Are many Asian-Americans willing tools of white racists?

 

The U.S, Senate recently passed a hate crime bill which addressed “violence and discrimination” against those of Asian origin by those who blame them for the COVID-19 pandemic. Asians are just as much the victims of a virus that recognizes no distinctions by race or ethnicity. But while it is certainly wrong to scapegoat every Chinese national for the actions of their government, on the other hand they are guilty of collusion in keeping the virus a “secret” for many months. Why shouldn’t the world be “mad” at the Chinese, or at least its government and government-run media? Reports now say that the Chinese knew they had a “problem” virus as early as August 2019, but denied its existence until January 2020.

You can point to the flawed efforts to contain the COVID-19—especially in India, which is now seeing even worse numbers than the peak rates in the U.S.—but there is also an argument to be made that given the massive traffic to and from China, the virus was probably already well-seeded throughout the world by the time it was “officially” reported. China had given itself a five-month “head start” to contain the virus, and its “official” numbers certainly do not include the real “first wave” of the virus, and people all over the world have a right to be angry at China’s contempt for them as anything other than replaceable consumers of its products.

But that wasn’t the only problem China imported to other countries, and most particularly the United States. During the 1970s, the Chinese government invited African students to attend its universities, with the intent to indoctrinate them into a Chinese-friendly element in their home countries and help the Chinese exploit their natural resources. What those African students experienced while in China was not welcome but racism, and today as then there have been many instances of racist assaults and rioting that harken back to the darkest days of race relations in America—except that in China, the government has taken little action to stop it, and law enforcement tends to take the side of Chinese nationals in “disputes” clearly instigated by them.

Many Chinese even had the audacity to scapegoat Africans for the COVID-19 and forbid them access to commercial establishments and restaurant, although the government claims it has “zero tolerance” for discrimination against foreign nationals. Meanwhile, a “performance” in a Chinese festival featuring blackface actors dancing as half-naked “savages” earlier this year was defended as being a show of “solidarity” with BLM protests. Things are no better in “democratic” Hong Kong, where Africans and South Asian domestics have been subjected to abuse, discrimination and exploitation.

The Chinese are not the only Asian group with race problems; after all, Michelle Malkin is Filipino-American, and she has gone out of her way to impersonate a Nazi. However, they are a starting point, because it has been both Chinese-Americans and Chinese immigrants who have been at the forefront of opposing diversity programs aimed at under-represented minorities, although they have had some assistance from Indians who have their own “caste-class” priorities. Now, suppose you were a member of a historically-discriminated against group, at one time not even considered a group that had rights a member of the privileged group was bound to respect, and then finally after numberless years was finally allowed a place at the table, albeit at the “pleasure” of those who hold the levers of power and set the rules. And then after these hard-fought gains, a new group arrives from across the sea, and by taking advantage of the rules that the privileged group had in place to insure their own places at the table, slid into some spots while the others were arguing about who and how many could sit at the table. The privileged group is in a bind because they made the rules that allowed this to happen, while the historically discriminated against group finds itself not only blamed for what happened by disgruntled privileged group, but also by the new group which not only has no knowledge of or sensitivity to the many years of struggle to secure a place at the table for the historically-discriminated group, but come from societies that still practice class and race discrimination.

Naturally, the privileged group is too conscious of the fact that it created the rules that the new group is using against it, and to reclaim its “privilege” would expose them as seeking “affirmative action” for themselves. So now they want take back more of the crumbs they gave to the historically-discriminated group and make them eat it off the floor instead of the table. The new group claims that any effort at reclaiming any part of the battlefield that had been won with much “blood” by the historically-discriminated group that it simply came in and occupied while the other sides were still fighting discriminates against them, using the same language that the privileged group used to justify generations of discrimination and prejudice. And let's not be blind to the fact businesses owned by these people in this country tend to hire only their own kind--which, of course, is discrimination.

I suppose there is a lot there to unwrap, but it isn’t really that tough to figure out. Under-represented and historically-discriminated against groups like blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans have fought many generations for a place at the “table,” even at the cost of their own blood, and now we see what was gained is now threatened once again by relative newcomers who have been generally welcomed by “unsuspecting” whites who find their own dominant position under threat. As I mentioned in my education-during-the-pandemic post, college campuses look much different than they did even 20 years ago. While the affirmative action was being debated to increase “diversity,” the ones who actually benefited the most from this were female students through the front door, and Asian students through the backdoor while no one was looking. Initially, many of these students were “international” students who decided to stay in this country instead of taking their education back home where it was needed, like India which has one of the worst healthcare systems per capita in the world and is now paying the deadly price for it.

While it is true that polling seems to show that most Asian-American students oppose efforts to end affirmative action, these are mostly people who already have a spot at the table. As we have seen here in the state of Washington, Chinese immigrant activists are especially vocal about being “discriminated” against, and have been instrumental in convincing many that passing last November’s referendum overturning the anti-affirmative action I-200 hurt Asians, and it appears that this opposition contributed to the referendum’s razor-thin defeat. In a 2018 op-ed in USA Today, Prabhudev Konana, of Indian extraction—in support of the Trump Justice Department’s attack on diversity, claimed that Asian-Americans deserved “fairness” from Harvard and other universities and reward their “hard work, not penalizing them in the name of diversity.” We are not supposed to “devalue” Asian-American grades and scores. Diversity is “no excuse for racial bias.” The arrogance, insensitivity, dehumanizing and racism inherent in these statements merely parrots that which white racists use. Terms such as “Chinese exceptionalism” is a racist concept “worthy” of Nazi “master race” ideology.

There are many ways that we can say that the University of Washington is not exactly representative of the state. 53.6 percent of the student population is female; but as the Seattle Times editorialized, you can’t do anything to help male students to correct that imbalance that “hurts” female students, although doing the opposite—which created that imbalance—is just fine. 46 percent of the student body is white, 23 percent Asian, 3 percent black and 8 percent Hispanic. UW doesn’t include the race of its international students, which comes out to about 13 percent of the student population. But as could be implied in my education post, these numbers don’t seem to jibe with the “eye test.” UW doesn’t include the race of its international students, which comes out to about 13 percent of the student population, but it is fairly obvious that nearly all of them are from east and south Asia. And it isn’t just the “big” schools: one-quarter of Seattle Central (Community) College’s full-time students are International students, mainly from China, Japan and Vietnam; of course that isn’t counting Asian-American students already there.

Nevertheless, NBC News reported last year that 70 percent of Asian-Americans opposed the lawsuit against Harvard’s diversity program. John Yang of the civil rights nonprofit Asian-Americans Advancing Justice asserted that “Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders have been used as a wedge and certain groups have purposely showcased Asian-American dissent to affirmative action as a way of masking their anti-black and anti-Latino agendas. Such efforts hide the fact that most opponents of affirmative action are really trying to increase the number of Caucasian students at the expense of Black, Latino and Native-American applicants.” That is of course what is really going on here: White students know that can’t “compete” with Asian-American students based on “scores,” so they are trying take back some of the crumbs they threw underrepresented groups.

Still, it is a “problem” that at colleges and universities across the country, Asians are vastly over-represented; at UC Berkeley, they make up 40 percent of the student population. What does that mean? Their claims that they are “discriminated” against doesn’t hold water.  Why should they be the only ones who can benefit from higher education and make a contribution? After all, underrepresented minorities have fought long and hard for that place at the table, and now they are being shoved aside by relative newcomers based on what arbitrary measures of “merit”? And it isn’t always so clear-cut; many Asian-Americans support affirmative action because 70 percent of Asian college students are either Chinese or Indian, and in particular many Southeast Asians see themselves as being discriminated against in favor of supposedly “superior” east and south Asians.

Unfortunately, the question of racism in this or that group cannot be simply dismissed because one them happens to be the favored flavor of the month. In TIME last year, Viet Thanh Nguyen writes that he felt “haunted” by the knowledge the face of Hmong-American police officer Tou Thao—who stood by while his partner, Derek Chauvin, choked George Floyd to death, ignoring the pleas of bystanders to stop him—is at once like his, but not like his. They may be of different “ethnicities,” but they are still both Asian, just as Italians and Swedes are both white. “Asian-Americans are caught between the perception that we are inevitably foreign and the temptation that we can be allied with white people in a country built on white supremacy. As a result, anti-Black (and anti-brown and anti-Native) racism runs deep in Asian-American communities.”

Despite being a racial minority group, in the generality Asians have chosen to align themselves with white racists. It is hypocritical, Nguyen observes, rightly, to complain about prejudice against them because they are Asian, yet engage in racism against other groups themselves—and the “temptation” to blame the “weak” rather than the “strong” for their issues in this country. Asian immigrants have “pulled themselves up,” yet many have done so aided by discriminatory attitudes that keep other minority groups “down.”