Work to End Hate Crimes Against Asian-Americans
May 10, 2004
Forum Column
By Paula A. Daniels
June 19, 1982, began as any other day would, ordinary for most and marked by a personal life event for others. In a speech a week earlier, President Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union a regime of totalitarian evil. The British government was wrapping up a brief war in the Falkland Islands. In the early days of summer, the sounds of baseball were in the air.
In Detroit, a young American was having a bachelor party in a bar. June 19 dawned for him as a day that held all his hopes and joys of a married future in the company of friends; it ended with his death and an awakening of the Asian-American consciousness to the deep shadows of hate cast by the American dream.
Vincent Chin was killed 22 years ago by two autoworkers, one of whom had recently lost his job. They hated Vincent because of his race, mistaking him as Japanese. Even in a drunken stupor, the autoworkers could not reasonably believe that Vincent, a 27-year-old American of Chinese heritage, had any control over any jobs at the auto factory. But the auto industry was in crisis, the workers were mad as hell about it and someone was to blame. Becoming engaged in local politics did not occur to them. Questioning the business strategy of the American auto industry did not occur to them. What did occur to them was to take a baseball bat to the skull of the young man whose Asian features became the locus of their economic anxieties.
His killers pleaded guilty to manslaughter but received only probation. The Asian-American community was galvanized by the injustice; it became a watershed for Asian-American activism.
Thus is the story of Vincent Chin also archetypal. An insecure culture demonizes another culture in order to maintain dominance; the story is as ancient as the centuries of anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust, as rooted in history as slavery in America. It runs like an open fissure through the firmament of our country.
In the history of Asians in America, it is in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the National Origins Act of 1924 - acts that restricted immigration in a manner designed to maintain the racial and ethnic status quo of the United States as of 1890. It is also indicative of the internment of 110,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry during World War II. The wholesale internment was itself a political decision later found to be based not only on a campaign of misinformation by the U.S. military but also on “race prejudice, wartime hysteria and a failure of political leadership.” See Korematsu v. United States, 584 F.Supp 1406 (N.D. Cal. 1984).
Economics are often a common undercurrent of the problem. See, for example, the insightful dissent of Justice Frank Murphy in the first Korematsu case, Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944). The combination of race prejudice and economics becomes a lethal force, such as that which was directed against Chin in June 1982.
Asian-Americans historically have experienced racial stereotyping as outsiders, or foreigners, regardless of their “American-ness.” The World War II internees included those of Japanese ancestry who were born in the United States and whose citizenship, cultural identity and allegiances were as American as that of anyone of German, Italian or other European ancestry. Yet, as Georgia University School of Law professor Natsu Taylor Saito wrote in “Model Minority, Yellow Peril: Functions of ‘Foreignness’ in the Construction of Asian American Legal Identity,” “[t]he racialized identification of Asian Americans as foreign came about through a process that involved, first, the social construction of an Asian ‘race’ which served as the basis for placing Asian Americans in the racial hierarchy which had emerged in the United States; and second, the initial association of ‘American’ with ‘white’ and the subsequent perception, reinforced by legal barriers to immigration and naturalization, that ‘non-whites’ were probably ‘non-American’ as well.”
The exclusionary immigration and naturalization laws referred to above reinforced this perception. Economic restrictions further exacerbated it, among them the Chinese Police Tax of 1862 ("to protect Free White Labor against competition with Chinese Coolie Labor") and the anti-immigrant sentiments of the California Democratic Party of 1912, which, as Saito found, called for “immediate federal legislation for the exclusion of Japanese, Korean and Hindoo [sic] laborers.”
The paradigm of cheaper immigrant labor as a threat to American jobs continues today, with its attendant racialized context, directed against a variety of immigrant groups. Its economic complexity lies beyond a brief discussion, but its effect on race relations is as inevitable as the impact of a misdirected baseball bat.
For Asian-Americans, regardless of their status as immigrants or Americans of third, fourth or greater generations, the perception of foreignness is as a permanent stain.
“The positive versions of these stereotypes include images of Asian Americans as hardworking, industrious, thrifty, family-oriented, and even mysterious or exotic,” Saito pointed out. “It is striking that the negative images almost invariably involve the same traits. Hardworking and industrious become unfairly competitive; family-oriented becomes clannish; mysterious becomes dangerously inscrutable.”
A recent study by the Anti-Defamation League and the Committee of 100 (a Chinese-American group) found that 25 percent of Americans had strong negative attitudes toward Chinese-Americans, including a suspicion that they were more likely to be disloyal to the United States. The American scientist, Dr. Wen Ho Lee, learned this lesson two years ago when he was subjected to the disproportionately harsh treatment of nine months of shackled solitary confinement for what turned out to be a trumped-up charge of espionage. Federal District Judge James A. Parker of New Mexico acknowledged that Lee had been terribly wronged; the evidence on which the overzealous prosecution team relied would have warranted, at most, administrative action, not the “demeaning and unnecessarily punitive” conditions he suffered. His fate was intertwined with the perception of him as foreign, regardless of his American citizenship.
In the decade before Sept. 11, hate crimes against Asian-Americans had been on the rise. Hate crimes increased dramatically against people from the Middle East (and those thought to resemble them) after the terrorist acts of Sept. 11, which indicates a similar “racing” of those nationalities as foreign terrorists. Even as that particular spike abates somewhat, 7,462 hate crimes were documented in 2002.
Recent legislation mandating collection of hate-crime data has provided a helpful foundation for identifying the source and extent of the problem - and of course, it takes many more malevolent shapes than the particular type discussed here. Religious intolerance, sexual-orientation intolerance and other pernicious bigotry are behind many of those crimes.
But what can be done to address it? Many worthwhile organizations, the Anti-Defamation League among them, provide excellent educational programs designed to break the cycle of hate. The Asian Pacific American Bar Association of Los Angeles is in its second year of a program in which its volunteer lawyers teach middle-school children about the blind prejudice that leads to hate crimes. They also teach the value of rapprochement. As lawyers, our role in society extends beyond our offices. We have an obligation to participate in honest, thoughtful debate.
A Chinese proverb advocates that it is better to light a candle than curse the darkness. May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, a time when we light the candle of history and remember the tragedies of the past so that we may learn from them. We light the candle of teaching, so that our efforts will encourage profound respect for and deeper understanding of all peoples. We light a candle of faith, that as a society we will move from hate to hope.
Paula A. Daniels practices civil litigation with Los Angeles’ Litt & Associates. She is the immediate past president of the Asian Pacific American Bar Association of Los Angeles.
