Author: Jacob Goffstein

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1FxHYztnxGCnSg0v3Z4QNfetBPDddIrNAQ7k9t9D4p08/edit?usp=sharing

Phi points out that many Asian Americans lean conservative regarding issues such as Black Lives Matter/Police conflicts. He also points out how Asian Americans themselves are often victims of police brutality, so it seems odd that they commonly support pro-police activism. I think the overall objective of this article is to encourage Asian Americans to take a step back and recognize that they too are being harmed by police brutality, therefore they should be aligning themselves with Black Lives Matter activists. 

Zen similarly mentions how many Asian Americans have taken a conservative stance on such issues. She discusses how various anti-Asian attacks perpetrated by Black people have pushed Asian Americans to side with the police (such as the incident of someone spraying an Asian man with febreze on the subway). She also brings up how talks of affirmative action have pushed Asian Americans conservative, due to them feeling like they would be negatively impacted by such policies. Like Phi, her objective is to encourage and discuss with conservative Asian Americans as to why they should be taking sides with minority communities and Black Lives Matter activists. 

The goal of the letter is to reason with Asian Americans and to help them understand the struggles that many Black Americans face. I think it does a good job because the author acknowledges and empathizes with struggles that Asian Americans have faced. Through common ground, the author believes, we can all unite to make a fair and safe society for all.

For frameworks, I picked ‘Jails make people sick’ by Zoe Saldana. The issue this excerpt address is that of the unpreparedness and lack of healthy living conditions in the U.S. prison system amidst this pandemic. She points out that while infectious diseases rapidly circulate through prisons, the people in charge are very unprepared and don’t do much to address the problem. I picked this because this issue isn’t exclusive to coronavirus, overall the prison systems in the U.S. are very broken and are often not at all concerned about the wellbeing of the inmates. 

For stories, I picked ‘Tired’ by Alice Tsui. She writes about how common anti-Asian sentiments have become during this pandemic. There has been a huge increase in slurs and verbal attacks against Asian American’s because they are seen to have some sort of association with coronavirus. She cites various instances of people making nasty comments in public at anybody who ‘looks’ asian. The notion that Asians are more likely to have covid simply because of the way they look is obviously absolutely asinine. It’s really terrible that anybody has to experience this kind of treatment in the 21st century. I picked this story because I myself have witnessed stuff like this happen in public.

For resources, I picked ‘Wash your hands’ by Malaka Ghairab. It’s basically just a guide with 3 things that everybody should be doing to slow the spread of coronavirus. Wash your hands, sneeze into your elbow, don’t touch your face. (these are rules everybody should be following anyway just for general hygiene. We shouldn’t need a pandemic in order for people to wash their hands.) I picked this because these are literally the simplest and easiest things everybody should be doing to slow the spread of covid or any other contagious virus. Also it is presented as a comic which is a cool and creative way to present information.

It seems to me that a lot of these problems stem from a half working refugee program. As it says in the article, “Compared to other races, Southeast Asian-Americans have some of the highest dropout rates in the country, and the majority of them have not attended college.” Perhaps if we invested more in community programs for these communities of Southeast Asian immigrants we would be seeing less of these ‘gangs’ and violent crimes that are seen in the documentary. 

Watching the documentary ‘Sentenced Home’, it is really saddening to see what is happening. Obviously, crime (especially violent crime) should not be tolerated, but it seems a little preposterous that people like Loeun Lun were being deported for crimes they committed many years prior and had already gone to jail for. 

Honestly this just seems like a really complicated sociological problem that probably doesn’t have a simple solution. Simply not deporting these immigrants isn’t going to solve everything because it doesnt fix any of the problems that led to deportation. (such as the abuse/discrimination that happens to these people) The problems obviously run much deeper than that and therefore require a deeper solution that addresses all the problems.

The concept of a model minority began in the 1960s when the U.S. was looking to accept skilled immigrants from various Asian countries. The U.S. sought to boost their own status/progress in the scientific and technological community by integrating some extremely skilled and knowledgeable scientists and technical workers from outside countries. They also sought to dispel the notion that the U.S. is racist. This idea of a model minority – this group of ‘elite immigrants’ who were considered extremely useful and productive to American society was created as a cruel comparison to other minority groups that did not necessarily have the same ‘success’ as the model minorities. While many Asian Americans are stereotyped as model minorities, African Americans are often stereotyped as ‘thugs’ or ‘criminals’. I think it goes without saying that while these are two very different experiences for those individuals, it is undoubtedly very unfair to both groups of people being stereotyped (or any other group, of course).

As a side note, on the topic of affirmative action, I’m gonna have to say I don’t think it’s the best idea. Not because I am not a proponent of equality, but because I don’t think it necessarily solves the problem. I think we would do better to determine why specific minority groups are underrepresented in colleges / higher education / various other places and address those issues directly. If, for example, the reason African Americans are underrepresented in college is that in a lot of communities during the steps before college they lack access to the same tools (such as quality elementary or high schools) as other communities, then I think this would be best solved by investing in those communities and providing them access to the same opportunities as everyone else. 

Honestly what I learned from the readings and video is not surprising at all. It pretty much just supported what I already knew about how exclusive America was (not just legally, but also socially) for a long period of time. In ‘Ozawa and Thind’, it is pretty clear that being white was the gold standard. The fact that Ozawa had to constantly fight over the fact that he isn’t ‘caucasian’ in order to gain citizenship is pretty ridiculous. Why in the world was a person’s skin color at all relevant in becoming a citizen? As Ozawa writes, he also had to prove that he was a ‘fully assimilated’ American in order to gain favor in the court. He discusses how to do this he had to prove that he has no affiliation with any Japanese organizations or communities whatsoever. I think a lot of the difficulty Japanese immigrants had obtaining citizenship (such as having to fill out loyalty questionnaires) comes mostly from the U.S. government’s fear of foreign governments. While I don’t necessarily agree with what they did, in a way I understand that they didn’t really know what to do to keep their country safe so they ended up implementing all these roadblocks.

Also, while Lopez does mention how Europeans had a much easier path to citizenship, as she says “Japanese immigrants shared much in common with their European counterparts, yet every European immigrant group regardless of national origin, had the right of naturalization and precisely because they possessed it no matter how beleaguered they were”, I wouldn’t say they were completely in the clear. There was still plenty of social disdain for specific groups of European immigrants, like the very common anti-Irish sentiments.

I think anybody should be able to become a U.S. citizen, at least socially. What it really means is to just live here and abide by the laws. If you live, work, and pay taxes here, you’re just as American as someone whose family has been here for 5 generations. Obviously skin color is not something that matters whatsoever.

From the readings and film, It becomes fairly obvious that Chinese immigrants were pretty undesirable back then. It seems like people were pretty racist back then and were intent on keeping their exclusively white community intact. As quoted in one of the articles, New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley sums up what people felt: “The Chinese are uncivilized, unclean, and filthy beyond all conception without any of the higher domestic or social relations; lustful and sensual in their dispositions; every female is a prostitute of the basest order.” Basically, they were viewed as second class citizens – if they even managed to obtain citizenship. It wasn’t even subtle or something the white residents were trying to hide, they would explicitly refer to the Chinese (and other ethnicities) as inferior. From an 1858 editorial, “Let us keep our public schools free from the intrusion of the inferior races,”. Most of these immigrants were honest hard-working individuals trying to help themselves and their families. It’s pretty terrible because all these immigrants came to America expecting a better life but instead were treated terribly by the residents.   Honestly I thought it was hilarious when in the film the building holding the records burned down so everyone who was there automatically received citizenship because nobody could prove otherwise. 

Obviously, the immigrants were not particularly happy about being segregated from everything, even in basic necessities such as school (Especially considering they paid taxes). They attempted to petition the city to change the segregation laws preventing Chinese children from going to public school, but to no avail. This is a pretty shitty part of our history and I’m definitely glad there is are no longer these enforced segregation rules that target specific ethnicities. Thankfully we’ve progressed to the point where while racism still exists, it is very much condemned by a vast majority of society and is no longer the prevalent force it was throughout history.

This class has been going really well for me overall. I’ve definitely been learning a lot, and I appreciate the environment in which we’ve been learning. I like how its more of an open discussion based class and its not just a teacher just jamming as much information as possible down our throats. Its thought-provoking and engages in critical thinking. I think it’s especially cool how many people in the class have been able to share their own/their parents experience of immigration as it makes the class even more real and relatable. Being an open-discussion class, I only wish that we would be able to meet and discuss things in person.

I can’t really think of any songs that would be relevant to this class, but I’ve listened to some of the suggestions other people made and those have been pretty good.

 

I think the “Race: The Power of an Illusion” makes some very good points.  Unlike what people in recent history have thought – that people of different races are fundamentally different, all humans are in fact fundamentally extremely similar. The biggest differences between races, such as skin color, are merely superficial and are not at all useful or important. The idea that race is a social construction is pointing this out – that meaningful distinctions between individuals are not associated with race. This is demonstrated by the DNA comparisons that were shown in the video, as people were not necessarily the closest genetically to the people that they look most similar too. This is also why I don’t think group identities are particularly useful. Similar to what is written in the article, the important characteristics of a person are very individual and are not at all associated with any race or group identity.

On the note of some of the experiences mentioned in ‘A Conversation with Asian Americans on Race’, It definitely makes me uncomfortable that people still face discrimination and receive unfair treatment based on the color of their skin. It is very unsettling and I wish we lived in a world where that doesn’t happen. The fact that in the Declaration of Independence it says “all men are created equal” yet African Americans were literally treated as subhumans, reminds me of the line from George Orwells ‘Animal Farm’, “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others”.  I think it takes more than just wishful thinking to create a society in which everyone is equal, and it is our responsibility to teach our children to treat everyone with respect and that nobody is inherently ‘better’ than anybody else.

I think the common explanations for people migrating to the United States are well known by us all. Usually it’s something along the lines of something they lacked in their home country that is available here. This can be reasons like increased opportunity, increased quality in life, family, etc. This is definitely a theme that is prevalent in media such as films and books, but I have also personally met immigrants or family members of immigrants who have testified them to be true. One movie I remember seeing, ‘The Good Lie’, was about several people who emigrated from a refugee camp in Africa after a civil war. The person I interviewed told me her mother’s family migrated to the United States due to a war happening where they are from. 

This definitely aligns with the foundation of Yang’s theory, the part he calls push and pull. There obviously needs to be some sort of incentive for people to move their whole lives to a new country – something different about the two countries. I met a chinese student in BMCC who told me he came to America because of more available education, as he wasn’t able to get into college in China. This is just another example of one of the many  possible push-pull factors that Yang mentions – accessibility of education. 

For the most part, I think Yang devised a pretty solid theory that fully explains the conditions that lead to immigration. The push-pull serves as the foundation and motivator, but then there still needs to be some sort of bridge between the two countries. Something that may often be overlooked, he’s also right in pointing out that there can be many social relationships that are factors in causing someone to immigrate.