingly, the boy managed to escape Dahmer’s apartment—only to have the authorities take him right back there, where he was subsequently killed.

While few stories can match the morbid horror of Dahmer’s murderous spree, there are broader lessons to take away from this episode. On top of blatant homophobia, a deadly combination of positive racial bias toward Dahmer and anti-Asian racism led the police to disregard Konerak’s humanity and cost him his life.

Such sentiments did not come from thin air. The dehumanization of Asians as faceless enemies—marked with racist epithets—spanned repeated U.S. wars in Asia and the Pacific. The United States directly and indirectly caused death and suffering of tens of thousands in Laos, through a bombing campaign that was covered up during the Vietnam War. Then, when refugees sought shelter in America, they were too often dehumanized again through scapegoating portraying them as threats to the economy and majority white communities.

Until we both learn these histories and unlearn their patterns of bias underlying them, the U.S. military and police will produce more of these tragic outcomes. Indeed, we have seen immigrants, refugees, and now U.S. citizens being dehumanized repeatedly through the Trump administration’s campaign of mass detention, deportation, and repression.