Asian discrimination is being ignored & overshadowed once again
by Sunjay Muralitharan, March 6, 2021
It's no secret that hate crimes against Asian Americans have been on the rise due to the coronavirus pandemic. We have already seen the number of Asian hate crimes increase 19 fold and how 25% of Asian youth have been victims of racist bullying this year. Despite these alarming data points, the mainstream media (MSM) has put little effort into reporting this issue. Because of the MSM’s lackluster performance we have yet to witness a united nationwide upheaval around the killing of 19-year-old Christian Hall, an Asian American teen who was fatally shot by police during a mental health crisis as we did with George Floyd. The same goes for the Vicha Ratanapakdee the 84-year-old Thai American who was brutally murdered in broad daylight just like Ahmaud Arbery.
(Left) A picture of Vicha Ratanapakdee (Right) A drawing of Vicha Ratanapakdee that has been circulating around social media
Photo: Jonathan Chang (Yahoo News)
This lack of reporting on hate crimes against Asian Americans is a part of a disastrous historical trend of ignoring Asian discrimination in our history. To the average American, the struggle for racial equality in the 19th and 20th centuries seems to be a dichotomy between blacks and whites. However, in reality, it was far more complex than this. While Asian Americans never had to experience the horrors of slavery, they have had their fair share of discrimination throughout America’s history.
Let’s begin our journey by looking at the 19th century. In 1848, news regarding the discovery of gold in Sacramento Valley electrified the globe. Many Asian immigrants, primarily the Chinese, rushed to America hoping for a life better than the one they had at home (before this event there was very minimal Asian immigration to America). For a time, whites viewed the Chinese as respectable hard workers. However, as time progressed, whites began to view them as industrial rivals and threats to working-class jobs. This growing anti-Chinese sentiment led to the passage of various racist laws that aren’t too well known by the general populace today. The most important ones being the foreign miners tax— passed by the CA legislature to reduce the prosperity of Asian miners— and the Chinese Exclusion Act which effectively banned Chinese immigrants from entering the US.
Early Chinese Immigrants working side by side white Americans during the 1848 California Gold Rush
Photo: California State Library
Many people tend to believe that Asians did little to combat this racism, but that was not the case. The Six Companies ( the six most vital Chinese American organizations based in San Francisco) filed federal court suits and launched an arduous letter-writing campaign hoping to overturn this racist legislation. Sadly, their efforts were in vain.
During the 19th century, the struggles of Asian immigrants were greatly overshadowed by the greater struggles of black slaves (or freedmen as they were called after the Civil war.) In this century we witnessed the civil war, emancipation proclamation, and passage of the 13th, 14th & 15th amendments that freed the slaves, gave blacks “equal” protection under the law and the right to vote. These monumental achievements tend to be what Americans remember the 19th century for instead of Asian discrimination.
Fast forward to the late 19th and early 20th century to the Philippine-American War. The US has recently acquired the Philippines from Spain due to their victory in the Spanish-American War. The native Filipinos were not interested in being oppressed by another imperialist nation and proclaimed the creation of the Independent Philippine Republic. Their leader was Phillipino Nationalist Emilio Aguinaldo who had led the conflict against the Spanish a few years back. Both sides were exceptionally violent, but the Americans were committing these atrocities to suppress the Filipinos desire for independence. American forces tortured war prisoners, burnt down villagers, and adopted the same inhumane reconcentration policies that they had criticized the Spanish for using. The Americans prevailed in the war with only 4,200 casualties, while 20,000 Philipino fighters were killed and 200,000 Filipino civilians perished.
The general populous today does not remember America as an oppressive imperial power in the early 20th century. After all, our empire was nothing compared to that of Great Britain and Germany at that time. Instead, they remember the early 1900s for other revolutionary policy changes like the implementation of the 18th & 19th amendments that banned alcohol usage and sale and gave women the right to vote (the 18th amendment was abolished by the 21st amendment in 1933). For these reasons, Asian suffering has been ignored once again.
Now let's jump into the mid 20th century. The recent 1941 Pearl Harbor bombing has spawned a nationwide hysteria regarding Japanese Americans as a threat to national security. President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 ordering people of Japanese descent to be placed in internment camps. Over 120,000 Japanese Americans (over half of which were US citizens) were affected by this order, many of which had to remain in these concentration camps, or “relocation centers” as they were called at the time, till the end of the war. They were housed in overcrowded barracks with little insulation and no running water. In Endo v. the United States, the Supreme Court ruled that the War Relocation Authority (the federal agency tasked with forcefully relocating Japanese Americans to relocation centers) didn’t have the authority to detain loyal Americans. This ruling, which was brought on by the daughter of Japanese immigrants Mitsuye Endo, effectively ended Japanese American concentration camps.
"We saw all these people behind the fence, looking out, hanging onto the wire, and looking out because they were anxious to know who was coming in. But I will never forget the shocking feeling that human beings were behind this fence like animals [crying]. And we were going to also lose our freedom and walk inside of that gate and find ourselves…cooped up there…when the gates were shut, we knew that we had lost something that was very precious; that we were no longer free." - Mary Tsukamoto, a survivor of Japanese internment camps
Manzanar concentration camp located in CA Owens Valley
Photo: Los Angeles Times
Japanese internment is one of the more high-profile incidents of Asian American racism but it was blocked out by another event: the Civil Rights movement. The Civil Rights movement spanned the 1950s & 60s and had a clear goal to end segregation and gain federal protection of citizenship rights for blacks. Its leaders ranged from the militant Malcolm X to the peace-loving Martin Luther King Junior. This struggle resulted in many notable victories including ending Jim Crow, banning racial discrimination, and increasing awareness of black culture & its impact on United States history. These revolutionary accomplishments benefited the Asian American community, but they also overshadowed the struggles they faced in the earlier decades of the 20th century.
After reviewing history, it should come as no surprise that the struggles of Asian Americans are being ignored & overshadowed today. However, this does not have to be the case. We can all take small steps to reverse this harmful indifference to Asian American racism and support the Asian American community. We can spread the word about Asian hate crime to social media. We can support the family of Christian Hall & get updates regarding advocacy about his death by following his family’s account on Instagram: @justiceforchristianhall. We can support our small Asian-owned businesses, many of which are having a tough time getting customers, by donating to this GoFundMe campaign to help save NYC’s Chinatown or shopping at your local Asian store.
The Asian American community is suffering and it's time we take a stand with them the same way we did for African Americans last summer. Real change starts with every single one of us.
Sources:
Milestones: 1899–1913 - Office of the Historian (state.gov)
Unnoticed-Struggle.pdf (jacl.org)
https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/japanese-relocation
Banner Photo by Equal Justice Initiative
Thumbnail Photo by Yahoo Sports