The Asian American Experience
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Class Notes
I. “When and Where I Enter” - Okihiro
A. Gary Okihiro – Scholar and teacher of comparative ethnic studies.
1. Professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University &
founding director of Columbia’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race
a. Recruited to Columbia as a result of a 1996 undergraduate
student protest calling for ethnic studies to balance what was perceived as a biased, proWestern core curriculum.
b. Prior to Columbia, Okihiro was the Director of Asian American
Studies at Cornell University
2. Received his Ph.D. in African studies from UCLA
3. Received Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Studies
Association
4. Past president of the Association for Asian American Studies
5. Author of numerous publications: Pineapple Culture, Island World,
Impounded, The Columbia Guide to Asian American History, etc.
B. Discussion:
1. According to Okihiro, what does the Statue of Liberty symbolize to
immigrants?
a. But to Bartholdi (artist) and President Grover Cleveland, the
statue commemorated republican stability and radiated outwards towards
“the darkness of ignorance and man’s oppression until Liberty enlightens
the world.” (4)
2. What is the significance of the essay’s title? How does it relate to
African American women? How does it relate to Asian Americans?
a. According to Anna Julia Cooper, “Only the BLACK WOMAN
can say ‘when and where I enter…then and there the whole Negro race enters
with me.’
i. “African American women bore the stigmata of race and
gender. Her liberation, her access to the full promise of America, embraced the
admission of the entire race. The matter of “when and where,” accordingly, is an
engendered, enabling moment. The matter of “when and where,” in addition, is a
generative, transformative moment.” (5)
ii. “The “when and where” of the Asian American
experience can be found within the European imagination and construction of
Asians and Asia and within their expansion eastward and westward to Asia for
conquest and trade.” (5): This sentiment is echoed in the film, Ancestors in the
Americas
3. Okihiro chronicles the images of Asians in the writings of many
prominent Western thinkers throughout history. Discuss how Asians have
been viewed by these Western thinkers. What effects have their ideas had on
the perception of Asians and Asian Americans in the West?
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a. 4th BCE Greek physician and ‘father of medicine” Hippocrates
offered a ‘scientific’ view of Asia and its people: “Under Asia’ milk, uniform
climate ‘courage, endurance, industry and high spirit could not arise’ and
‘pleasure must be supreme.” “Asians exhibited ‘monotonous sameness and
stagnation.” (5-6)
b. Aristotle: “Asians were ‘intelligent and inventive,” but lacked
spirit and were therefore always in a state of subjection and slavery.” (6)
c. Alexander reminded his officers that they were ‘ever
conquerors” and their enemies were “always beaten,” that the Greeks were a free
people and the Asians “a nation of slaves.” (6)
d. The effect of such statements is the view of Asia and its
inhabitants and inferior and appropriate conquests for a stronger Western
civilization.
4. As Okihiro writes, some literary critics such as Edward W. Said
and Mary B. Campbell have characterized that European conception of
Asian and Asians – “the Other” – as almost a European invention.” Discuss
how Asians have been relegated to the role of “Other.” What are the effects
of this Orientalism?
a. “Such accounts of Asia…enabled an exotic, alienating
construction of Asians, whether witnessed or simply imagined…Europeans
understood Asia as a place of “romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and
landscapes, remarkable experience.” (6)
b. “The assumptions of Orientalism supported a Western style for
dominating, restructuring and having authority over Asia.” (7)
c. “Asia was the location of Europe’s oldest, greatest, and richest
colonies, the source of tis civilization and languages, its cultural contestant and
wellspring of one of its most persistent images of the Other.” (7)
5. What does Okihiro mean when he says that “Asia was on the
European mind?”
a. “The conquest and colonization of the Americas was a product
of that global expansion of Europeans, and the “when and where” of the Asian
American experience must be similarly situated.” (11)
6. In what way is Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest, an allegory of
race relations? How does it relate to the plight of Asian Americans?
a. Prospero, prince of power and lover of books set adrift with his
daughter Miranda and lands on an enchanted island which he takes from Caliban,
whom he enslaves and banishes to the island’s wasteland. Caliban (anagram of
the word “cannibal” is everything Prospero is not: dark physically deformed,
poisonous, lying, filth, capable of all ills..he is both African and Indian, his
mother from Algiers and descended from Brazilians Patagonians, and Bermudans.
b. Prospero is the benevolent Western colonizer, Caliban is the
barbaric colonized…
7. What was the relationship between colonizer and colonized
Asians?
a. “The colonialist stresses those things which keep him separate,
rather than emphasizing that which might contribute to the foundation of a joint
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community.” The colonized is always degraded and the colonialist finds
justification for rejecting his subject.” (11)
II. “Neither Black nor White” – Ancheta
A. Angelo Ancheta: Background
1. well-published legal scholar focused on the issues of racial
discrimination and immigrants’ rights
2. Education & employment
a. faculty at Santa Clara
b. lecturer at Harvard Law School
c. adjunct professor at NYU School of Law and taught at UCLA
School of Law
d. Director of Katharine and Alexander Community Law Center in
Santa Clara
B. Discussion
1. What is the significance of the scene from Spike Lee’s film, Do The
Right Thing, that Ancheta describes in the opening of his essay?
a. (Angry mob outraged by killing of a black youth by white
police officers turns its rage n Sal’s Famous pizzeria, operated by a white family.
Then the mob turns to the Korean grocery store across the street. The owner,
Sonny shouts “I not white! I not white! I not white! I black! I BLACK!”) The
scene illustrates the volatility of urban race relations and the difficult position that
Asian Americans often find themselves in.
b. Complex dynamic of race relations: “The grocer, caught in the
middle of a race riot, invoked an inaccurate but successful appeal to be treated as
if black. The entreaty “I black” placed him squarely on one side of the conflict,
resolving any ambiguity about his alignment within the neighborhood’s racial
matrix.” (22)
2. What does Okihiro mean when he asks, “Is yellow black or white?”
a. The black-white racial paradigm is insufficient to deal with race
relations in the United States
b. Okihiro suggests that Asian Americans have been “near-blacks”
in the past and “near-whites” in the present, but that “yellow is emphatically neither
white nor black.” (24)
3. How were Asian Americans classified in the American legal
system?
a. “Recognizing the dominance of the black-white paradigm in the
law, Frank We adopts a similar view proposing that Asian Americans have been forced to
fit within race relations discourse through analogy to either whites or blacks. He posits
that American society and its legal system have conceived of racial groups as whites,
blacks, honorary whites, or constructive (legal jargon for “implied”) blacks.” (24)
b. The courts even classified Asian Americans as if they were
black… “black was a generic term encompassing all nonwhites, including Chinese.”
c. treatment of Asian Americans as “honorary whites”…in the
minds of those who oppose race conscious remedies such as affirmative action
d. Congress enacted naturalization legislation in 1790 to limit
citizen ship to “free white persons.”
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4. What are some instances of Anti-Asian violence that Ancheta cites
in his essay? How do these events put racism against Asian Americans in
context?
a. To better understand the experiences of Asian Americans,
consider how racial subordination operates within a specific context: Anti-Asian
violence.
b. The killing of Vincent Chin in 1982: Chin a 27 yr old Chinese
American celebrating his upcoming wedding at a Detroit bar, approached by
Ronald Ebens, and Michael Nitz, two white automobile factory workers who
thought Chin was Japanese and blamed him for the loss of jobs in the automobile
industry, chased him out of the bar and eventually proceeded to beat him
repeatedly with a baseball bat. Chin died from his injures a few days later.
Neither served prison time.
c. In 1989 in Raleigh, NC, Jim (Ming Hai) Loo playing pool with
approached by Rovert Piche and his brother Lloyd, who began calling Loo and his
friends “chinks” and “gooks” and blaming them for the death of American soldiers in
Vietnam..Piche pistol whipped Loo who fell onto a broken bottle that pierced his brain.
Robert Piche was convicted and sentenced to 37 yrs in prison.
d. Multiple killings of Asian American children at the Cleveland
Elementary School in Stockton, CA in 1989. Patrick Purdy used an Ak-47 assault rifle to
spray bullets only a crowded schoolyard, killing 5 children, wounding twenty others
before turning the gun on himself.
e. Prosecuting hate crimes is problematic: inadequately trained
officers may not collect relevant evidence, and prosecutors may be reluctant to press
charges because of the difficulty of proving intent on the part of the perpetrator. (29)
i. victims may be recent immigrants who speak little
English and are reluctant to report crimes
5. Define and discuss the racial themes of racialization, nativism and
racism, and racial hierarchies and interracial conflicts that Ancheta discusses
in his essay.
a. Racialization: The attribution of specific ethnic characteristics
to anyone falling within the racial category of “Asian” is common in anti-Asian
violence. (Nguyen, a Vietnamese premed student killed in Coral Springs, FLA in
1992 called “chink” Vietcong” and Sayonara” three separate and distinct ethnic
slurs)
b. Nativism and Racism: the intense opposition to an internal
minority on the ground of its foreign (un American connections)…Asian
American victims are perceived and categorized as foreigners by their assailants
c. Racial Hierarchies and Interracial Conflict: Asian Americans
appear to occupy a higher position on the social and economic ladder that places
whites on top and blacks at the bottom
i. Black on Asian crimes
ii. “stereotyping of Asians as the “model minority”
6. What are the limits of viewing racial issues in the United States
purely upon a single racial axis of Black and White?
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a. A black-white model fails to recognize that the basic nature of
discrimination can differ among racial and ethnic groups.
7. What are the limits of viewing racial issues in the United States
purely upon a single racial axis of Black and White?
a. California Proposition187 openly discriminates against
undocumented immigrants…but also targeted lawful permanent residents, green
card holders by stripping many permanent residents of eligibility for entitlement
programs such as Food Stamps and Supplemental Security Income
b. Asian Americans with the model minority image are often
excluded from corrective civil rights programs.
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