how the Asian "Model Minority" perpetuates Anti-Blackness

the asian american community and the black community have an unfortunate history of tension which is why foreign man in a foreign land and i wanted to create companion pieces on this issue now the asian-american community is extremely diverse so i don't want to suggest that the experience is singular and i hope to address some of that diversity in this video for reference though i am a second generation chinese canadian and i feel that there are general themes in the asian american immigrant experience while my video is about anti-blackness and the asian-american community foreign's is about anti-asianness in the black community definitely go check out his video which will be linked in the description box and put as a card here [Music] in 1927 a group of chinese-american plaintiffs brought the case gonna be rice to the united states supreme court at this time there was legal segregation between white schools and colored schools however the chinese americans argued that they should not be in colored schools with the black students for white americans justified their own separate school on the grounds that black people posed a danger and if white americans were entitled to protection from the black race then they reasoned that it would be discriminatory to quote expose the yellow race to a danger that the dominant race recognizes why wait the victims my friends are good pressures so much and to go through this in 1991 a korean liquor store owner shot and killed latasha harland a 15 year old black girl who the owner believed had stolen a bottle of orange juice the korean american could have been sentenced to 16 years in prison but the judge placed her on probation what six months probation i mean the people were pissed then a year later four police officers who had severely beat rodney king a black man were acquitted of their charges these two events sparked a six-day period of widespread looting property damage and arson thousands of korean american stores were hit as derek chauvin knelt on george floyd's neck tu a hmong american police officer argued with bystanders while the crowd begged the police to stop tal responded he's talking so he can breathe before i say anything else i think it's crucial that i de-radicalize the term white supremacy i know this term may conjure up images of white extremists who march around with a confederate flag but i'm afraid this absolves a lot of people who aren't explicitly and obviously racist white supremacy is anything that upholds white privilege through socioeconomic legal cultural and materialist means as such people of color can contribute to white supremacy the reasons of course are not the same and that's what a lot of this video is going to explore it can come from a mixture of internalized racism and buying into colonial neoliberal thinking for survival but that doesn't mean a person of color can't uphold white supremacist beliefs in fact many white supremacist ways of thinking are normalized as natural which is what allows some people of color to deploy it without intending to or being aware that that's what they're doing white supremacy renders itself invisible it's mythological in its nature we know it's there but we're not allowed to see it and we're discouraged to talk about it unless it does something egregious like stand on a man's neck for 10 minutes killing him or storms the capital to try to do a coup so what that often leaves is different minority groups all suffering under white supremacy looking at each other this is how white supremacy successfully pits racial minorities against one another it is based in the colonial principle of divide and rule that makes minorities think they must be either above or below one another and whiteness is the default i forgot which president said it but i think the quote is if you could convince the poorest white man that he is better than a black person you can take every dollar or you could take any pop like any penny from that white man making him feel like despite his squander around him at least i'm better than those black folks and that distraction keeps him content that distraction stops him from wanting more out of his class the tension between the asian american and the black community seems to feel particularly salient because of how these two communities sit in the racial minority hierarchy asians are supposedly the top beneficiaries as the model minority and black folk are at the far opposite end i would love to work like walk into the workplace and everyone assume oh she's the smartest in the room or she went to a uc or whatever good stereotype that is associated with asian people i would love to have that this divide carries colonial perceptions of asia versus africa oriental asia is harmony mystical wisdom spiritual but not without discipline hence the asian american trope is a docile law-abiding citizen who works hard africa on the other hand was viewed by colonial explorers as uncivilized savage and in need of transformation by the whites hence the african-american trope is associated with things like crime drugs and a lower likelihood to succeed academically but how do these stereotypes remain intact and even become internalized we can examine this deeper by looking at an important characteristic of the asian american community its predominant immigrant population [Music] out of all the racial communities the asian-american community holds the largest immigrant population and continues to be the fastest contributor to america's immigrant populace in the 19th century chinese laborers were brought to america to do hard grueling labor for white employers they had awful working conditions many facing severe health complications or dying receiving little to no pay and being seen as less than human because of their race other asian and pacific islander groups were brought to america close afterwards for this same reason exploited labor they experienced intense racism from both white individuals and its institutions although asian americans today are stereotyped as honorary whites or the model minority back then they were negatively perceived as being black or near black there were many discriminatory measures taken to ensure their exclusion from white society the united states nationality act of 1790 limited citizenship to free white persons and called people outside of this category aliens ineligible for citizenship largely targeting asian people who wanted to immigrate there the racial discrimination in this law was not removed until 1952. the 1922 ozawa case is another memorable instance in which a japanese american was denied citizenship solely because of his race the appellant is a person of the japanese race born in japan including the period of his residence in hawaii the appellant had continuously resided in the united states for 20 years he was a graduate at the berkeley california high school had been nearly three years a student in the university of california had educated his children in american schools his family attended american churches and he had maintained the use of the english language in his home that he was well qualified by character and education for citizenship is conceded the appellant in the case now under consideration however is clearly of a race which is not caucasian and therefore belong entirely outside the zone on the negative side what this hints at and what i'm definitely going to expand on in a moment is how the socio-racial framework of america is a binary of white and black the fact that the 1922 ozawa case happened at all is because american law was confused as to where a person of asian descent belonged in this white black binary the judge justice sutherland had said this if naturalization is limited to aliens being free white persons and to aliens of african nativity and to persons of african descent is one of the japanese race born in japan under any circumstances eligible to naturalization we also see this white black binary in effect in ganglam v rice the case i mentioned in the beginning of the video the chinese plaintiffs did not challenge the segregation between white and black people itself rather their case was to argue that east asians did not count as black in order to advance the quote yellow race they felt as though they needed to make a claim to whiteness philosopher louis gordon describes it like this quote the anti-black world is conditioned by what we can hear describe as two principles of value one it is best to be white but two above all it is worst to be black when one fails to achieve the principle one it becomes vital to avoid embodying the group designated by principle two framing race in this binary way of white and black is problematic in numerous ways for one it has created a lot of confusion for the asian-american identity as an asian-american immigrant or children of immigrants there is a lack of native culture history representation and community and so there was no solid asian route for people to reference and identify with asian american is also such a broad umbrella term that really flattens the diversity of asia chinese culture and history has many differences from thai culture and history which has many differences from filipino culture and history and so forth but america these sneaky little colonizers mushed the largest continent in the world into a single racial group asian american so that defining people under white supremacy would be easier the more people you shove under one group the more people you can subjugate at a time so when asian immigrants entered this society that was very explicitly framed around black and white it was easy to feel like a perpetual outsider the book the myth of the model minority contains tons of interviews from a diverse demographic of asian americans and in one section a japanese american recalls being confused about where he landed during the legal segregation era quote i stopped at a mcdonald's in mississippi and there were two lines one for whites and the other for blacks well coloreds i stood there and decided to go in the colored line because there was nobody in it and i could get my food faster when i got up to the counter the guy told me hey you can't use this line get in that other line the line for whites was long and i had gone about halfway up when this guy says hey you can't be in this line get in the other line i just stood there and thought ah what am i without representation in this white black binary non-black people of color have to decide whether they are going to identify with whiteness or blackness as we have seen so far asian americans historically and largely continue to strive for whiteness because it's the default i'll talk about this a lot more in the section on the model minority but in recent decades there have been aspects of blackness that have become cool and popular such as hip-hop rap and streetwear it has enticed some asians to identify more with blackness particularly darker-skinned asians who feel excluded by colorism in the asian community in toronto for example there are neighborhoods that have historically been home to sizeable caribbean african and south asian immigrant populations within these neighborhoods south asians have often tried to emulate an idea of blackness through an interest in hip-hop and using certain language and dressing in a certain manner in a podcast episode i listened to journalist druva balram talks about how as an indian canadian him and his indian friends used to say the n-word all the time and nobody thought it was wrong because they truly felt as though they were black because he grew up alongside other black people and he didn't have a south asian identity to gravitate towards he thought that using the n-word was a way to claim some proximity to blackness one of the two racial identities available as though he understood the black experience which he now declares he obviously didn't there are south asian rappers like nav who has said the n-word in multiple songs in toronto the term toronto man's refers to drake wannabes and it is primarily represented by black and brown folk as a nukeda mystery describes it in the absence of aspiration that reflected our own hybrid south asian identities we gravitated toward black culture and role models sometimes fair-skinned east asians will even try to emulate blackness as a sign of rebellion blackness is thought of as the antithesis to whiteness and so by using aave language or having hair like this it's seen as cool and badass but these identifications with blackness are not the same as identifying with whiteness many asians who make claims to blackness adopt the clothing the slang the swagger but when it comes to black issues like police brutality or the lingering effects of redlined communities they become quiet when you have these non-black people that come to black culture seeking acceptance and offering gifts we're like oh this is cool come on in let's hang around oh look at you doing the thing we do that that's awesome you know someone else you want to say n word okay just this one time and the thing that causes a problem is black people realize that we keep letting people in and like they're with us when it's convenient and then when it's inconvenient they're like oh man i don't know about these [ __ ] over here racism is so often talked about as a solely black and white issue which can make asian americans feel as though it is not their issue to speak on and it also makes it harder for asians to identify when racism involves them i know there are asian americans who believe that if there is racism it only happens to black people initiated by white people and so it doesn't involve us this aversion to participating in the black struggle or just being ignorant about it means that identifying with blackness really is most of the time co-opting one culture for another's capital and cultural gain it's about only adopting aspects of blackness that do not disturb a white supremacist system in this way even when a claim to blackness is made it still operates under the rules of whiteness so not only is there this search of how to fit into the white black binary that really is limited by white supremacy asian american immigrants as with many immigrants came to america searching for a better life they may have been facing political strife poor living conditions or war in their own homeland and have heard of the american dream where anyone can build a better life for themselves though they felt like a foreign outsider they had high hopes of a better life in this country thus psychologically assimilation often is an attractive solution racist nativism positioned asian-ness as a threat to jobs in western civility so asian americans couldn't embrace their culture and racial identity and then expect to succeed no if the american dream was to be achieved it was to be done through embracing whiteness the dominating narrative of socioeconomic success respect and beauty many of the city's new small businesses are the american dream of the foreign born [Music] after generations of being forced to work in cruel working conditions being treated as viruses or threats being forced into concentration camps educational and job achievements became a major survival response from the asian american community because academic achievement can seem like an objective measure of meritocracy you might be a racial minority but if you got in 100 on this test and that white kid got a 92 well the test scores don't lie you've beat the white kid racism dismantled by becoming model citizens and students who would not question white imposed ways maybe we can thrive in an environment that hates us especially for parents who did not obtain the prosperity they had imagined it is even more important to them that they see their children succeed it's hard to separate from the old world and that's why i push push my children so hard i want my children to be better than me to do better than i did my life here it wasn't supposed to be like this i i wasn't supposed to come here and work so hard for this long my husband came to get his phd not have a restaurant i worked i worked in that hot kitchen three days before my daughter was born and had to go back had to work three days after i am a failure here i have a bachelor's degree in math i was a teacher before i came here now now i am nothing i did the best i could but it wasn't supposed to be like this now i want to be clear this drive to excel academically to work hard and to push their kids to do the same is not to prove the truth of the model minority stereotype not all asians are naturally talented in math and science or have some innate drive to work work work rather a large portion cared about academic achievement because they saw it as necessary to escaping discrimination but as hard as they tried asian americans weren't really perceived as a success story until the 1965 immigration and nationality act was passed this act removed the racial quota for asian immigrants which by the way was a direct result of the civil rights movement so we can thank the black community for that this is when the asian-american immigrant population really started to shift from poor skill-based laborers to middle and upper class asians with higher education and specialized qualifications the american government was very selective about who they let in so unsurprisingly this new wave of asian immigrants had a greater advantage than previous asian immigrants suddenly asians were no longer considered black or near black their ability to get into good schools and obtain well-paying jobs granted them honorary white status asians became the model minority i mean look at how everyone in that group has succeeded the chinese the koreans the japanese they're living proof that systemic racism is a thing of the past if you ask me they have it better than whites i mean in my high school the only kid to get into harvard was asian oh by the way two blocks down there's a lovely nail shop run by this vietnamese family the vietnamese shops always do everything for so much cheaper just be careful though the neighborhood is kinda sketchy it always smells like smoke and there's like homeless people everywhere why can't they be like the asians [Music] the brainiacs the kids who get top marks at school and university and you can't help but notice but many of them are asian why is that are they naturally smarter or are they pushed by their parents when we hear the word asian america has done a great job at erasing 90 of the asian american population from our mind asian has become synonymous with chinese korean and japanese because asian is supposed to equal the model minority the racial minority that makes a lot of money lives in good neighborhoods and does well in school they make white people feel comfortable because they don't complain about supposed oppression and they accept the western way of life and admittedly many asian americans themselves buy into the model minority myth i certainly did when i was younger i've had countless people joke about how my academic achievements are because of my asianness and i've watched enough movies that portray the asian character as the nerd but if it is just a myth then why do so many asian americans believe in it and act as though it is true there's lots of research to show that having shared memory of oppression can play a role in developing group solidarity the black community having existed for generations in america as slaves shares a collective memory of centuries of racism however with asian americans being comprised predominantly of immigrants they lack a strong collective memory of discrimination i know and have read about many asian people who did not think racism against asians existed until they experienced a racist incident themselves when i was a child i was oblivious to racism it did not occur to me that my desire to have blonde hair and blue eyes or being embarrassed of my chinese language and food was because i had internalized whiteness as the standard to strive for there was no discussion of racism at home or among asian friends a lack of collective memory means things were dealt with individually and internally awareness of racial discrimination was much harder to raise my parents immigrated to canada in 2001 so my family didn't know about the la riots of 1992 and we didn't have korean canadian friends who could inform us about it middle school was where i first learned about historical discrimination against chinese communities and the experience was like having a disattached history lesson i was a student taking notes about tragic events that happened to chinese canadians the group i racially belonged to but these chinese people weren't my family like many chinese immigrants that arrived post-1950s my family wasn't part of north america's exploited chinese laborers and so i don't have a generational connection to them it's very different from the way black americans know that their personal ancestors were enslaved the diversity of asian americans also makes building shared memories much more difficult because they have their own inner conflicts for instance during the world war ii era some chinese and korean people would wear stickers saying i'm chinese or i'm korean so that they wouldn't get mistaken as japanese who were being brutalized in public the educated asian immigrants also tended to look down on the uneducated asian immigrants so without a strong collective memory of racism nor group solidarity the asian-american identity is defined primarily by ideas others impose onto them the desire to integrate into society as foreigners can make them more vulnerable to accepting and internalizing racist white supremacist ideas if those ideas help them fit in because when you take away someone's ability to understand who they are and what their places in the world they will go at lengths to escape existential crisis when asian immigrants cannot understand themselves in a socio-racial binary of white and black and when being a foreigner further hinders their ability to define themselves then anything that lessens the confused existential crisis is welcome racism is not only this system to uh suppress people and oppress people it's a culture that you can buy into it's currency that you can use to access social capital with a particular majority group and that's really important so a lot of people sometimes they aren't even racist they're just being racist or casually racist so that they could get in with a particular group and the strongest most prevalent narrative that has been pushed on to the asian american community is the model minority narrative so that's what exists in their collective memory and so it feels true and it definitely is a pleasant narrative to accept when the alternative is alienation as a foreigner and or being treated like the black community it is white supremacy's tactic of offering asian americans non-blackness while still gatekeeping whiteness doesn't sound like a great deal but that's the danger of white supremacy it protects white privilege and tells everyone else that the best you can do is distance yourself from blackness now admits all this i think it's important to remember how desperate times can be for immigrants especially back in the early and mid-1900s they uprooted their entire lives to chase better conditions and as a player you don't get to set the rules you just play the game in hopes of getting a good score but being sympathetic toward the immigrant situation doesn't mean it's completely justified because by accepting this model minority narrative the asian-american community has been used as a way to delegitimize black struggles it allows asian people to acknowledge the plights of black communities but explain it as being caused by black laziness and criminality they can say hey we were immigrants we know what it's like to struggle and to have to build our own success but we worked hard and if the black community just worked as hard as us their struggles would be solved too what this narrative fails to recognize is the historical and social differences between these two communities their experiences in america are not analogous black enterprise in america historically has been literally burned to the ground by white supremacist terrorism the story of tulsa oklahoma is the most famous one now like literally that was a well-known thing in black academic circles and black cultural circles that tulsa black wall street was burned to the ground by white terrorist mobs and when you get to a certain point it's impossible to pass anything across communities across families because nobody has anything to pass along um let alone just the absence of connection to our cultural heritage in africa i don't know what tribe my family's from i don't know anything about what my ancestors may have been in africa i would have to pay ancestry.com to kind of figure it out and then do a bunch of research black immigrants caribbean and african they often have the same attitude towards black americans that asian immigrant and second generation immigrants have which is why do you guys why are you guys so this why are you guys so bad why do you act this way and then a lot of them when they get there forn gave this personal example when he got to america before he got to america he had a relatively low opinion of like you know black americans he got here and kind of got to see and feel the nature of white supremacy firsthand he was like oh i get it now before i came to the states like i didn't think much about the fact that i was black but as soon as i came to the states like i was aware of my skin i was aware of my size i was aware that i to some people may very well just be a threat they won't see my culture they won't see the things that i love or the nuances of my personality they will see a big black mouth bed however many asian americans do not fit into this model minority narrative it ignores the experience of tons of asian americans who immigrated into poorer neighborhoods who didn't have pre-existing resources and qualifications to move them up the socio-economic ladder for example many hmong americans came to america as impoverished refugees which has drastically affected their communities ability to fit into the model minority stereotype after the vietnam war the us resettled a lot of southeast asian refugees into poorly funded urban areas with crumbling infrastructure where they had to live alongside the black community in these neighborhoods the limited resources bred conflict between the asian and black communities who had to compete for those resources why can't you guys be like asian americans it's like well which ones are you talking about are you talking about eastern asians you talking about the japanese because they're doing really well you talk about you know uh uh uh indians doing excellent if you're talking about you know cambodians and laotians and filipino not so much but you know that would require a critical race lens [Laughter] ignoring the diversity of asian american experience is a direct result of trying to attribute one grand narrative to a multitude of cultures but for white america to tell the story of a model minority they inevitably highlight those that are consistent with the story and sweep the rest under the rug this allows white supremacy to treat asians as a positive stereotype minority who is used as a scapegoat to deny the presence of white supremacy but simultaneously maintain a barrier between asian-ness and whiteness i think of it as like a backhanded compliment just as how someone might say you're so pretty for an asian the model minority narrative says you're such a model citizen for a minority one of the people i talked to was cheyenne lin a youtube creator who has a unique perspective although she is chinese she was adopted by a white family into a white community early on she explains that even though these white people raised her and encouraged her to embrace her chinese culture they could not fully understand her experience as an asian american and it was hard again being raised by people who like wouldn't really understand what i was going through like racially and who would even like make like mean comments about like my asian american friends and like they expected me to kind of just laugh and go along with it so sometimes they would see me as like as like clearly a chinese american but then sometimes they would want me to kind of enforce their preconceived notions of like like korean-american people for example and as a kid um growing up like in a white community i faced a lot of racism and my family was really supportive when i was a kid when i was going through like those kind of microaggressions and bullying and stuff but then as i became an adult like in college when i would just talk about like the same stuff that was half that happened when i was a kid was still happening they kind of shifted like when i got older it was more like you need to assert yourself more stick up for yourself stop being a victim and all this stuff and it was weird because like as a kid they supported me so much but i think they didn't realize that having a kid that's a different race than you is like they're going to be facing racism for their whole life you know and it's like a constant struggle and you constantly have to have those conversations but i think that they thought that was going to be left behind after i like left grade school so long as white supremacy is the norm asian americans are not going to be equals with whiteness we need to recognize that the privileges we receive from white supremacy is at the expense of other racial minorities and are used to compare us to one another these privileges aren't even that great at the end of the day there is a huge mental health crisis in the asian american community because we are expected to constantly excel academically in the myth of the model minority book one respondent said she considered suicide at the age of eight because she didn't get a gold star that day in class another daughter was shamed for her mental health problems because she didn't get accepted into any ivy league schools another man insisted that asian americans did not face racism yet he mentioned several times about how stressed he was about losing all the success he had achieved because if he loses it he would be reduced to a mere foreigner people kind of forget about the bad stereotypes and also think that the good stereotypes protect us from like racial violence which we know isn't true i think this the good stereotypes is another reason of why it makes it harder for us to speak out about racism because they're like well what do you have to complain about these problems are paid little attention because being naturally smart is supposed to be a good stereotype yeah it's good for pitting racial minorities against each other and denying anti-asianness but it's not so good for racial minorities ourselves [Music] in november 2014 peter liang an asian american police officer murdered an unarmed black man ika gurley out of this situation some asian americans formed a pro-liang coalition and argued that liang was being used as a distractor from the white black conflict liang was a victim in their eyes because what happens if the black community wins and liang is sentenced to prison well they felt that the black community would basically accumulate more oppression points at the asian american community's expense in killing rage ending racism bell hoax talks about how white supremacy crafts an idea of institutional black power in society's imagination in order to make non-black people of color feel that the attention received by black issues is unfair black power can be theoretical like critical race theory public policy like affirmative action or cultural like hip-hop but this imagined black power insists that black people actually have some mythological power and respect in society it's a way to diminish the severity of black oppression it's like when people ask why do black americans complain about racism we've literally had a black president obama but we've never had an asian president or when people deny the philosophical utility of critical race theory and say that schools teaching students about critical race theory is just institutions kissing up to black people because apparently any specific attention given to the black community is proof of some secret privilege they have critical race theory is bigoted it is a lie and it is every bit as racist as the klansmen in white sheets i do not like that ted cruz man this narrative of institutional black power is a way for non-black people of color to justify their annoyance with black attention it hides the fact that they are annoyed because they are vying for white attention and they view the black community who seems to get more attention for their issues as the main competition rather than seeing the attention black people receive as linked to the gravity of our situation and the intensity of our resistance they want to make it a sign of white generosity and concern furthermore as with any minority liang's racial identity was inherently political we as minorities become representative of our groups if liang got convicted there was fear that he would become a symbol of asian americans as a whole it's just like how a black person who commits a crime becomes a much more salient representative of their community than a white person who commits a crime an asian student who gets a below average grade becomes an asian failure whereas a white student who gets a below average grade doesn't get that same label under white supremacy racial minorities have to always be careful about how their actions reflect onto their racial identity because rights and privileges are treated like a zero-sum game if one group gains some privileges or rights then that's at another's expense this competitive mindset encourages infighting and distrust if we are going to build greater solidarity between the black and asian american communities we need to discard this mindset i know this is way easier said than done but i also think there's been more solidarity between these two communities than we often give credit for there are people like grace lee boggs and yuri kochiyama who were active in the black power movement and civil rights movement and worked to build black and asian solidarity during the la riots of 1992 the predominant narrative pushed by the media was that korean immigrants were innocent bystanders whose stores were just unfortunate collateral in a white black conflict what they largely left out were the korean americans who cooperated with black communities where they invested in local organizations and churches for racial injustice causes covid and the atlanta spa shootings brought anti-asian hate to the forefront of discussion many asian americans reported that for the first time they sympathized with the black community and really understood what it felt like to fear for their life because of their race these are opportunities to recognize that black and asian communities are both disadvantaged by a white supremacist society if we can see racial conflict not as between white and black or black and asian but between white and non-white then we can feel a sense of belonging to the same group and that sense of group membership is crucial to spurring collective action racism is like a river and we are all in it some of us are up to our necks in the river of racism others are trying to wade to shore but even if we make it to the banks of the river we still have the river water on us thank you so much to fd and cheyenne for sharing their opinions and helping me out with this video if you didn't totally hate this video you can like and subscribe leave a comment if you want as well thank you so much for watching let's keep talking and i hope to hear from you soon bye you

Channel: oliSUNvia

Views: 427,799

Keywords: bell hooks, CRT, white house, america, racist, interracial conflict, discrimination, asian hate awarement, protest, movement, anti asian hate movement, black lives matter movement, civil rights movement, black power movement, slave history, 1950s, 1960s, 1900s, korean american, chinese american, japanese american, biracial, south asian

Id: fRTUJoMinuU

Length: 38min 19sec (2299 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 30 2022