When I listen to prominent Asian Americans, in my case mostly comedians and writers, they seem to spend half their time complaining about being the perennial outsiders always asked where they are “really” from and the other half talking about their, their parents, or their grandparent’s immigration story. This is because in the modern era the vast majority of Asian American ethnic groups are foreign-born.
Since the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, also known as the Hart–Celler Act, became effective in 1968 almost half of the nearly 20 million immigrants admitted to the U.S. were born in Asia. The population of Asian Americans has gone from less than one percent in 1965 to more than five and a half percent as of 2019. First generation Asian Americans are more likely to have immigrated to the US for, or with, higher education. The result, according to a 2018 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research and the U.S. Census Bureau, is that first and second generation Asian Americans have the highest rates of upward mobility of all racial groups in the country.
During the mid 20th Asian Americans were a miniscule percentage of the population. Even now, after decades of exponential population growth, a surprisingly large percentage of Americans never physically encounter anyone of Asian descent in life and, still, rarely do so in media. In the past, this made Asian American upward mobility feel less threatening. Certainly, less so than recognizing the rights and claims of African Americans.
Between 1940 and 1970 Asian Americans were able to outdo Black American Non-Immigrants (BANI) in average household earnings. By 2000 Asian American men were outearning white men and Asian American women were doing the same to white women by 2015. This progress is the foundation for the Model Minority myth which has been manipulated by, mostly white, conservatives against other people of color in the US. Specifically, against BANI. They point to the history of American discrimination against Asian Americans and note how they didn’t protest in the streets. Instead, they claim, Asian Americans pulled themselves up by their bootstraps through education and hard work. They then point to BANI people and blame them, us, for not being able to do the same.
The Myth is incorrect on multiple levels. One of them is that there was an Asian American Civil Rights Movement in which Asian Americans did march in the streets. Immigrants who have arrived since 1965 owe their presence in the US to that movement and the Black led Civil Rights Movement. Unfortunately, most Americans as a whole seem to know little about either beyond a few whitewashed misquotes from Martin Luther King. This blindness is abetted by the fact that by the time immigrants who came after 1965 arrived in the US the Model Minority mask was ready and waiting for them.
Another is that, according to research by Brown University economist Nathaniel Hilger, between 1940 and 1970, when Asian Americans made such great social leaps, schooling rates didn’t increase at all appreciably. This makes the “education and hard work” aspect of the mythology a bit more difficult to connect to AA’s successes. In fact, Hilger’s research suggests that the biggest change in situation for Asian Americans is that their fellow Americans became less racist toward them.
When it comes to the way the US classifies immigrants it uses the same inconsistent and often contradictory methodologies it uses to classify race. The Asian population, like the Black population, the Latin population, the Muslim population – is made up of disparate groups of people with various, and sometimes overlapping, backgrounds. But in America little attention is paid to where immigrants come from or who they were. This further distorts our perceptions of the various racial and ethnic groups within our borders. Even the white ones.
Before the Asian American Civil Rights Movement Asians in America held themselves in disparate groups. However, the virulent racism spawned by the Vietnam War didn’t discriminate between ethnicity or country of origin. It almost forced the different Asian groups living in America to bond together. The term Asian American was created in this time by people of Asian descent in America. The flipside of this is the monolithic identity ascribed by the Model Minority myth that renders the struggles of distinct groups within the diaspora invisible.
That our histories are multidimensional is triply true for immigrants and other migrants. When we immigrate to a new country our histories can become muddled. The connection we feel to the people and history of our new home is different than the connection we have to the home left behind. This is further complicated by the fact that new immigrants to America quickly realize that one of the quickest ways to advance in the US is to align oneself with white supremacy and explicitly to be anti-BANI. This can even be true of Black immigrants. This makes it tough to recognize that it is only together that we can overcome the white supremacist patriarchy that supports the systemic racism that infests the infrastructures of the Unites States.
We must recognize where we come from to know where to go. The Black Power Movement inspired the Asian American Movement by confronting institutional racism and government hypocrisy. And Asians and Asian Americans, like Japanese American founding member of the Black Panther Party Richard Aoki, had powerful roles in the fight for Black liberation. ‘Yellow power’ was born from disenchantment with white American pride and a respect for Asian American culture. The legislation that occurred during the Civil Rights movement has come to have a most powerful effect on the present and future of Asian Americans, LGBT people, people with disabilities, religious minorities, other people of a variety of cultures and ethnicities, for people who believe in inclusive democracy, and especially, for white women.
The contradiction between America’s democratic ideals and our reality: the anti-democratic laws, the systemic racism, classism, and the misogyny of the white supremacist patriarchy that continues to exclude the vast majority of Black, Asian, Latinx, Brown, Indigenous, and poor people from full political and economic participation in our society has always been obvious despite the efforts of the Powers That Be to obscure it. The Civil Rights Movement inspired many to band together across race, across culture, and across class to take action to move American democracy closer to its ideal. In 2020 the importance of fighting together to win racial equity for all of us is finally permeating into the national conscious.
Source
http://www.asian-nation.org/1965-immigration-act.shtml#sthash.NZk3peyy.dpbs
https://www.thoughtco.com/asian-american-civil-rights-movement-history-2834596
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/11/29/the-real-reason-americans-stopped-spitting-on-asian-americans-and-started-praising-them/
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=214833622
https://www.dartmouth.edu/~hist32/History/S18%20-%20The%20Black%20Power%20Movement%20and%20the%20Asian%20American%20Movement.htm
https://time.com/5851792/asian-americans-black-solidarity-history/
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/from-the-civil-war-to-civil-rights-the-many-ways-asian-americans-have-shaped-the-country-49762201/
https://www.racefiles.com/2013/07/31/three-things-asian-americans-owe-to-the-civil-rights-movement/