“Just for the record, do you hate Asians?” I asked him.

“No,” Max Karson answered.

Phew.

I asked because, on Feb. 18, Max wrote that he wants to use butterfly nets to catch us Asians; make us eat bad sushi with forks; yell at us for not making enough Nintendo Wiis; and let us play “Dance Dance Revolution,” but rig it so we can’t get any points.

“They hate us all,” he wrote. “It’s time for war.”

The column – published in the University of Colorado student newspaper and headlined “If it’s war the Asians want, it’s war they’ll get” – has pissed off a lot of people.

OK, so I wasn’t all that pissed. In fact, I’m Asian and I laughed. I thought Max was just an idiot who was trying to get a rise out of people.

But I began to wonder why it outraged others while I, an Asian, was unscathed. And I wondered what the purpose of this piece was. So I decided to do some thinking.

Before I came to any conclusions, I did some research and I stumbled upon Max’s own Wikipedia page; apparently, he said anyone, including himself, is capable of killing 32 people just a few days after the Virginia Tech massacre. He was arrested, but the charges were later dropped. And that’s just one of the controversies he’s stirred up.

He seemed crazy. Did he just hate Asians? I had to find out for sure.

So I sent Max a Facebook message Saturday afternoon and asked if he’d like to do an interview. He agreed.

When I first called, I got his voice mail: “Hi, you’ve reached Max Karson, licensed massage therapist …” I called a few hours later and I got Max, the controversial columnist.

I expected him to be sarcastic and mocking. But instead, he was articulate and civil.

“There’s a lot of racial tension at CU,” he said, adding that almost all the students are white. “There’s a huge divide between Asian students and white students. At the student center, all the tables are filled with white kids. Except there’s one table filled with black kids and Latino kids, and then a few tables down there are two or three tables that are only Asians.”

But I still didn’t understand how his column addressed this issue. Then he dropped the M-word – metaphor.

I love metaphors, but I entirely missed this one.

“I wanted to explain to people that, if they feel that Asian students are being aloof or cold by sticking to their own racial group and not interacting with other students, this is a possible metaphor for their experience at CU – to be forced to act white,” he said.

So, just to be clear, being rounded up and forced to conform to white middle-American culture through a boot camp is a metaphor for what some Asian students are being expected to do for social acceptance at CU.

Clever, I guess.

In fact, he could’ve mentioned that earlier in the 20th century, America did just that – round up Asians and put them into camps. And, when writing something this sensitive, he could’ve been more precise with his language and presented a clearer metaphor. To me, he just came off as an ass, albeit a funny one.

And he could’ve been less offensive about it, right? But he offered another metaphor.

“I always think about Flintstones vitamins,” he said. “If you want people to eat vitamins, especially stupid people, you have to give them a lot of sugar, too.”

He sees the shock value of his column as sugar. But many people have, instead, seen it as a bitter pill.

He has received hate mail and death threats. He gets e-mails saying, “the reason I hate white people is because of people like you” and “you’re a racist fag.” Last week, about 150 students gathered to protest the student newspaper and Max’s writing. Even CU Chancellor Bud Peterson has weighed in on the matter, saying the piece was “wounding and damaging to a community we hold dear.”

But if he doesn’t hate Asians, why was he willing to be hated? What is the purpose behind all this?

“People don’t want to take the time to actually have a real dialogue about racism anymore,” he said. “They just want to wag their finger at it to save themselves from public scrutiny.”

He wanted to kick-start dialogues about racism, and this was his way of doing it. And I hate to say it, but people are now talking (and thinking) more about race – not only at CU, but around the country.

It worked.

When I read his column, I laughed at first. But then I began to think about its implications. It got me to engage in this dialogue about racial tensions halfway across the country.

Still, let me be clear. In no way am I endorsing Max Karson’s column or his attitude about fixing societal problems. (“I am angry. I’m an incredibly angry person,” he said. “I think it’s a good thing to be angry a lot of the time. It beats being depressed. I think there are a lot of things to be angry about.”) In fact, the sad part is that it took a column like this to bring race to the forefront of the dialogue.

However, let me offer my own metaphor.

Who would you rather have on your side – the kid who walks into the cafeteria and quietly sits at the table assigned to his cultural group, oblivious to any problems, or the kid who walks in and flips a few tables to make a point?

I might lose my lunch, but I’ll still take the latter.

But Max is still an ass.