Jarred Ha: It Could Happen to Anyone
1/1/2017: As more people have read this and given me feedback, I wanted to clarify that I am not trying to claim that Jarred Ha was assaulted or mistreated primarily because of his race. The reason that this article focuses on race is because it was written for one of my classes as Cornell University, because I saw parallels between Jarred Ha’s case and that of Vincent Chin. Fewer people have been reading the article to the end, and I wanted to stress that the conclusion of the article is more of a call-to-arms against the University of Washington administration and King County Prosecutor’s Office than anything else.
Preface: Jarred Ha is a Bellevue resident and junior at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business. He has received considerable backlash for events following his part in a dispute that turned violent. This article will cover some of my own views on the case, as well as some of our discussion on Asian American issues. I hope to clear up some of the misconceptions surrounding the case, which have caused considerable poorly based defamatory attacks against Jarred. I also wish to give a voice to Jarred as an Asian American, and urge readers to think about his case in the greater American societal context of the Asian American Middle Class and Asian Pacific American issues in general.
