Author: Garey

immigration slides

Immigration From Hong Kong to Brooklyn

Phi’s point is that conforming to the model minority and essentially identifying with tone’s oppressors doesn’t grant them immunity to discrimination and violence. They will always be the immigrant, the other. The goal of his article is to call out the racism against black people that is present in the Asian American community and bring to their attention that they need to work together to bring lasting change. That police brutality does not care where your loyalty lies, racists cops will shoot the first chance they get.

I learned how anti CCP Chinese Americans can become right wing conservatives. This actually something I have been wondering about for some time now. The way Zen explains it makes sense and confirmed a theory I had that living in a communist country would encourage an immigrant to cling to what is popularized as (for lack of a better phrase) the “democratic American way.” The idea of what America should be as often described by older conservative WASP politicians and their constituents. In Phi’s article, the author talks about police brutality and how a shocking number of Chinese Americans supported a racist murderer cop. In Zen’s article, the author talks about how some Chinese are led to believe they are being targeted by Black people and that police presence would make them safer. The relation is that they are attempting to choose the side of the oppressor in hopes that the law will protect them if the assimilate enough and conform to “whiteness.”

The letter’s goal is to appeal to an older generations sense of compassion in hopes to open their eyes to pain and suffering they are causing or contributing or perpetuating. I don’t think the message reached all of them yet, because people are still being discriminated against. This is something that will take a long time to reconcile. But if we keep speaking out and standing up for marginalized groups we will be heard, even if it takes more than one generation.

Sex workers aid

This excerpt talks about how the COVID-19 crisis is affecting sex workers. It mentions how we can help support Asian migrant sex workers by doing things like and contacting our local leaders. I chose this excerpt because I thought it is important to address how sex workers are treated in today’s society. I feel like the movement to grant them equal working protection and representation does not gain traction because of a 1950s mentality that stigmatizes sex workers and other non-conforming groups pf people.

Ten of wands

This except talks about the current state of the world. That the world and humanity are threatened but capitalism will not make a move until the economy is truly at risk. This really stood out to me because it reminds me of how meritocratic and ignorant to humanity and human suffering our society is; the way we constructed, how it treats us and how we treat each other through it.

Breathe

This excerpt is more of a resource. It gives a brief step by step guide of what appears to be different kinds of meditative breathing techniques for mindful meditation. I chose this resource because I have been meaning to learn more about different techniques of meditating lately.

Refugee resettlement was designed to relocate people from Cambodia who survived the Pol Pot genocide to America, but once they came they were not given citizenship. Cambodians were chucked into already impoverished areas, into an alien society they knew nothing of and left to their own devices. They and their children often turned to crime having no other way to feed or house themselves. As a result, they are targeted by law enforcement and immigration agencies, minors tried as adults and given harsh sentences. Law enforcement and immigration agencies even started deporting many Southeast Asian Americans who grew up in America for crimes for which they had already served their time. Rather than try to address the lack of opportunity and resources for these immigrants, the government makes no effort to aid these people and even penalizes them through denying welfare if they are declared overearning. Groups came together to form advocacy organizations aimed at young Cambodians to help keep them off the streets and in school; they later expanded to help fight court cases in the justice system and immigration. Even though this helped a lot of people, the justice and immigration system had already destroyed the lives of many families that have already been through extreme trauma by targeting them in such ways. Many thoughts came to me while reading and watching this material. One major realization is that the Southeast Asian community is often left out of the immigration debate, they fade into obscurity and get lumped in with other Asians only to then be compared against the favored “model minority.”

According to Prashad in The Karma of Black Folk, Asian immigrants who were previously denied entry and citizenship to the United States were permitted to immigrate in 1965 under the Immigration and Nationality Act as technical workers. Fore example, Indians who had degrees in the STEM field were recruited during the Cold War to expedite the moon landing in response to the Soviet Union’s Sputnik. The U.S. required only skilled people, which consequently had or achieved a higher economic status and education. These elite immigrants were then unfairly compared to other minorities in the U.S. that suffered under discrimination and segregation, becoming a model image of what white Americans think non-white Americans should be, the model minority. Therefore, the phrase “model minority” was first discussed in 1966 to distinguish the well-off “good minority” from the “bad minority.” Kim says in “The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans” that Peterson’s article was the first to attribute Japanese success in America to their “culture,” a Japanese “Tokugawa” ethic, and to compare this model to the lack of success seen in the Black community. He emphasizes similarities between Protestant ethic and “Tokugawa” values, their perceived culture being foreign though Japanese Americans had been Americans for generations. Their supposed lack of political involvement allowed them to focus more on generating wealth. He suggests that the Black community fails to achieve success due to their “deficient culture,” the political activity that paved the way for all minorities to resist discrimination, and that they should be more like the Japanese “model minority.” Thus, we can see that the “model minority” myth was developed to pit Asian Americans against other “problem minorities.”

 

In the video “Affirmative Action,” the “model minority” myth is reproduced by the AACE when they say that they worked hard for the American dream, and that affirmative action and other racially conscious social programs are standing in the way of their success. Hasan Minhaj mentions that Zhao wrote a book attributing his success to Confucian values, perpetuating the “model minority” myth that the cultural uniqueness of Asian Americans solely determined their success. This ignores the civil rights movement that the Black community fought for, that even allowed universities to be racially integrated. Furthermore, their inability to be accepted into these Ivy League colleges, despite of their hard work, while legacy students are given priority, emphasize the limits of Asian “gung-ho.”

According to the excerpt by Lopez, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race, the criteria for citizenship required individuals to be “white,” to fit a classification established by generally accepted as “common knowledge,” which we now know as rooted in pseudo-scientific racial claims. However, it is really up to the whim of the Supreme Court, because after ruling against Ozawa, whose claim as “white” was based in part on the literal shade of his skin, the Supreme Court contradicted itself three months later so that it could rule against Thind. This time the court argued that according to the common man and the common knowledge, the anthropological definition of Caucasian is irrelevant; through ignorance the common man may exclude people with dark skin as not “Caucasian” and not “white.” Therefore only “white” people as defined by the Supreme Court were eligible for citizenship.

In the film, Meeting at Tule Lake, the criteria were the renunciation of citizenship of all other countries and loyalty to the Emperor of Japan. They must have absolute loyalty to the United States but were still refused citizenship. Agreeing to the questionnaire effectively forced them to become stateless indefinitely. If they answered no they were sent to Tule Lake, labelled as disloyal by both white Americans and other Japanese Americans. They could not refuse to answer the questionnaire or else the government would fine them $10,000 and imprison them for 20 years. They were also expected to serve in the armed forces. If the camps were created to identify spies and neutralize their threat, then forcing them to join the army contradicts the foundational purpose of the camps. Therefore Executive Order 9066 was not justified because “the successful prosecution of the war requires every possible protection against espionage,” but rather the mere stripping away of rights, “the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave” the internment camps. The public fear of Japanese Americans, the animosity and desire to enforce control over them, to discriminate against Asian Americans, was the true motivation for the camps.

While legally the United States government recognizes the citizenship of people with the documents to prove it, socially if you are not white your citizenship is constantly challenged. For example, Kamala Harris is a citizen by law because she was born in California. Yet political opponents have targeted her as unfit for the office of Vice President, inventing a requirement that her parents had to be naturalized citizens at the time of her birth, highlighting her supposed foreignness because of her Jamaican and Indian parents. Therefore, they are really saying that she does not belong and is not part of America. I believe that living here peacefully, having a dedication to democracy, freedom, equality, and human rights, are what should be in the heart and soul of every American citizen.

Among arguments made to exclude Chinese migrants, two that stood out from Luibheid, Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border, were a racialized conception of germ theory supported by the American Medical Association (p. 37), and the perceived “threat” to white male laborers (p. 34) as well as the nuclear family wherein each member has and performs their respective gender roles. In the text, Mr. Pixley testified expressing his concern for the white male laborer, “The true American hero is the man who takes his dinner out in his tin plate, works all day, six days a week, and brings his wages home for his wife to expend in the maintenance and education of the family, in their clothing and their protection.” Luibheid adds that these heroes are synonymous with “civilization and the U.S. nation” due their gender roles and “sexual arrangements.” The Chinese were singled out and perceived to lack these social constructs, therefore deemed unfit for American society and “unassimilable.” Chinese women believed to be sexual deviants, threatening to lure moral white men away from their families, leading them to disease and immorality.

Another argument put forth uses germ theory to say that Chinese people carried diseases that were particularly dangerous to white men, venereal syphilis, and should thus be barred from entering America. The American Medical Association’s racist stance can be summarized as follows, “The germ theory of disease provided an explanation of the manner in which an obviously inferior group might best a superior one, contrary to the natural laws of social Darwinists.” I thought it was ironic that the AMA would make such claims. Just two centuries prior, the first European settlers brought smallpox to the Americas, which devasted the population of Native American tribes. Medical professionals and government officials used this twisted concept of germ theory to not only declare that one race was superior to the rest, but also that these “inferior” races were dirty and diseased. This threat was to be kept out of the country, away from the moral white man and his nuclear family.

These ideologies and prejudices created dire circumstances for Chinese migrants in America. As explained in the film Carved in Silence: Inside Angel Island Immigration Station, some Chinese migrants who were confined in prison-like conditions would carve poems on the walls, play music, and knit to take their minds off of the anguish caused by their interrogators. Chinese detainees formed a group called the Angel Island Liberty Association, and its main objective was to relay messages from families to detainees to provide accurate information for their interrogation.

One of the most shocking things I realized while studying the material is that many of the immigration procedures that are in place today originated from racially motivated efforts to discriminate against non-whites, and in ways these procedures remain mostly the same. These techniques designed to subjugate Chinese immigrants are now applied to every immigrant, case in point at the Mexican border where families are separated and treated poorly. The racist stereotype that was birthed by the American Medical Association still rings through time in phrases like the “China virus.”

This is definitely a class I look forward to. It’s fun and very engaging . I have already learned so much from the course, the professor, and my classmates. It would be great if open lab was a little easier to navigate, since I have to click on about three different tabs to get to the discussion board.

One song I would add to the class playlist is Prayer of The Refugee by Rise Against. The reason I think this song would be appropriate is because it’s about an immigrant parent and family who come to America for a better life only to face discrimination, the family suffering just like in their homeland where they were also being exploited. This song came into my head a lot while reading the materials. In the video we see examples of how capitalism and colonialism exploit poorer countries, where big companies drop huge factories that pay locals next to nothing and drain the country of resources, leaving them dependent on the American economy. Another concept that came to mind while analyzing the song and video was that by conducting business through this method, major American companies and politicians rely on destabilizing local governments; America never stopped colonizing other countries.

Race is a social construction created by people who refused to grasp that there are people with their own culture and history, whose identities are not defined by white European categories. They refused because it was economically beneficial to differentiate themselves as white, while forcibly categorizing all other people into races. For example, the film Race: the Power of an Illusion, states that in 1619, when slavery began in America, religion and wealth were used to determine one’s social status. However, when slave labor became increasingly more widespread and necessary to build wealth in America, race based on skin color was used to justify slavery, since those that were black could not easily disappear into the population. Therefore, slavery preceded racism, the economic benefits of slavery motivating the rationalization of racism. From the reading Asian America: Sociological Interdisciplinary Perspectives, it is also apparent that racial classifications changed over time, which is indicative of its nature as a social and political construct that is not based on biology. Chinese Americans in Mississippi changed their social status by associating and identifying themselves as white instead of black. The concept of races forced them to pick a category defined by economic interests. Another example indicating race is a social construct is the idea of the “model minority.” Asian Americans are compared to African Americans and declared to be “better off,” while African Americans are told to try harder. But from the NY Times video A Conversation with Asian Americans on Race, the Asian American immigrant experience is not uniform, and Asian Americans are not inherently, racially better than African Americans. Asian Americans have committed murder, or been part of gangs, but these are ignored when discussing the “model minority” myth because American racism needs minority achievement to prove that its supposed meritocratic system works.

An affirmation from the NY Times video I recognized was the need to sound American. My mom encouraged the idea of sounding white over the phone, as if sounding like a white American was indicative of higher education, and that therefore I would be treated better. I am also reminded of how my mom, being of Caribbean ancestry, would always tell me to identify myself as white, because she thought I would be treated better. This is probably the earliest memory I have of race and racism.