Stop Comparing Asian Americans on a Gradient of Oppression

In America, Asians inhabit the small malleable space between white and Black, privileged and oppressed. We made our homes here in this fragile in-between, but our assimilation was our disappearance; our survival was also our death.

In her book Minor Feelings, author Cathy Park Hong writes that “Asians lack presence. Asians take up apologetic space. We don’t even have enough presence to be considered real minorities. We’re not racial enough to be token. We’re so post-racial we’re silicon.”

For centuries, our status as only “semi-racial” and “semi-oppressed” has prevented an Asian American movement. We perpetually play the supporting role and pass the mic to other, “more oppressed” voices, waiting for an appropriate moment to speak.

Such logic is a Chinese finger trap. If we wait to achieve justice for the least enfranchised before we fight for “more privileged” minorities, the moment for those in the so-called “middle” will never come. The struggle for justice is ceaseless. Oppression is not an ascending ladder, and justice is not a hopscotch court with each race a rung and a square.

Too often, minorities compare and plot degrees of oppression on a gradient instead of unifying to combat inequality as a whole and the structural institutions of white supremacy that harm all of us.

The history of Asian Americans in the United States is long and widely unrecognized for the significance that it deserves. Most historical accounts don’t document the existence of Asian Americans until the construction of the transcontinental railroad, but we were here long before then.

Asians have been in America since 1587, the year the first Filipino sailors landed on the California coast. In the 1830s, Chinese “sugar masters” arrived in Hawaii, bringing the knowledge of transforming cane syrup into sugar. Twenty years later, a group of 195 Chinese coolies started cultivating sugar plantations on the island. In 1868, the United States began using illegal Japanese labor on sugar plantations.

From 1863 to 1869, 15,000 Chinese men laid 700 miles of the transcontinental railroad. Railroad laborers shoveled 20 pounds of rock over 400 times a day in the face of constant danger—accidental explosions, avalanches, rockslides, and harsh weather conditions. Three Chinese men died for every two miles of railroad track, but total deaths are unknown because no one bothered to record the identities of thousands of men who left everything to build a country that had given them nothing.

In the late nineteenth century, white nativists crafted an anti-Chinese campaign out of fear that cheap Chinese labor would displace American workers. They dubbed the terrors of Chinese infiltration as the “yellow peril.” During this social and political climate, the Chinese were beaten, spat on, clubbed, and shot in the back.

In 1871, 500 whites mobbed Chinatown in Los Angeles because of a rumor that some Chinese men had murdered a white police officer. The day ended with the torture and hanging of eighteen Chinese men and boys—the largest mass lynching in American history to date. Internet sources will tell you otherwise because the Chinese Massacre of 1871 fades next to the “more oppressed.”

All of this led to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, in which legislators described Chinese immigrants as “rats,” “lepers,” and “machine-like.” I learned about the Chinese Exclusion Act in history class, but I learned about it in a vacuum. My education failed to teach me about the decades of agony and suffering that finally culminated in the Act. How my ancestors lived in fear every day. How they were driven from their towns and forced to watch their homes burn. How they shaped Manifest Destiny and lost their own in the process. Like many other things, my people swallowed this pain in silence.

Asian Americans are largely absent from textbooks and primary sources, documentaries and movies, leadership and management positions, but most importantly, racial discussions. Even our single racial stereotype of being America’s “model minority” has been constructed to purposefully conceal our affliction and exclude us from conversations about race.

The false narrative that we are all successful, middle-class families makes it easy and justified to claim that we do not face oppression to the extent that other minorities do and enjoy the benefits of being near-white. Yet, the glaring disparities between Asians and whites beg to differ.

Data shows that government research, clinical outreach, and advocacy initiatives frequently ignore Asian Americans. For example, despite increasing by more than 72 percent since 2000 and ranking the fastest-growing racial group, funding for clinical research on Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander populations has remained at 0.17 percent since 1992.

As of 2018, Asian Americans have displaced Blacks as the most economically unequal racial group in the country; Cambodians and the Hmong consistently experience higher poverty rates than the rest of the population. Yet, the model minority facade forces all of us to live under the pretense of wealth and prosperity.

Asian Americans are also the least likely racial group to hold positions of management and leadership, despite constituting the largest racial cohort in the professional workforce and being one of the most likely to be hired for jobs. In other words, it is easy for us to enter the labor force but impossible for us to ascend to anything higher than the middleman. There’s even a name for this middle ground—it is called the “bamboo ceiling.” Asian Americans are not even included in diversity and inclusion initiatives in the workplace because “Asian Americans are so smart and successful, so hiring or promoting them does not count as encouraging diversity.”

These statistics are not coincidental. When reporters, academics, and politicians coined the term “model minority” in the 1960s, their hidden agenda was to exacerbate divisions among minorities and mask societal inequalities underneath pretty words. Amid a tumultuous decade for racial advocacy, the rise of a model minority was opportune for whites; it exonerated white systems from taking accountability for their acts of racial violence and excused them from reform. Our sheer existence is conditional; we exist when it is convenient for the white man. We are the mute and invisible cogwheels of society when the status quo is content, but we are vilified and attacked when white institutions need a scapegoat.

In the late 1800s, a tight labor market led white workers to assault the Chinese for stealing jobs. In the 1900s, the United States sought justification for continued colonialism in the Philippines, so they pointed to the “tropical diseases” spreading among native Filipino bodies to validate U.S. rule abroad. This past year saw a horrific increase in hate crimes against Asian Americans, topping 100 anti-Asian racist actions per day in April 2020. Our livelihood is constantly threatened by the state of the political climate and the consequent scapegoating. We and our struggles are only invisible until the status quo needs someone to blame. Such is the double-edged sword of the Asian American existence in America.

For decades, Asian Americans have unified behind other movements. But we have yet to have one of our own—one that ends our silence and frees us from the false narratives that mask our realities and needs. It means telling our stories, heeding our histories, and becoming visible in the public eye.

Tangibly, movement goals could be devoting funds to Asian American poverty mitigation efforts, increasing clinical research on Asian Americans’ health, including Asian Americans in workplace diversity and inclusion programs, and acknowledging our role in American history. These would all be a start in uncovering the unseen Asian American in our country.

In what seems a bipolar struggle between white and Black, any race in between becomes obscure and secondary. We are not as oppressed, but we are equally as far from privileged. In this purgatory, we float.

It should not and does not need to be this way. We need to collectively recognize, deconstruct, and reject the notion of comparing oppression. Oppression is not a gradient. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously said that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” In other words, it should not matter whose oppression is “more” or “less.” Too often, this comparison prevents the unification of movements. Instead of pitting minorities against one another, we need to unify against the systems that oppress all of us.

Racial justice needs to be a fight for everyone simultaneously; the struggle for racial equality is not a series of disjointed movements for Blacks, indigenous peoples, Latinx, Jews, and Asian Americans, each occurring in a separate space. It should be one single fight to uplift all of these people. Ultimately, we all strive for the same goal of equality and justice, and we are stronger together.

One possibility for building unity between races and minimizing divisions on intensities of oppression is to disallow the news cycle to dictate when we engage in racial conversations. Last summer, the United States saw a mobilization of people unparalleled before, even amidst a pandemic. In one day, Black Lives Matter demonstrations peaked at half a million people on June 6, which was only one day in more than a month of continuous protest over the murder of George Floyd. His death was sadly not unique, but it triggered an overwhelming public response. The sporadic and inconsistent news coverage of the media leads to short, unsustainable bursts of discussion on one specific race. During these periods of heightened news coverage on one race, others feel the need to put their work on hold.

In reality, the racial justice movement would be more effective if it continued to amplify racial discrimination toward all minorities to generate a constant conversation on race and equality. Only then can we begin to make effective and inclusive strides toward equality and justice.

Politics, SocietyWendy GaoComment