Asian-American Civil Rights Movement?

[jacobin1949]

Today in many ways the Asian community in the USA and west are where the blacks were in the 1920s. Asians are expected to quietly submit to racism and white rule. Asian-Americans are the only minority group that continue to except white exploitation and lack civil rights leaders. People may say that Chinese are just by nature conservative and submissive but thatw as said about Mainland Chinese until Mao Zedong Thoughts. Any way I'd appreciate any feedback on thoughts about an Asian-American civil rights movement.

[Janus]

Today in many ways the Asian community in the USA and west are where the blacks were in the 1920s.
That's an exaggeration. Only the situation for Asians in the late 19th century (which resulted in the Chinese Exclusion Act) could be comparable.


People may say that Chinese are just by nature conservative and submissive
Currently, the stereotypes focus more around work ethic and intelligence rather than social values.


Any way I'd appreciate any feedback on thoughts about an Asian-American civil rights movement.
Asians already have civil and political rights.

And as far as Asian-Americans go in the US, they're one of the better off minority groups in the US though they are also one of the groups facing greater active discrimination and racism today due to academic and economic reasons.

[Pilar]

It is absurd to compare Asian-Americans to nearly any other group of Americans. Like Europeans, they CAME to the U.S. (Unlike hispanics and African-Americans, they weren't already here, nor forced to come here.)

Generally speaking, an Asian-American has more opportunities and better civil rights in the USA than in China, Vietnam, Burma, the Koreas, Indonesia, Malaysia, etc...

Originally, there were many anit-Chinese laws in California, and the U.S. Immigration Dept. didn't let Chinese bring their wives. The Japanese were, of course, impoverished after Pearl Harbor.

But again, non of these violations of civil rights were as horrible as, from their point of view, living in China or the other Asian nations I have mentioned.

One could make an argument that, for Europeans and Asians, life in America when they first came here was pretty bad.

BUT, life in their home countries was REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY bad.

But again, your premise is faulty in that you have to remember they came of their own volition. Since more continued to come, logically, life in America was a better deal.

Outside of class war for those who are socialist, what could Asian-American complain of that other minority groups don't already complain of? That is, why should their cry of discriminaltion be stronger than the chorus of other who claim discrimination?

[Reuben]

Pilar are you seriously putting forward the case that that our opposition to the oppression of any group should be in part determined by what that group was experiencing in thier previous country of residence.

[Pilar]

Needless to say, THAT GROUP'S identity of its achievements and possibility of success are based on partly on what it could do in its country of origin versus what it can do in its country of adoption.

Why would you believe this wouldn't be the case?

I know many Africans who have left Africa and are happy they are in America.

Ditto Mexicans, and Asians (as was the topic).

You have not met such people in your experience? This is not to say they do not miss their homeland, but the issue of this thread was one of civil rights.

Edit:

Now I see what you're asking me about. Okay, I answered the issue raised by the one who started this thread, Jacobin1949. Here's his issue:


Any way I'd appreciate any feedback on thoughts about an Asian-American civil rights movement.

Any Asian-American civil rights movement has to be measured on what ASIAN AMERICANS are doing about it, not by those of us who would convince them of a better society through communism. It's hard to lead such a horse to water.

[TC]

Originally posted by [email protected] 26, 2007 07:45 pm
Today in many ways the Asian community in the USA and west are where the blacks were in the 1920s.


You MUST be kidding.


Asian Americans are statistically the most privileged racial demographic group in America, including whites.

http://www.asian-nation.org/demographics.shtml

Hispanics and African Americans are ghettoized and systematically economically disadvantaged, Asian Americans are integrated and share the same social circles and communities as white americans.

You seem to somehow forget that in the 1920s, there were black people who were born slaves, none of them could vote, they had no civil rights, and they were segregated in an apartheid system. Is that the case for asian americans today? Uh, no. Its not even the case for African Americans.


Asians are expected to quietly submit to racism and white rule.

That sort of a claim is just totally unfounded, asians are integrated in equal or superior numbers in the white social order, they have greater numbers in the ruling class than the lower classes. This is clearly not true of hispanics and blacks who unlike whites and asians are grossly overrepresented in lower classes and income groups and grossly underrepresented in the ruling class and upper middle class.


Asian-Americans are the only minority group that continue to except white exploitation and lack civil rights leaders.

Asian americans don't have civil rights leaders for the same reason that white americans don't have civil rights leaders, because they already have civil and economic equality.



People may say that Chinese are just by nature conservative and submissive

yo'ure the first i've heard say that

[TC]

Originally posted by Compañ[email protected] 28, 2007 12:46 am
TC, again, proves her idiocy is only outweighed by her rightist outloook.

Actually you're choosing to ignore the facts when they don't mesh with your ideological outlook which pretends that institutional racial discrimination isn't class based but identity based. Thats a reactionary, unmarxist ideology, thats essentially a type of racialism.


do you honestly agree with the opening post that asian americans are worse off than african americans were in the 1920s (you know, when they couldn't even vote or live in the same areas as whites)...




[img]http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/img/incpov96/income96.gif' alt='' width='600' height='446' class='attach' /> (http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/img/incpov96/income96.gif)
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/income96/incxrace.html
API= Asians and Pacific Islanders

is the US census data wrong or do you believe that a demographic group with higher median income than whites and vastly higher than blacks and hispanics is in fact, more oppressed than blacks and hispanics? If you want to think that, you should abandon all pretense to being a marxist.



Today, Filipino Americans are working against racial discrimination in the work force. Despite the level of education and workplace productivity, the community continues to see discrepancies between their salaries and compared to the salaries of other ethnicities. There is also a lack of those or few who have actually reached the upper rungs of executive positions.




This thread isn't on filipinos its on asians in general.

However as shown in the link i posted, the median personal income for Filipinos is 23,000 USD, the median personal income for whites is 23,640 usd, roughly the same, by comparison, the median personal income for blacks is just 16,300 usd and for hispanics, 14,400 usd, for native americans, 14,500 usd.

It is simply undeniable that filipino americans are not economically oppressed on account of race in the same manner that blacks, hispanics and native americans are, they earn vastly more money.

Of course there might be some individual personal prejudice, personal prejudice can be applied to any group no matter how powerful, but they are not the victims of systematic institutional discrimination in the same manner that blacks and hispanics are. The numbers simply do not support your beliefs CDL.

http://www.asian-nation.org/demographics.shtml



i've got to ask CDL, did you even read the Asia week article you posted because it completely contradicts you?



Somewhere among these segregated classes were Asian and NHPI Americans. In most categories, the socioeconomic statistics for Asian Americans mirrored the statistics for non-Hispanic whites, and the numbers for NHPIs more closely matched those for Latinos and African Americans.


You get what that means right? Let me repeat incase you missed it:

"the socioeconomic statistics for Asian Americans mirrored the statistics for non-Hispanic whites,"

the section you highlighted "and the numbers for NHPIs more closely matched those for Latinos and African Americans." while interesting, is totally irrelevant to this thread becuase NHPIs, or Native Hawaiian's and colonial Pacific Islanders, are not Asian Americans, they are not being referred to as Asian Americans. Is Hawaii in Asia CDL? Nope.




In 2000, Asian American families had the highest median family income, $59,324, compared to the national average of $50,046. Non-Hispanic white families trailed with $54,698. NHPI families had a median income of $45,915, followed by Latinos with $34,397, and African Americans with $33,255.

In other words, Asian Americans are even better off than white Americans, native islanders are not,.


The fact that you would defend the original posters claim that Asian Americans are worse off than African Americans, despite posting an article siting the fact that Asian household incomes are almost *TWICE* that of black household incomes, is absurd, deliberately ignorant of the economic realities and reactionary.

[SPK]

J1949, you may already be familiar with the historical asian-american movements in the usa. If not, you might want to check out a few books: Legacy to Liberation: Politics and Culture of Revolutionary Asian-Pacific America, edited by Fred Ho et al; Asian-Americans: the Movement and the Moment, edited by Steve Louie and Glenn Omatsu; and Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles, by Laura Pulido. These cover the sixties and seventies period mostly, so there’s discussion of some of the more well-known left formations like the Red Guard, I Wor Kuen, Wei Min She, and EastWind – most of which ended up in Maoist parties formed during the new communist movement.

These civil rights and liberation movements – and their successors over the last quarter-century or so – helped alleviate the onerous conditions imposed on their peoples by white supremacy and capitalism. Interestingly, none of the nauseating reactionary garbage being put forth in this thread by Pilar and TragicClown take these political struggles into account: if we take them at their word, folx of asian heritage just magically showed up one day in the usa and started getting paid, no hassles. In reality, the improved status today of some – not all -- of the different asian-american communities was in part a product of those battles (these movements during the sixties and seventies had strong representation from longstanding japanese-american and chinese-american communities – the demographic composition of the API strata is rather different today).

This tells us that the question of a civil rights struggle is still very important. We can’t look at only the current situation, but must dialectically understand the history behind it. That tells us a lot about how to sustain, and advance, any progress that has been made by asian-americans. It also tells us a lot about what could happen at some point in the future – particularly from the side of the bourgeoisie.

Nor can we limit our analysis to some statistical abstraction produced by a government agency. The API category, at least as it is used in the census, encompasses a wide variety of people of different heritages: chinese, vietnamese, cambodian, hmong, laotian, indian, pakistani, bangladeshi, indonesian, malaysian, and so on. (I think arab-americans are in this category as well – am I right on that? :unsure: ) Of course, there are also many other critical differences to which revolutionaries should be attentive: citizenship versus immigrant status; documented versus an undocumented, so-called “illegal” status; religious background; and class position. Mechanically rattling off average API income levels doesn’t better an understanding of these factors, the ways that various strata can be impacted by ruling class offensives, and the roles various strata can play in a radical movement or revolutionary process.

So what are some key flashpoints, around which struggles have recently, or may in the future, coalesce? Here are a few:

1. As a strategy by the ruling class to whip up xenophobia and war fervor against their competitors in the japanese bourgeoisie, people of japanese descent were forcibly interned here during the second world war. They were subjected to vicious racism in society as a whole, ordered into government camps under armed guard, and had their possessions seized by the state and profiteering parasites. (Actually, this traumatic experience later led a disproportionate number of people in the japanese-american communities to commit themselves to left politics, so that such atrocities would never occur again to any communities.) Today, there is a notion among amerikans who don’t know any better – including TragicClown -- that this is part of the past and has no relation to the usa right now. Nothing could be further from the truth, and these ideas of some imaginary historical progress over the past sixty years – under the capitalist system! – are ideological obfuscation at best.

What has occurred in the usa, say, over the past five years or so to demonstrate this? For one, the state-sponsored terror campaign against muslim, arab, and south asian peoples in the wake of 911 attacks. Hate crimes against those who were muslim spiked here in the aftermath of WTC, and that includes many in the asian-american communities – i.e. people of pakistani, bangladeshi, or indian heritage, etc. Targets included even those incorrectly perceived to be muslim because of their headdress or facial hair – as in the case of sikhs. People were beaten or killed, small businesses were burnt to the ground, and so on. The government then ordered tens of thousands of immigrants from predominantly muslim countries to “register” with the Immigration and Natural Service (now a part of the Bureau of Homeland Security), which was reminiscent of the early policies against jews by the nazi regime in germany. Thousands were subsequently arrested, imprisoned in detention centers for often extended periods of time, interrogated, and deported – including many who had wisely avoided the “registration” edict.

The ruling class engaged in this racial profiling for many reasons, including a desire to whip up war fervor against countries in the imperialists’ gunsights, like iraq (so their oil reserves could be seized). It was also done to minimize, though fear and intimidation, any future internal opposition from strata sympathetic to the plight of people there – and immigrants from those countries certainly fall into that category.

The kind of oppression that japanese-americans faced during the second world war and its aftermath is still very much alive and affects many other asian-american communities today. It is hardly a part of the “past”.

2. The historical situation of japanese-americans, and the status of japan specifically, also helps us better understand another high-profile question today, that of china.

China is rapidly becoming a key competitor to the usa. Its labor markets are significantly lower-cost than those in amerika and the west. Given its huge surplus / reserve population, the majority of which are still rural peasantry transitioning to the capitalist labor force, that is not going to change any time soon. Of course, the capitalists in the so-called “communist” party there help keep wages low by suppressing strikes and calling out troops to quell popular rebellions. The amerikan bosses take advantage of those conditions, moving factories and service centers there in an effort to boost profits. Many products once manufactured in the usa now come out of china, leading to major job losses here: furniture and textiles are more recent examples.

This situation is analogous to that of the japanese-amerikan relationship in the seventies and eighties. At that time, japanese car companies were taking away consumer market-share from amerikan manufacturers. This was one notable factor (not the primary one) spurring layoffs in the automotive industry here. The ruling elites, in an effort to divert attention away from the true causes of that restructuring (which were related more to developments in the forces of production, such as automation, which rendered workers “redundant” and upped profits for the bosses), scapegoated japan and by extension many asian-americans. For example, the campaign was supported by union bureaucrats, and auto workers engaged in media stunts where they smashed up japanese-built cars with sledgehammers.

These attitudes easily transferred over to people of asian heritage: hate crimes ballooned, and in at least one notorious instance, Vincent Chin, a chinese-american, was brutally murdered by two white men from Detroit angered over layoffs. The killers had thought he was japanese – which helps explain why asian-american struggles here have been able to organize across certain national lines. After protracted court cases, and a major political mobilization within asian-american communities, the racist legal system exonerated the two murderers of any criminal wrongdoing.

Currently, china is funding much of the usa’s federal government debt (which is enormous, due to the wars in iraq and Afghanistan) and trade deficit. This support is being gradually reduced by the central bank in Beijing. While it may be convenient at the moment for the amerikan ruling elites to keep quiet, history shows that they have no compunction, when it serves their interests, in whipping up xenophobia and nativism to divert attention from the failures of the capitalist system – to deadly effect for asian-americans.

3. The case of Wen Ho Lee provides further, ominous evidence of how relations with china may play out. Lee is an amerikan citizen, born in taiwan, who was a scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the late nineties. He was unjustly accused of selling secrets concerning nuclear weapons design to agents of the people’s republic of china; arrested by the federal government; and held in solitary confinement for over nine months. Ultimately, he was acquitted of all but one of the 59 counts leveled against him by the state, as all evidence indicated he could not have possibly been the person who transferred the information to the PRC. (Note that this occurred under the putatively-“liberal” Clinton administration, not Bush.) His prosecution was viewed widely by progressives as a racist frame-up.

What is important about the Lee case – setting aside the question of whether or not he should have been working on weapons research, etc. – is that it indicates, again, how API peoples here can be treated by the ruling class when it suits their purposes: even when those folx are naturalized citizens, middle-class, and so on. Given china’s growing strategic presence globally and the possibility of a military conflict between the competing amerikan and chinese bourgeoisies, this should be an immediate concern and not some abstraction for a far-off future.

Despite what TragicClown and her ilk claim, in their cartoon version of revolutionary Marxism, the existence of an oppression is not solely dependent – positively or negatively -- upon the economic position of an oppressed group. Identities, whether based on religion, state citizenship, ethnicity, and so forth, are still significant factors. And the relative position of one group vis-à-vis other peoples of color certainly isn’t decisive in that regard – such a claim smacks of divisive racism and plays off one group against another.

[Pilar]

SPK,

I live in San Diego and am in Los Angeles regularly, a city where there are great numbers of Asian-Americans.

All of the civil rights activities involving Asian-Americans have involved their staking out their slice of the pie, not based in socialism. Any notion that there is a more than MINOR MINOR MINIMAL attempt at Left-Revolution in the Asian community need their heads examined.

Asian Americans have demonstrated only for fairness and equal opportunity to benefits of capitalism, not its overthrow.

[SPK]

Originally posted by [email protected] 30, 2007 10:21 am
I live in San Diego and am in Los Angeles regularly, a city where there are great numbers of Asian-Americans.

All of the civil rights activities involving Asian-Americans have involved their staking out their slice of the pie, not based in socialism. Any notion that there is a more than MINOR MINOR MINIMAL attempt at Left-Revolution in the Asian community need their heads examined.

Asian Americans have demonstrated only for fairness and equal opportunity to benefits of capitalism, not its overthrow.
Currently in the usa, there is absolutely no community that we could generally characterize as fighting for socialism. Conscious revolutionaries of any tendency are a tiny minority here, whether we’re looking at society as a whole, different peoples and strata within society, or the movements specifically. Politics are still limited to a type of civil rights struggle, when we’re talking about different communities challenging white supremacy: asian-american, latino, african-american, and so on. Certain of those communities may have a nominally higher level of political consciousness than others (chicano, mexicano, and central american peoples are one obvious example, given their central role in last year’s massive immigrant rights battle), but I don’t think that means much in the usa. :lol: So your criteria is invalid – we can’t write off entire sectors of people just because we don’t see a large number of folx there fighting for communism; otherwise we would be writing off everyone.

And just who do you think are more likely to be revolutionaries in this country? White, middle-class, suburban kids in black masks? <_< You should be cautious of the political logic you apply in understanding these questions. After all, white kids are far less likely to be fighting for their “slice of the pie” – which is the standard you use in writing off and dismissing the asian-american movements – because in a white supremacist system they already have their slice of the pie. <_< White people are not the ones being thrown into prisons and internment centers because they’re muslim or from predominantly-muslim countries. White people are not the ones being harassed, attacked, or even murdered because they have a certain mode of dress and presentation that xenophobes view as “alien” or “foreign” or “other”. White people, the vast majority of whom are citizens, are not being smeared and libeled, because they are allegedly taking jobs away from “real amerikans”. White people are not being persecuted by the state, and accused of being agents of a foreign power, simply because of their national heritage and background.

The political struggles – even if they use a traditional, civil rights paradigm – that arise around these types of oppression do not negate the possibilities of developing revolutionary consciousness. Far from it. They constitute openings and possibilities for such development, if left tendencies have a correct line and approach to the question – rather than writing people off, as you do. Such struggles must be given principled, active support. Ultra-left denunciations of some putative lack of a “real” class or real “revolutionary” content are worthless at best and counterproductive at worst; they also encourage the left to stand on the sidelines as the amerikan state engages in the most heinous violations of basic human rights.

The books that I mentioned in my last post discuss how such communist perspectives actually arose in the asian-american movement during the sixties and seventies. This site http://aamovement.net/ also has some useful material on that history. (As a side note, it seems to me that the historical role of Marxism-Leninism is more openly acknowledged in current API struggles -- as compared to other community movements, where there is more of a silence or lack of awareness around such influences, if not open hostility.)

You should also take seriously what Reuben said earlier. The legitimacy or validity of a people’s struggle here in the usa is not based on the comparative conditions in their country of origin or the country of their family’s origin. Particularly since, in most cases, the relatively-worse conditions in those other countries were caused by amerikan imperialism. Why did vietnameses, cambodians, laotians, and hmongs emigrate to the usa, for example? Because millions of tons of amerikan bombs had destroyed their homelands. Amerikan-sponsored neoliberal economic policies have a similar effect, certainly in mexico and central america.

[Red_Pride]

I don&#39;t know, the Asain communities have stayed silent regarding the current news organizations bashing the man (Asain) who commited the 32, 33 including him, shooting at VA Tech.

But, this is the first major insult to them...

[Janus]

the Asain communities have stayed silent regarding the current news organizations bashing the man (Asain) who commited the 32, 33 including him, shooting at VA Tech.
Well, if they did issue a collective apology (not sure how that would work) that would imply that they were in some way responsible for it, which doesn&#39;t make much sense.

However, Seung-Hui&#39;s parents have apologized for what occured.
Family apologizes (http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-cho21apr21,0,7781817.story?coll=la-home-headlines)

[Severian]

On economic statistics, I might point out that Asian-Americans typically earn less than whites, for the same level of education.

So racist discrimination in employment continues. Asian-Americans are also subject to racism and scapegoating in other ways.

As others have pointed out, the "Asian-American" category is pretty varied, there are a lot of differences between Japanese-Americans and Filipino-Americans, etc.

Additionally, it&#39;s very possible for a group that&#39;s economically wealthier than average to be subject to racist scapegoating - and it&#39;s still necessary for communists to oppose this scapegoating, which is a tool of the ruling class and fascist groups. The classic example is anti-Semitism.

As for the original question: "Will the silent minority ever rebel?"

Some Chinese immigrants already are. (http://www.themilitant.com/2007/7111/711104.html)

[RedJacobin]

I agree with SPK that Asians in the US are oppressed because of our nationalities and that there&#39;s potential for radical and revolutionary consciousness as a result of that. Although, it&#39;s definitely not comparable to Black people in the 1920s, who had to live under the direct terror of lynching. But, I don&#39;t think the original poster was making that point (which a bunch of people jumped on him for). I think he was saying that Asians, like Blacks in the 1920s, are "expected to quietly submit to racism and white rule," which is true.

Just a couple of points:

While there are struggles to be waged against white supremacy, I think all of them take place within the context of class exploitation and oppression. Class is primary. The most immediate enemies that Asian workers in the US have to fight against are often other Asians (bosses and other kinds of oppressors). Check out the struggle around Saigon Grill in NYC.

So, while middle-class and even capitalist Asians might have progressive roles to play (or at least, under certain conditions, might be neutral to revolution), Asian workers ultimately have more in common with other working people, Black, Latino, and white. There&#39;s a multinational proletariat in this country that needs to be the core of any movement to change things. Those who consider ourselves communists need to struggle against identity politics.

Something else, I think the entire "Asian-American" identity, despite fueling a lot of positive upheaval, has an assimilationist logic and should be questioned. I think specific nationality-based movements have a potential to go in a much more radical direction, depending on the level of struggle in the countries of origin. This was certainly true among Chinese people in the US during the 60s (who played the main role in forming the Red Guard Party, I Wor Kuen, Wei Min She).

Another example, I think the struggles of Filipino leftists in the US today and its connection to the struggle against neocolonialism in the Philippines would be significantly de-radicalized if it were collapsed into a broader "Asian-American" framework. It&#39;s not at that stage yet, but maybe it&#39;s possible that something similar could develop among South Asians in the US, especially with the fierce revolutionary movements in that part of the world. That&#39;s not to detract from the campaigns for Asian-American ethnic studies and other fights against discrimination, which are good things, but I think those should be seen as steps towards something more radical.

[TC]

I&#39;m sorry but this thread and the replies are pathetic. While some asian groups are oppressed some places, Chinese and Japanese Americans are not racially oppressed. They have more money, higher incomes, higher education levels, than white americans and americans on average. Thats the reality. If you are a 2nd or more generation native english speaker Chinese American, you are statistically more likely to be privileged than Americans on average. Chinese and Japanese Americans are overrepresented among capitalists and professionals and underrepresented among working and lower class people.

Get over this identity politics nonsense in the face of economic and social reality. It is as silly as suggesting that Jewish Americans or WASP Americans are oppressed minorities, they&#39;re ethic minorities but minorities at an advantage above the American mean.