It’s always tough to discuss the relationship between different people of color. I joke (well, not really joking) that people of color have to keep their arguments hidden because white people will use those disagreements to justify ignoring both groups. In some way, people of color don’t have a space to have a nuanced conversation about race relations because white people aren’t ready to hear said nuanced points and white people permeate almost all spaces in this country.
That being said, it’s impossible for me as an Asian American who staunchly supports the Black Lives Matter movement to not recognize the conflicts that arise between non-black people of color and black people. Ex-NYPD officer Peter Liang’s murder of Akai Gurley in a Brooklyn housing project highlights this in the national media. Some Asian Americans protested the fact that Liang, a Chinese American, was prosecuted in a way that white officers weren’t and thus demanded charges be dropped. While I don’t disagree, Liang was probably treated more harshly as a non-white person, that doesn’t absolve him of killing an unarmed person, nor does it dismiss the harm caused to Gurley and his friends and family. It also doesn’t dismiss racism as a factor. By focusing demands on treating Liang like white officers, it highlights a common theme: Let’s try to join white people and leave other people of color in the dust.
This interracial violence is nothing new. Between the beating of Rodney King and the LA riots, 15-year-old Latasha Harlins was murdered by a Korean American store owner, Soon Ja Du. Not only was this a tragedy and probably related to anti-black attitudes that exist among many Asian Americans, it also provided white people an excuse to focus the Los Angeles riots on the squabbles of black and Asian communities, rather than the poverty both communities were struggling with or the police brutality towards Rodney King and others, both black and non-black.
Closer to home, we see an Asian-American UW-Madison student assault and spit at a black student. The victim and her friends state he said racist comments, including stating that she was here on scholarship. It’s starting to feel like that montage in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing around town. Having Samuel Jackson jump in with “Yo! Hold up! Time out! Time out! Y’all take a chill!” feels appropriate.
Why does this conflict exist? Well, the first thing to highlight is the historical absurdity of the term “Asian American.” Conflicts between China and Japan have existed longer than the United States of America. Lumping together Vietnamese, Korean, Pakistani, Hmong, and Mongolian people under the same umbrella is absurd. Those communities and identities have deep history, a history older than some white Americans believe the world to be. So, their experiences as Americans will be different, as well. But, when in the United States, “Asian” is the term white people will use for all those groups (similar to how Native American somehow applies to every single nation of indigenous people, each with its own history and culture and language). And so long as white people view you all as the same, you will have shared experiences. I mean, no matter what your ethnic roots, a white person will ask you at some point, “Where are you from? No, where are you really from?”
I joke, but I’ll speak to those shared experiences. While Asian Americans have been in the United States for all of the United States’ history, the community is significantly rooted in immigrant populations. That immigrant process may be different for all of us, whether we are descended from refugees or 1800’s manual laborers or contemporary students pursuing higher education, but most of us come in hugely ignorant of the history of black America. We come in and we see a hierarchy already set — black people are on the bottom, white on the top. It would seem to be in our self-interest to try to align with those on the top; as the saying goes, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. And, frankly, there’s a lot of superficial success that’s come along with this. Once upon a time, Asian Americans were the “yellow peril,” an amorphous fear of Asians taking over white people’s countries, their womxn, and their jobs. You used to lose your citizenship if you married an Asian. Immigration laws were designed to keep Asians out. Today, we have the model minority stereotype. We’re here to do well in math, play the violin, go to college, and… take their higher-paid jobs (apparently, Latinx are taking their lower-paid jobs — white people really do fancy themselves to be Goldilocks, huh?).
“We Asian Americans owe our success to black Americans. In 1964, the Civil Rights Movement won the passage of the Civil Rights Act, but 1965 saw the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which allowed for many more Asians to immigrate to the United States. We literally wouldn’t be here without the Civil Rights Movement, which was led primarily by black Americans. Who was a leader in ending the Vietnam War, which caused the unnecessary and brutal deaths of millions of Asians? Martin Luther King, Jr. Underneath the superficiality of the model minority myth and racial hierarchy, Asian Americans have been organizing for themselves, often following the path laid down by black activists and organizing alongside contemporary black activists.”
Personal experience combined with this lack of knowledge of black history reinforces this. Many Asian-American immigrants feel they came from deep oppression, and there’s definite truth to that. The obstacles my parents faced, for instance, seem insurmountable to me. To come from deep poverty, face political persecution, come to a new country and learn the common language after the fact, barely maintain housing, eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches every day to save money, then somehow rise in socioeconomic status? You can almost be forgiven for believing the story of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. Then, in turn, you turn to black people, who you mostly know from racist media coverage, and go, “Well, we did it and we were here for 30 years, why can’t you in 200 years?”
This, of course, does not recognize the real advantages that many(though not all) Asian Americans have. My father was here pursuing a graduate degree. Of course, those networks and that educational background bring in huge advantages. Asian Americans did not face hundreds of years of slavery, a hundred years of Jim Crow, and the reintroduction of slavery through mass incarceration. We have never been public enemy number one (maybe number two in the 1800s); this country has a special place in hell it wants to put black people, a deep-seated genocide that is only rivaled by its approach to Native Americans.
As Liz Lin in The Salt Collective puts it, “But as Asian Americans, we do have some privileges. People generally assume that we are smart and hardworking, which is reductive but infinitely preferable to people assuming the opposite. The impact of these beliefs on how we experience the world cannot be overstated. It’s not surprising that at 17, when I first heard in a freshman seminar that I was oppressed because I was Asian-American, my first response was skepticism.”
But you know who loses out in the end when we buy into the “model minority” myth, when we try to assimilate to the white hierarchy? All of us. Poor people, black people, Asian people. For instance, take the model minority myth. It’s just factually untrue, for one thing; once you account for parental educational background and socioeconomic status, Asian Americans don’t do better at things like educational achievement and test scores. We actively recruit the highest-achieving, often-most-privileged Chinese and Indian students to come to American colleges. The immigration process often weeds out working-class Asian Americans. All of this masks that Asian Americans face a higher poverty rate than white people, face higher foreclosure rates, and make up 12 percent of the undocumented population and those model minority statistics vanish when you focus on groups we don’t actively recruit from, like refugee populations. The flipside of the term “model minority” would be problem minority. That’s what the myth is really about; it’s a way to blame black people for their own oppression. Every time we as Asian Americans buy into that, we reinforce the stigmatization of black people. Just the fact that we’re being used as a tool, a wedge to drive apart different people, should be upsetting.
As Liz Lin noted, it’s reductive. It reduces the Asian experience, one that I highlighted as infinitely diverse, to “good at math, good at school.” This allows us to ignore our own oppression. Where in the model minority myth do we talk about hate violence against Asian Americans, like the murder of Vincent Chin? More recently, a Chinese couple was beaten by a white person for speaking Mandarin Chinese. What about the police murder of Kuanchung Kao, when the police “feared his kung fu moves.” Or the police murder of Cau Bich Tran, a Vietnamese American womxn, or the police murder of the Hmong American Fong Lee.
Where do we talk about the need for mental health services for Asian-American refugees from wars that the United States started, like in Vietnam? Where in the model minority myth do we talk about the fact that until recently, Chinese people were entirely banned from entering the United States? And where do I, as a highly educated, privileged, middle-class second-generation Chinese American, talk about working-class Chinese Americans who came in the 1800’s? Or came today undocumented and are shuffled around the country from low-wage food service job to low-wage food service job?
This racial hierarchy prevents us from recognizing the class oppression of our own people, sometimes by our own people. That, in fact, may be arguably the intended goal of this country’s racial hierarchy to begin with. Where would poor white people be if labor unions didn’t exclude black workers in the early 20th century? What would union membership rates be like? What would the minimum wage be? The bosses pitted poor white workers and poor black workers against each other, many labor unions (though not all) played into that, and the only winner was the boss, who probably laughed all the way to the bank.
The psychological tolls of assimilation are immeasurable, as well. As any second-generation immigrant will tell you, the experience is like being caught between two worlds. I’m not American enough to be American, but I’m not Chinese enough to be Chinese (in fact, just the other day a college student from China said that I’m not Chinese). I will always be an outsider. In my high school days, I survived a very white high school by rejecting all facets of my Chinese heritage. I stopped learning my parents’ native language, I played into racist humor, and I blamed my outsider status on my parents and my own heritage. Now, I have only a tenuous connection to my extended family. Faced with the lose-lose of choosing to be connected with family and connected with friends, high-school me chose the latter. Despite the clear harms of those actions to my parents, my family, and myself, harms that I recognized both then and now, in some ways I take comfort in the fact that the other choice would have been similarly harmful. By playing into this false path to success laid out to us “model” minorities, we lose our own networks and identities.
And let’s not pretend that the relative privileges of model minority are here to stay. Muslim-American immigrants from Middle Eastern countries used to have many of the same stereotypes as other Asian Americans, such as being doctors and having high educational achievement. Post 9/11, though, Muslim Americans face a level of persecution that is unfathomable, from police brutality to racial profiling to indefinite incarceration. How much more Trump-esque rhetoric telling working-class white people that Chinese people are the reason they don’t have jobs or foreign policy conflicts with China does it take before Chinese Americans see increased hate crimes and persecution?
Finally, we Asian Americans owe our success to black Americans. In 1964, the Civil Rights Movement won the passage of the Civil Rights Act, but 1965 saw the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which allowed for many more Asians to immigrate to the United States. We literally wouldn’t be here without the Civil Rights Movement, which was led primarily by black Americans. Who was a leader in ending the Vietnam War, which caused the unnecessary and brutal deaths of millions of Asians? Martin Luther King, Jr. Underneath the superficiality of the model minority myth and racial hierarchy, Asian Americans have been organizing for themselves, often following the path laid down by black activists and organizing alongside contemporary black activists. These efforts should be our role models, not assimilation. Madison has its own organization called Asians for Black Lives. Freedom, Inc. is a community organization in Madison that runs programming focused on low-income queer Black and Hmong youth.
Yuri Kochiyama was a Japanese American activist who fought against the Vietnam War and fought for reparations for the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II. She learned from Malcolm X. Kartar Dhillon was a South Asian activist from California. She fought against British colonialism of India and fought for the reunification of Korea. She worked for the Teamsters union and supported the Black Panther Party. Grace Lee Boggs was a Chinese American activist who was an outspoken socialist fighting for workers’ rights and civil rights for black Americans. This is the history we lose when we try to achieve success by appeasing white standards. As long as we are pitted against one another, the wealthy white man wins and we lose.
We have to recognize that our struggles are interlinked; we are in one big fight. Our liberation is tied to black liberation. As Grace Lee Boggs stated, “I think it’s very, very important that folks understand how much this country was founded on the enslavement of blacks, and how the resistance of blacks to that enslavement has been the spark plug for so many important developments.”
