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30
April , 2001
THE
WARNING SIGNS OF
A RETURN TO RACISM
Prejudice cannot be stopped overnight. But judging from a recent poll, an entire generation is still not enough time to erase many peoples' racist ideas either.
| A very disturbing poll concluded that 25 percent of Americans hold consistently negative feelings about Chinese Americans. |
African-Americans aren't the only targets of racism. Anyone of color in the US is familiar with prejudice, including Asian Americans. In fact, in recent weeks Asian Americans have become the most visible target of verbal attacks.
It's true that decades of civil rights legislation and education about the injustice and tragedy of racism in America's history has made most people more sensitive to the issue of race. But crises bring out peoples' innate prejudices, and in the past year, starting with the Wen Ho Lee arrest and charges that the Taiwan-born scientist was a spy for China, an atmosphere of racial hysteria has been brewing. Last month's crisis over an American surveillance plane's collision with a Chinese fighter jet and landing on a Chinese island kicked the hysteria into overdrive.
Last week, the Asian American Students' Association at Stanford University announced that the California campus has been subjected to a series of hate crimes in the past few weeks. Several areas in the school's history building and Library were vandalized with graffiti containing explicit anti-Asian and anti-Black sentiments. The police have classified these incidents as hate crimes, but no arrests have been made.
College campuses aren't the only targets. In the days after the surveillance plane crisis, talk-show callers across the US were calling for boycotts of Chinese restaurants, and suggesting that all Chinese-Americans be rounded up and imprisoned. Callers also urged Chinese Americans to "go back to China."
Last week, a very disturbing poll sponsored by a national Chinese American organization, the Committee of 100, concluded that 25 percent of Americans hold consistently negative feelings about Chinese Americans.
According to the survey's findings, a frightening majority of the public, ranging from 68 percent to 73 percent, believes Chinese Americans are "taking away too many jobs from Americans"; "don't care what happens to anyone but their own kind"; and "have too much power in the business world."
Among the people surveyed, 46 percent believe that there is a problem with "Chinese Americans passing on information to the Chinese government." Almost one-fourth, 23 percent, said they would be "uncomfortable" if an Asian American were elected president, in contrast to 15 percent who would be uncomfortable with an African American president. This is despite President Bush naming two Asian Americans to his cabinet.
Perhaps most disturbing to me was the fact that one-third of those surveyed believed that Chinese Americans are more loyal to China than to the US.
That statement chilled me to the bone, because that's the type of thinking used to justify the internment of Japanese Americans 60 years ago. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, hysteria against anyone of Japanese descent swept through the West Coast of the US, where people feared they might be the next to be attacked. The Issei, or first-generation Japanese Americans were automatically suspected of having close ties with their former country, and even the Nisei, or second-generation Japanese Americans, were assumed to be more loyal to Japan than the US.
"Once a Jap always a Jap," was the blunt appraisal of Mississippi Congressman John Rankin in the days leading up to the internment. And the only way to deal with Japs was to round them up and imprison entire families in concentration camps scattered in the most desolate areas of the US interior, in Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, Arkansas and Colorado -- away from the West Coast where they would otherwise help the Japanese military invade America.
Japanese Americans and their businesses were subjected to a flurry of racial attacks and epithets, and families lost all their belongings in the rush to judgment against 120,000 people based solely on their race. Children of Chinese American families wore badges to school that read, "I am Chinese" to protect themselves, and Chinese business owners posted signs proclaiming "I am not Japanese" out of self-preservation.
I do not think that we are on the verge of interning all Chinese Americans. Despite the sad fact that prejudice lives on beneath the glossy veneer of Americans' belief in civil rights, I realize that we have come a long way since the day when lynchings were commonplace. And I would like to think that a racial roundup would not occur again in the 21st century. We are also not at war with China, and diplomacy is ideally how the world tries to settle disputes today.
But here's something to worry about -- the results were just announced, but the Committee of 100 survey was taken two weeks BEFORE the US plane landed in China. I'd hate to see how opinions have changed since then. Since Asians are usually lumped together into one homogenous group (Vincent Chin, a Chinese American, was beaten to death in the 1980s by out-of-work autoworkers who blamed Japanese manufacturers for their layoffs), we should be wary.
This is a time when all Asian communities should support other Asians - whether we are Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Thai or have roots in any other country and culture, we share one sad reality. We all look alike to those who hate us.
I can tell you this: I will never, ever wear a badge that says "I am not Chinese."