response to readings

Student 1:

The aim of this paper is to analyze some changes that took place in South Asian American communities after 1965.  Prior to 1965 the migrants from such countries as India, Japan, Korea, Vietnam and some others were generally called Asian Americans: the majority if not all the representatives did not care much about being acknowledged as representatives of a particular ethnic group, e.g. Indian Americans, Vietnamese Americans, etc. Population of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi countries have changed and such changes have also led to some shifts in the communities they formed in the United States. Since 1965 the Indian representatives who lived in the USA began to demand to be named and classified other than Asian American. Their need for self-identification and ethical acknowledgment has grown. The shift in the consciousness of Indian migrants began when India proclaimed its independence in 1947 (Shukla 1999-2000). Social changes as well as the economic growth in the 1970s in India have led to the alteration of self-perception and self-representation of Indians as a separate nation. According to Shukla (1999-2000), starting from late 1960s Americans of Indian origin started “to develop organizations and newspapers to define themselves self-consciously as a community” (23). 

The change in the consciousness of Asian people or desi (descendants of South Asia) and realization of the belongingness to a particular ethnicity has been marked by certain events in national and world history. Vivienne Prashad discusses the process of such transformation of consciousness and feelings of Asian peoples in her book The karma of brown folk. The author raises the problem of “resilience of race” which cannot be simply forgotten and explained by universalism (ix). Obviously, the perception of South Asian Americans by other Americans as well as by descendants of migrants themselves has been changing due to the shifts in social, cultural, economic and governmental spheres on local and global levels.

Student 2:

One example from early South Asian American history (before 1965) is racial discrimination. According to Erika Lee’s Legacies of the 1965 Immigration Act, AEL (the Asiatic Exclusion League) argues that South Asians were “dangerous cheap laborers and unassimilable foreigners whose support for Indian nationalism was a threat to national security.” Racial violence happened later. South Asians were harassed by them. At that time, they were not allowed for owning and leasing the land, and were expelled from towns and cities.

The example from Prashad’s preface to his book The Kama of Brown Folk also is racial discrimination. Prashad states that the claim to a higher spirituality allows desis to look themselves superior to blacks. In addition, he also states that the social sanctioned by US orientalism provides a space to develop a life, even though it is under constant threat from education and other institutions. 

After I read Sandhya Shukla’s essay and Vijay Prashad’s essay, and study lecture 5, I found that both examples which I have chosen have a similar thing: racial discrimination. However, first one is majority discriminates minority on their own initiative. For various of reasons in term of economy and job opportunities, American excluded South Asians through legislation and behaviors (threat or violence). Even though the second example also is racial discrimination, this is different. Most of South Asians are farmers, railroad labors, or factory workers. Their living condition are not good. To change their attention for living condition and discrimination, operators make them to see themselves as superior to blacks. Hence South Americans have anti-blackness. They would overlook the situation that they also accept racial discrimination and don’t fight for better living conditions. In addition, people also prevent solidarity of two racial groups which are blacks and South Asian through this way which is changing South Asian’s attention, and try to divide two groups.