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10/24/22

By Cat Sandoval 
Experts say the trope of Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners and treated as "others" continues today with dangerous consequences.

There aren't many headlines or news coverage of anti-Asian hate crimes now, compared to what was shown during the height of the pandemic — but attacks and insults are still happening in various parts of the country.

The national coalition Stop Asian American Pacific Islander Hate tracked 11,500 hate incidents from March 2020 to March 2022. At the start of the pandemic, Asians were scapegoated and wrongfully blamed for COVID-19. It is true that the Chinese government silenced their doctors and kept the outbreak a secret from the rest of the world.  

John C. Yang, is the president and executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice.

"We should be calling out that government. But in doing so, we absolutely need to be clear that it's a government that we are concerned about and not the people," said Yang. 

Politicians like former President Donald Trump publicly blamed China and continued to use radicalized terms like "Wuhan virus" and "China virus," terms the World Health Organization warned could lead to racial profiling and stigma. Trump's first "Chinese virus" tweet was followed by an increase in anti-Asian hashtags. But activists say anti-Asian hate didn't start with the pandemic.  

Stewart Khow, co-founded the Asian American Education Project.

"There was a political party built, the Workingmen's party that was established in California. That main point was to get rid of the Chinese. So there was violence," said Khow. 

Khow is referring to an American Labor Organization founded in San Francisco in 1877. Five years later, anti-Asian sentiments led to the Chinese Exclusion Act. That was the first and only federal law that banned immigration of a specific nationality.  

Experts say the trope of Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners and treated as "others" continues today with dangerous consequences.  

"Regardless of how long we've been in the United States, whether we were born here or not, that we are seen as a foreigner," said Yang.

During WWII, Japanese Americans, men, women and children were rounded up and placed in detention camps. They were incarcerated for three years, their property and personal items taken.   

"Not one Japanese American was ever convicted for spying for Japan," said Khow. 

Then, when the Twin Towers fell in 2001, South Asians and Muslim Americans were targeted. It didn't matter if they were born here.   

Janelle Wong, is a professor of American studies, at the University of Maryland.

"This is a cyclical kind of trope that is always kind of beneath the surface, but arises in times where the U.S. feels under threat," said Wong.  

And now, during the pandemic, experts say one way to combat hate is through education.

"You prevent that from making sure people understand that Asian Americans are American, are part of the fabric of our history," said Yang. 

The Asian American Education Project aims to train teachers and teach this history in every public school from kindergarten through 12th grade. Currently, five states have passed a mandatory Asian American history requirement.    

"Asian American history, is American history. Let me say it again. Asian American history, is American history. You don't understand big parts of American history — unless you understand Asian American history," said Khow. 

The surge in anti-Asian hate has led to a reemergence and groundswell of Asian American activism. In the 80s there was no justice for Vincent Chin, who was killed in a brutal racial attack in Detroit over rising tensions over Japanese auto imports. 

Compare that to the reaction after the 2021 mass killing of eight people — mostly Asian women, at massage parlors in metro Atlanta. 

"The fact that President Biden went down to Atlanta, along with the vice president, almost immediately after the Atlanta murders, and that there was legislation passed within a within a couple of months addressing hate crimes against Asian Americans —  power to Black people, power to Asian people," said Yang.  

"One of the most exciting kinds of activism to emerge from the last two years is Asian-American young people's interest in telling their own stories," said Wang. 

Chicago held its first ever Blasian March, a coalition of stop anti-Asian hate and Black Lives Matter activists.   

Rohan, is the founder of Blasian March. 

"I think being Blasian and being a Black Asian is incredibly powerful because, you know, so often society is trying to divide us and separate us. But you can't separate me. You know, I am living proof that we can coexist," said Rohan. 

"We can unite as a community from the Black and Asian and Asian communities to come together and just understand our differences and also just celebrate our intersectionality and our history together," said Kate Ventrina, the Chicago Blasian March organizer. 

    

 

3/18/22

By Maryland Today Staff

Hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders remain a serious issue one year after the Atlanta killings of eight people, including six Asian American women, according to a new survey led in part by a University of Maryland researcher.

With 16% of Asian American adults and 14% of Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islander adults reporting a hate incident since the beginning of 2021, these proportions suggest that nearly 3 million adults from these groups have experienced a hate incident in a little over a year.

The 2022 survey, conducted online March 2-9 by AAPI Data and Momentive of 16,901 adults, including 1,991 Asian or Asian Americans and 186 Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islanders living in the United States, also reveals that Asian Americans are not alone in experiences of hate violence.

Critically, all non-white groups report experiencing hate crimes or hate incidents in the period from January 2021 through early March 2022—from 17% among Black adults, to 16% among Asian Americans, 15% among Native Americans, 14% among Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, and 13% among Latinos. Only 6% of White adults report experiencing a hate incident over the same period.

“These trends help to add critical context and data to the ways in which hate crimes and more everyday experiences with racial discrimination affect all non-white groups in the country,” said Janelle Wong, a UMD professor of American studies and Asian American studies and AAPI Data’s co-director.

The survey results show that Asian American women and men experience hate crimes and hate incidents at similar levels—28% and 30%, respectively, report having ever experienced hate incidents and 16%, or about one out of six in each group, report having experienced hate incidents since the beginning of 2021.

Accounts of self-reported incidents fail to capture the full scale of anti-Asian hate incidents. For example, the Stop AAPI Hate organization had logged about 11,000 hate incidents involving Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders as of December 2021, far short of the 3 million estimated incidents based on the survey findings.

The survey also found that nearly half (48%) of the general public believes that hate crimes against AAPI individuals have increased from the previous year, higher than what the general public believes for the Black (29%) or Latino (20%) community.

Similar to previous surveys, Black people are most likely to have ever experienced a hate crime or hate incident (35%). Nearly 30% of Asian and Native Americans say they have experienced a hate crime or hate incident during their lifetimes.

The survey also provides insights into a range of experiences with racial discrimination and racial identity among Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and other groups:

  • More than one-third (34%) of Black people, 28% of Hawaiian/Pacific Islanders, 23% of Asian Americans, 18% of Latinos and 16% of Native/American Indians say that their race is a very relevant aspect of their background when it comes to how they are treated at work.
  • Two-thirds (63%) of AAPI adults consider themselves a person of color (compared with 87% of Black people, 48% of Latinos, 49% of Native or American Indians, 6% of white people).
  • AAPIs who say they are a person of color are more aware of the increase of hate crimes against their community (58% vs 39%).
  • AAPIs are among those most likely to say race is a relevant aspect of their identity at work (compared with 58% of Black people, 57% of AAPI, 41% of Latinos, 39% of Native Americans, 20% of white people).

“These data provide new and essential context on the persistent impact of the tragic events of the past year,” said Jon Cohen, chief research officer at Momentive. “Getting fresh insight into the incidences of hate crimes along with reports of day-to-day discrimination shine a spotlight on how AAPI individuals are thinking about and expressing their identities.”

This article was based on a release produced by AAPI Data.

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Professor Janelle Wong will talk at 10 a.m. Friday about the new data on hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in an event sponsored by the Williams Center for Education, Justice and EthicsWatch her conversation with retired U.S. District Court Judge Alexander Williams Jr. on YouTube live.

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Professor Janelle Wong will talk at 10 a.m. Friday about the new data on hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in an event sponsored by the Williams Center for Education, Justice and EthicsWatch her conversation with retired U.S. District Court Judge Alexander Williams Jr. on YouTube live.

 

6/15/21

By Kimmy Yam

While news reports and social media have perpetuated the idea that anti-Asian violence is committed mostly by people of color, a new analysis shows the majority of attackers are white.

Janelle Wong, a professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, released analysis last week that drew on previously published studies on anti-Asian bias. She found official crime statistics and other studies revealed more than three-quarters of offenders of anti-Asian hate crimes and incidents, from both before and during the pandemic, have been white, contrary to many of the images circulating online.

Wong told NBC Asian America that such dangerous misconceptions about who perpetrates anti-Asian hate incidents can have "long-term consequences for racial solidarity."

"The way that the media is covering and the way that people are understanding anti-Asian hate at this moment, in some ways, draws attention to these long-standing anti-Asian biases in U.S. society," Wong said. "But the racist kind of tropes that come along with it — especially that it's predominantly Black people attacking Asian Americans who are elderly — there's not really an empirical basis in that."

Wong examined nine sources and four types of data about anti-Asian hate incidents, including from the reporting forum Stop AAPI Hate, Pew Research, as well as official law enforcement statistics, the majority of them spanning the year and a half when the #StopAAPIHate hashtag was trending. She found major contradictions in the prevailing narrative around perpetrators, victims, and the general environment of racism toward Asian Americans during the coronavirus pandemic. She said such misleading conclusions could be attributed to the lack of context around images, the failure to amplify all aspects of the data or misinterpretations of the research.

A misread of a frequently cited study from this year, published in the American Journal of Criminal Justice, likely contributed to the spread of erroneous narratives, Wong said. The study, which examined hate crime data from 1992 to 2014, found that compared to anti-Black and anti-Latino hate crimes, a higher proportion of perpetrators of anti-Asian hate crimes were people of color. Still, 75 percent of perpetrators were white.

Other studies confirm the findings, Wong wrote. She pointed to separate research from the University of Michigan Virulent Hate Project, which examined media reports about anti-Asian incidents last year and found that upward of 75 percentof news stories identified perpetrators as male and white in instances of physical or verbal assault and harassment when the race of the perpetrator was confirmed. Wong said the numbers could even be an underestimate.

"This is really how crime is framed in the United States — it's framed as the source is Black," Wong said.

Karthick Ramakrishnan, founder of AAPI Data, a data and civic engagement nonprofit group, for which Wong also works, said that the public's perception of perpetrators and victims is largely formed by the images that have been widely circulated — but that they aren't representative of most anti-Asian bias incidents. For example, the videos that have gone viral are more likely to be from low-income, urban areas where there is more surveillance, he said.

"You have security camera videos that are more available and prevalent in certain types of urban settings. And so that's what's available to people in terms of sharing," Ramakrishnan said. "The videos are more viral than if it's something that doesn't have any imagery or video connected to it, like something that's happening in the suburbs, for example."

When they are circulated, they play on a loop with no audio. Even though the videos alone don't provide much detail about what's happening, they dominate our perceptions, Ramakrishnan said.

"There's just something so powerful about these visual images so that no matter what the social science might say, people believe their eyes and especially the images that get played on repeat now," he said.

To read the full article, click below.

 

4/5/21

Why Anti-Asian Racism Persists

History shows us the cyclical nature of anti-Asian racism and violence.

In the last year, violence against Asian-Americans has increased significantly. When a 21-year-old shooter in Atlanta, Georgia shot and killed eight, including six Asian-American women, a national eye finally turned to face the anti-Asian hate that’s been building since the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic.

This kind of violence isn’t new. As Janelle Wong and Viet Thanh Nguyen write in a recent Washington Post piece, “While it is ever-lurking, the prominence of anti-Asian bias in U.S. life is cyclical. Though Asian Americans are often cast as a success story because of their high average levels of education and income, many Americans, at times of economic stress and uncertainty over U.S. global standing, associate Asian faces with a foreign threat.”

How can understanding the history of anti-Asian hate inform our national response today? Nguyen and Wong weigh in.

Click here to listen to the full CAFE Insider Podcast.

4/6/20

By David Nakamura 

Amid increased public attention on anti-Asian hate incidents, some Republicans and conservative-leaning advocacy groups are seeking to leverage the debate to bolster their long-standing efforts to overturn affirmative action policies at elite universities and high schools.GOP lawmakers have railed against the admissions criteria used by Ivy League schools, saying they discriminate against Asian American students. Influential pundits, including podcast host Ben Shapiro, have made similar arguments on social media, suggesting that Democrats and liberal groups have been duplicitous in their advocacy. 

And on Tuesday, a new coalition of Asian American groups, based mostly on the West Coast, called on the Justice Department to reinstate a Trump administration lawsuit — which the Biden administration dropped in February — that had accused Yale University of discriminating against White and Asian American students in its admissions.

“We condemn anti-Asian hate, but we call for action not empty rhetoric. People who are appalled by the broader attacks on Asians should be equally outraged by Asian students being deprived of their fair chance at a college education based on their race,” said Linda Yang, director of Washington Asians for Equality, a group formed in 2018 to oppose affirmative action measures in Washington state.

Yang, a co-founder of the new coalition, told reporters on a conference call that she hopes President Biden “has the courage to officially acknowledge that anti-Asian racism existed before covid-19” and direct the Justice Department to reinstate the Yale case.

In a statement, Yale spokeswoman Karen N. Peart rejected any assertion that the school’s admission’s process is discriminatory.

“Yale considers every applicant as a whole person; race and ethnicity alone never determine admission; and Yale never imposes numerical quotas or targets,” she said, noting that Asian Americans comprise about 26 percent of the school’s incoming class each year, up from 14 percent 20 years ago.

Democrats have denounced the efforts as a disingenuous attempt by Republicans to score political points on an ideological issue, and to shift the focus away from rising racism and xenophobia against Asian Americans over the past year that, they argue, was fanned in part by President Donald Trump’s rhetoric in blaming China for the coronavirus pandemic.

“This is a cynical use of a moment of real pain to further an agenda that [a majority of] the Asian American community does not even support,” said Janelle Wong, a professor at the University of Maryland and co-founder of AAPI Data, a demographic and policy research operation that conducts polling among Asian American and Pacific Islanders.

Surveys from AAPI Data in 2012 and 2016 showed that a drop in support for affirmative action among Asian Americans was attributed largely to more negative views specifically among Chinese Americans. Support among other Asian American groups held roughly steady at about 73 percent, the survey found.

"They are trying to end any consideration of race in public policy, which is not consistent with ending racial discrimination,” Wong said of Republicans.

[To continue reading the full article click the source below.]

 

3/19/21

By Viet Thanh Nguyen and Janelle Wong  

The Asian American sense of belonging was already fragile before a White gunman killed six of us among his eight victims in Atlanta this past week. The slayings reinforce a sense of heightened vulnerability among a group that had reported nearly 3,800 incidents of anti-Asian bias over the last year. The alleged killer told police that race wasn’t a motive, but given his targets, that is just not credible. Partly, no doubt, those incidents came thanks to President Donald Trump’s insistence on calling the coronavirus the “China virus” and the “Kung flu.” Many recognized early that such words aligned him with a strain of hatred — and accompanying vigilante violence — that has existed in the United States for as long as Asian immigrants have been here.

But it’s too simple to blame Trump for what is happening. In the 1980s, officials from both parties cast Japan as the economic enemy; now it is China, one of the few issues about which Democrats and Republicans agree. And yes, it’s true that China is an extremely bad actor when it comes to espionage and human rights. But decades of official U.S. foreign policy and rhetoric from the pundit class have had a unique effect on Asian Americans. When the government frets about Russian hacking and election interference, there is little consequence for Americans of Russian heritage. When officials express fears over China or other Asian countries, Americans immediately turn to a timeworn racial script that questions the loyalty, allegiance and belonging of 20 million Asian Americans. Most Americans are not skilled at distinguishing between people of different Asian origins or ancestries, and the result is that whenever China is attacked, so are Asian Americans as a whole.

While former president Barack Obama and President Biden have both denounced anti-Asian violence, as they should, they have also spent their careers embracing critical takes on China that have overlapped with Trump’s and that may have helped accelerate Sinophobic sentiment in the United States. Trump called China a “threat to the world” and advocated a hard economic line against the country, but even Biden has vowed to continue a tough stance. This includes an initiative that civil rights groups say opens the door to the racial profiling of Chinese American scientists by giving extra scrutiny to their tax records, visa applications and other documents. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said this month that “China is our pacing threat.”

[In Trump’s vision, immigrants should be grateful and servile]

The news is full of paranoia about Asian Americans and Asian immigrants. Some Chinese American scientists have been wrongly charged on the assumption that they are spies. In 1999, scientist Wen Ho Lee was accused of passing nuclear secrets to China and held, often in shackles, for nine months. In the end, the judge overseeing his case freed him, complaining that he’d suffered an abuse of government power. To be sure, spies from China, like those from all major powers, operate here. But research shows that innocent Asian Americans fall under suspicion because of their race or last names. (This is the same instinct behind the racial profiling that targets Black and Brown people.) In 2014, for instance, Sherry Chen was wrongly arrested on suspicion of espionage, charged and suspended from her job as an analyst at the National Weather Service. The charges were later dropped.

While it is ever-lurking, the prominence of anti-Asian bias in U.S. life is cyclical. Though Asian Americans are often cast as a success story because of their high average levels of education and income, many Americans, at times of economic stress and uncertainty over U.S. global standing, associate Asian faces with a foreign threat. In the 1980s, alarm that Japan would corner the affordable-car market led to Asian-bashing and increased hate crimes against Asian Americans, including the murder of Chinese American Vincent Chin in 1982 by two White Detroit autoworkers who mistook him for Japanese. The supposed threat was captured by the 1993 movie “Rising Sun,” in which the Japanese villain ate sushi off the body of a naked White woman, recalling World War II propaganda that showed Japanese soldiers threatening White women with rape.

Anti-Asian bias extends beyond people of Chinese origin. Four of the six Asian women who were killed in Atlanta were of Korean origin, with the two others possibly of Chinese origin. Last March, two young children and their father were stabbed in a Sam’s Club in Midland, Tex., by a man who believed the victims, of Myanmar origin, were from China and responsible for spreading the coronavirus. Data from the Asian American Voter Survey shows that, last summer, more than half of all Asian Americans, regardless of national origin, worried about pandemic-related hate crimes, harassment and discrimination.

There is historical reason that Asian Americans feel targeted, scapegoated and vilified. In the late 1800s, the Page Act and the Chinese Exclusion Act effectively ended Chinese immigration, based on fears that these immigrants would pollute the nation with disease, immorality and foreign habits. The laws were the official expression of many years of anti-Chinese violence, including the 1871 massacre of 17 Chinese men in Los Angeles and the 1887 killing of as many as 34 Chinese miners in Deep Creek, Ore. During World War II, many Americans assumed that Japanese Americans were no different from the Japanese and therefore constituted a subversive threat; more than 120,000, many of them citizens, were interned. Thirty years later, Vietnamese refugees faced hostility, including racist attacks on Vietnamese fishermen by the Ku Klux Klan in Texas. After 9/11, heightened American fears about Muslims led to violence that targeted anybody who appeared to be Muslim, including the murder of Sikh American Balbir Singh Sodhi, a gas station owner in Mesa, Ariz., whose killer identified him as a “towel head.” In 2012, a white supremacist killed six Sikh worshipers in Oak Creek, Wis.

[Books by immigrants, foreigners and minorities don’t diminish the ‘classic’ curriculum. They enhance it.]

Meanwhile, China emerged in the 1990s to replace Japan as a future competitor the United States must beware of. The “Chinagate” controversy involved alleged efforts by Chinese operatives, supposedly at the behest of the Chinese government, to influence the Clinton administration with donations. National Review turned to yellowface to depict Bill and Hillary Clinton and Al Gore as “Manchurian candidates” with buck teeth, foreshadowing how quickly Americans might turn to anti-Chinese stereotypes under sufficient fear or pressure, as Trump did. China obviously does compete economically with the United States. But so does the European Union, which Democrats, Republicans and the press do not characterize as a threat.

...

To continue reading the full article, click the source below.

3/22/21

By Liam Farrell

A disturbing trend of increased discrimination and violence against Asians and Asian Americans hit a terrifying new level in the United States last week with the shooting deaths of eight people, including six Asian women, at three Georgia spas.

University of Maryland study last year that surveyed more than 500 Chinese Americans nationwide found nearly half had been targeted by racist vitriol blaming them for the coronavirus pandemic. A separate investigation found anti-Asian hate crimes reported to police spiked 150% from 2019 to 2020 in the 16 of the largest U.S. cities even as overall hate crime reports fell 7%.

Janelle Wong headshot

Janelle Wong, professor of American studies and government and politics, and a faculty member in the Asian American Studies Program at UMD, spoke to Maryland Today after the mass shooting about the anxiety building in the Asian American community for the past year, how racial history is replaying and ways that the UMD community can help prevent future tragedies.

How were Asian and Asian American communities feeling before Tuesday’s events?
There’s definitely been an intensified feeling of anxiety as the pandemic has rolled on—survey results from AAPI Data, where I am a senior researcher, show substantial numbers of Asian Americans worrying about experiencing hate crimes, harassment and discrimination because of COVID-19. It was triggered to some extent by some U.S. leaders and elected officials calling the pandemic the “China virus” and the “kung flu” and people in our communities knowing there is a much longer history of Asian Americans being blamed for the introduction of disease to the United States. As part of the political justification for the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and subsequent acts that severely restricted immigration from Asia, they were painted as vessels of diseases like smallpox and bubonic plague. There is this stereotype of Asian Americans as fundamentally foreign, that they have dual loyalties and that they bring unfamiliar foods and culture and possibly disease.

How do you put the shootings into context with the overall rise of anti-Asian discrimination?
The roots of the anxiety over belonging and fears of Asian American otherness we see today go back much further in history, really to the moment Asian Americans arrived on U.S. shores. We saw it not only in the 1880s, when Chinese immigrants were driven out of small towns across the Western U.S. by vigilante gangs and when Congress had to find reasons to justify restrictions on immigration and naturalization based on race, but again in World War II with the internment of Japanese Americans. In the 1970s, when Vietnamese refugees were attacked and vilified as a foreign threat even though they were here as the result of U.S. war-making. We saw it again after 9/11 with attacks on Sikhs and South Asian Americans who were assumed to be terrorists. These same ideas about Asian invaders, what scholars refer to as the “Yellow Peril” trope, are easily and consistently called up and activated in times of national insecurity, economic instability or the uncertainty and fear of a global pandemic.  

There are unanswered questions about whether the alleged shooter was motivated by racial animus or sexual frustrations. Meanwhile, some alleged assailants of Asian Americans over the past year are also people of color. Are we looking at multiple motivations, or does something tie all this together?
What happened in Atlanta was both racialized and gendered violence. It affected some of the most vulnerable people in our communities: They were economically vulnerable, working outside of their homes, during the pandemic, in close quarters. It’s important for a full understanding to see the intersection of their race and their gender and their economic status. In addition, the shooter’s religious views seem like a critical part of the story.

I don’t think that every attack on Asian Americans is necessarily racially motivated. I think some of the incidents we are seeing are street crimes that might be a function of economic conditions and a concentration of stressors that are related to the pandemic. We are also seeing that racial discrimination presents itself in different forms. There is attention to violence and bias directed toward Asian Americans at this moment, for good reason. But Asian Americans are certainly not alone in experiencing violence based on race. Asian Americans are among the least likely to face police brutality while Black Americans are among the most. And racism is not only experienced through physical violence.  The form that racial discrimination takes varies across groups.

There is a high possibility that the shooter was focused on those establishments due to both racialized and sexualized fantasies that are applied to Asian American women via media images and other kinds of popular culture. We can’t really look at this incident simply in terms of Asian Americans’ racial position in society. Instead, it presents an opportunity to examine the ways that the experience of racism depends on gender and economic status. Equally critical is to take this moment as an opportunity to better see how discrimination travels both through and across communities of color. We see anti-Asian bias in communities of color, and we see anti-Black attitudes in Asian American communities. One key to decreasing that discrimination is to focus on the historical and systematic drivers of discrimination: racial segregation in neighborhoods, schools and the workplace. We must confront with policy changes the systems that have contributed to a society for which one prominent feature is racial caste. That means supporting proactive ways to dismantle racial inequality, including affirmative action, redistricting to create less segregated schools, fundamental reconsideration of policing systems, and redirecting economic resources and wealth. 

How does the “model minority” stereotype of Asian Americans as wealthy, educated high achievers complicate the discussions of racial discrimination?
On the one hand, Asian Americans are not always included in discussions of racial discrimination, even though they face racism as non-whites in the U.S. On the other, Asian Americans do possess some important group advantages that are related to race. For example, that Asian Americans exhibit, on average—although not across every Asian national-origin group—the highest levels of income and education in the U.S. This is in part due to immigration laws that recruit highly educated immigrants to the U.S. from Asia (less than 10% of Chinese have a college degree, but more than 50% of Chinese American immigrants do!). Asian Americans face bias in terms of being seen as foreign and perhaps lacking aggressive leadership qualities, but we are also the only non-white group that is assumed via implicit bias to be super competent and smart. The latter, when held by teachers, can actually improve academic performance among Asian American students. This is a complex moment, and it highlights the complicated position of Asian Americans in the larger racial landscape. To spin things out a bit further, the idea that Asian Americans are uber-smart and hardworking, what you refer to as the model minority stereotype, also serves to cover over the economic and mental health struggles of many in our community and reinforces the idea that Asian Americans don’t face any challenges related to race. The tragedy of the shootings in Atlanta are a sad reminder of that false claim.

What can people in the UMD community do to help?
This is really a moment where we can reflect on the potential for solidarity across different groups. The kind of racial profiling and racial targeting that Asians are experiencing is different from. but still related to, the profiling and stigmatization that other racial groups face. The pain we as Asian Americans feel is pain that is felt by so many groups, including Indigenous, Black, Latinx and LGBT people, and members of religious minorities. In these horrific moments we can see one another and recognize that these shared experiences are something we need to confront together.

What the University of Maryland has is the potential to develop a deeper understanding among all students of race and racism in the United States. We have a robust set of courses to help students understand how we got here, where these stereotypes come from and why attending to race, gender, sexuality and other kinds of potential axes of marginalization is critical. 

2/22/21

A few years ago, I asked the students in one of my Asian-American studies classes whether they had voted in the 2016 election. Most of the students in the class identified as Asian-American and for many that year was the first time they had reached voting age. If they had not voted, I asked the reason.

Beyond the age requirement to cast a ballot in presidential elections, there are other reasons why the students in my classes might not be eligible to vote. Sometimes students are not eligible because they are visiting on international student visas or because they are permanent residents who came to the U.S. at a young age, and have not yet become citizens.

It was not until after I asked the question that I realized that one of my students who had not voted in 2016 was avoiding eye contact. A year earlier, the student had disclosed their status as an undocumented immigrant to me, and they clearly did not want to share the information with the class.

I had seen and often cited the startling statistic that one of every seven Asian-American immigrants were undocumented. I had been part of a group of staff, students and faculty advocating for resources for undocumented students on campus, and I had been to many immigrant rights rallies focused on DACA.

But that day I had allowed myself to teach that class as if none of the students in my mostly Asian-American class could be undocumented. And this is the problem with the current debates over undocumented immigration. Too often, even those of us with the best of intentions fail to consider that policies that affect undocumented immigrants affect each and every one of our ethnic and racial communities.

Maryland is home to over 415,000 Asian-Americans making up approximately 7% of the population. Around 266,000 of them are immigrants and around 39% of Maryland’s Asian-American population are limited English proficient. The issues of legalization and immigration enforcement are too often thought of only as a Latino issue. In fact, there are around 35,000 undocumented Asian immigrants living in Maryland.

The Maryland Trust Act (SB88/HB304) disentangles Maryland government services, including policing, from immigration enforcement and forbids government employees from inquiring into people’s immigration status. It will have a direct effect on Asian-American undocumented people in our state, who are too often overlooked in debates over immigration. And, this legislation is good for all of our communities because research shows that jurisdictions with community trust policies (also known as sanctuary policies) are safer than comparable jurisdictions without them.

A group of Asian-American activists have turned out in opposition to community trust policies at the state and local level in Maryland in the past with a variety of Trump-like talking points. This mobilization is troubling on multiple levels, but particularly because other opposing organizations such as Help Save Maryland have ties to national organizations such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform that have white nationalist roots and seek to lower overall levels of immigration to the U.S. including legal immigration.

But these activists don’t speak for all Asian-Americans. A 2020 survey of Asian-American voters shows that 59% of Asian-Americans endorse a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and 55% support the government expanding health care to undocumented immigrants.

Asian-American voters are behind strong immigrant rights policies.

— JANELLE WONG 

The writer teaches Asian-American studies at the University of Maryland, College Park and is co-director of Montgomery County Progressive Asian American Network.

 

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