sociology fp media

Asian Americans Chapter 9

SOCY 3020-E01 Race and Ethnicity in the U.S.

Fall 2018

Asian American Stereotypes

 A brief and realistic short video that encompasses some popular attitudes towards many Asian

Americans in this country:

 What Kind of Asian Are You?

List of Asian Countries and Dependencies

 ARMENIA  AZERBAIJAN  BAHRAIN  BANGLADESH  BHUTAN  BRUNEI  BURMA  CAMBODIA  CHINA  CYPRUS  EAST TIMOR  INDIA  INDONESIA  IRAN  IRAQ  ISRAEL  JAPAN  JORDAN  KAZAKHSTAN  KUWAIT  KYRGYZSTAN  LAOS  LEBANON  MACAU  MALAYSIA  MALDIVES  MONGOLIA  NEPAL  NORTH KOREA  OMAN  PAKISTAN  PHILIPPINES  QATAR  RUSSIA  SAUDI ARABIA  SINGAPORE  SOUTH KOREA  SRI LANKA  SYRIA  TAIWAN  TAJIKISTAN  THAILAND  TURKEY  TURKMENISTAN  UNITED ARAB EMIRATES  UZBEKISTAN  VIETNAM  YEMEN  48 Total

 Asian Maps

 Asia Political Map

 U.S. Census Definition of ‘Asian’

 Definition of ‘Asian’ used in the 2010 Census:

 According to OMB (Office of Management and Budget), “Asian” refers to “a person having origins in

any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent, including, for

example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand,

and Vietnam” (Census, 2010).

 The Asian population includes people who indicated their race(s) as “Asian” or reported entries such as

“Asian Indian,” “Chinese,” “Filipino,” “Korean,” “Japanese,” and “Vietnamese” or provided other

detailed Asian responses.

Asian Americans

 The total population of Asian Americans grew by 46% from 2000 to 2010 according to the Census

Bureau, which constituted the largest increase of any major racial group during that period.

 According to the 2010 Census the population demographic for Asian Americans, as previously defined,

is 5.6% of the U.S. population.

 In all actuality and correctly including a more encompassing approach for all Asian groups, Asian

Americans represent 9% of the population, about 27-29 million people.

 U.S. Asian Population Concentration Distribution

 Current Asian Americans in Politics

 Currently, for the 115th U.S. Congress the political representation of Asian Americans in the two houses

is:

 12 representatives

 2 delegates (Northern Mariana Islands and American Samoa).

 3 Senators:

o Sen. Mazie Hirono (HI) (2013 - p): Japan born. Buddhist (first in U.S. Senate’s history).

o Sen. Tammy Duckworth (IL) (2017): Thailand born.

o Sen. Kamala Harris (CA) (2017).

Sonia Shah's: Asian American?

 Sonia Shah

 Sonia Shah is an investigative journalist and author of critically acclaimed and prize-winning books on

science, human rights, and international politics.

 Her essay Asian American? Is the basis of this lecture’s section.

 Asian Pacific American History Week was observed during the first ten days of May after a joint

resolution from the U.S. Congress in 1978. It was later expanded, by Congress, in 1992, to cover the

entire month of May.

 Shah argues how the very term “Asian American History” makes their presence here sound so official,

so natural.

 She says the term “Asian American” itself is problematic. Most of the people whom others would

characterize as “Asian American” most emphatically do not think of themselves that way.

 Their particular histories, ethnicities, and nationalities are one million times more visceral and

meaningful in their lives than “pan-Asianness” (Shah, 1999).

 “The push to unify the disparate peoples and histories of Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Hmong,

Pakistanis, Thais, and Indians, among others, comes from both right and left.

 Unlike other diverse ethnic/racial groups, such as African Americans and American Indians, Asian

Pacific Americans share no common historical trauma like slavery or colonization, in this country.

(Occupancy and assimilation?)

 There are undeniable strategic values in their unity.

 Americans know so little about Asian cultures, in general, that the stereotypes and fantasies projected

upon any one group bleed over onto the next” (Shah, 1999).

 As a group, Asians can be considered or labeled a “model minority” and at other times seen as spies and

interlopers, but Shah argues that they are held at a distance, no matter how “American” they may

become.

 This is due, in part, because their role in American society is mainly defined not by their unique

contributions per se, but by their roles in the unfolding drama between American labor and capital, and

between Blacks and Whites (Shah, 1999).

 “Each wave of Asian immigration to American shores has been triggered by U.S. immigration policy or

military interventions in Asia.

 When American labor has gotten too expensive, due to unions organizing victories and the like,

immigration laws have strategically shifted to import workers from Asia, whether poor Chinese laborers

in the 1800s to build the railroads or professional Asians in the 1960s to service the then-growing

welfare state” (Shah, 1999).

 “U.S. military interventions in the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere likewise resulted in

floods of Asian refugees at American gates.

 Today, the workers, farmers, and small landowners in Asia whose livelihoods have been

determined/influenced by the demands of U.S. multinational companies are being smuggled illegally

into the country.

 Predictably, backlashes against these workers have followed in each case.

 Laws excluding Chinese from becoming citizens, owning property, marrying, or attending public

schools with Whites were enacted in the mid to late 1800s” (Shah, 1999).

 In 1942, the U.S. government took away homes, possessions, and savings from 120,000 Japanese

Americans while also forcing them into “internment” camps.

 Please watch all six parts of this short documentary (about 20min total):

Japanese Internment Camps

 The 1980s economy included another wave of anti-Asian violence, bigotry, and discrimination:

 As we just explored through the Vincent Who? film, in 1982, Chinese American Vincent Chin was

beaten to death with a baseball bat by auto workers who thought he was Japanese.

 In 1987, Navraz Mody was beaten to death by a gang of youths in New Jersey, home of the infamous

“dotbusters” (a vicious reference to the Indian bindhi) (Shah, 1999).

 “Today, many Asian workers serve as a sort of middle-tier wedge between Blacks and Whites, and

between corporate elites and workers.

 Even the much-lauded professional Asians are harassed and excluded on the basis of their accents, their

degrees often devalued and held to higher-than-usual standards.

 For all the fanfare regarding their success, most of them still make less money than Whites with

comparable educations” (Shah, 1999).

 As part of the American pattern of exploiting minority members, undocumented Asian workers take jobs

nobody else will tolerate, toiling in sweatshops and factories.

 Some of this labor exploitation is imposed by other Asians as well. There is a very obvious pattern of

legal vs. illegal immigrants’ subjugation.

 “The model minority myth likewise inserts Asians into the larger drama about Blacks and Whites.

 While an education can be had and a living made based on model minority myths (at least for some), it

is at the cost of indulging the racist delusion that there can be some “good minorities” in implicit

contrast to those other “bad minorities” who have only themselves to blame” (Shah, 1999).

 Shah’s theory is that American media continues to be fascinated with Asian misery and senseless

oppression.

 She points out that when Americans gain a peek into the life in Asia, it is invariably a horror scene:

 Indonesians eating bark  Chinese women drinking pesticides  Thai prostitutes chained to their beds  dead bodies in rivers  contaminated blood supplies  tsunamis  mudslides  train wrecks  massacres, and so on.

 “The story of Asian American history, in these ways, is a story of not belonging, of alienation from

America and Asia.

 Yet, despite all this ambivalence and contradiction about their place in U.S. society, Asian Americans

have played upon the broader American stage and have made lives and history changes as a result”

(Shah, 1999).

 Shah mentions people such as:

 the human rights advocate Yuri Kochiyama;  the feminist activist Anannya Bhattacharjee;  the Gay rights activist Urvashi Vaid;  the radical poet Janice Mirikitani;

 the public intellectuals Glenn Omatsu, Peter Kwong, and Mari Matsuda;  the filmmakers Richard Fung and Renee Tajima to name just a few, are building an inspired Asian front

to improve all of their people’s lives.

 Their legacy are today’s influential Asian American immigrant worker movements, the growing

institution of Asian American Studies in universities across the country, a thriving Asian American arts

community, and much more.

 These people and the institutions they have built are the Asian makers and contributors of American

history.

 They have and will continue to force this country to deal with and accept the realities of a diverse,

multilingual, Yellow and Brown, ever-more-vocal “Asianized” America (Shah, 1999).

 Still, as Shah points out, their own country remains ignorant of this group.

 “The pan-Asianness approach is simply culturally irresponsible.

 It denies historical factors and differences, multiple nationalities, different languages, dietary practices,

cultural traits, and customs, while perpetuating the stereotypical expectations for its members” (Shah,

1999).

 This is a group also affected by immigration laws and our own immigration views.

 A minority group forced to go from pan-Asianness (sameness approach to all Asians) to pan-Asianism

(ideology promoting the unity of Asian peoples) in order to curtail the assimilation factors.

 It is another minority group with an incredible economic power. Out of all minorities, Asian Americans,

collectively, own more independent businesses than any other minority group.

 At a current demographic of 9 % of the United States population, they are also an ever growing

minority. Closing in (and sometimes even exchanging the title) to the highest and fastest growth rate

owned by Latinos/Hispanic Americans.

 A minority group that includes, offers, and shares different religious and philosophical influences.

 A minority group that is gaining more and more political power every day as their needs for

representation and acceptance solidify within our society.

 A group that also played a crucial role in the making of modern America.

 A group that also contributed in many different ways to the building and expansion of this country.

 A group that is simply and undoubtedly part of our global and multicultural American society.